Public School is Dead
A reflection on a conversation with an old teaching buddy.
Here's how you know public school is dead: I had dinner with an old teacher friend the other day. She's noticeably exhausted. She tried not to talk shop, but kept drifting back. Several students popped up repeatedly in her narrative. The stories were all the same, at root.
These kids have storied pasts. Nothing the school tries changes their behavior in any meaningful way. They've held multiple interventions following their MTSS (aka RTI, aka PBIS) plan. Multiple professionals are involved: counselors, psychologists, speech-language pathologists, teachers, and principals.
Every teacher seems to be following the discipline protocol at the site, given the records in the Student Info System. The paper side is filled out and sent home. This takes a significant chunk of time out of my friend's day, as well as her colleagues.
Parent dutifully signs every behavior report that is sent home. Kids return them to the issuing teacher but, clearly, parents have a "let them eat cake" attitude toward the school. Other than signing forms, the kid's behavior at school is not their problem.
And yet the disruptions to EVERY class continue, costing 30+ other kids incalculable amounts of learning. The behavior slips keep getting sent home. Parents keep signing and returning them. The interventionists intervene and have long quasi-therapeutic sessions with the child.
Right now you're thinking: just kick these brats out. Logical, except the school can't; all of this madness is MANDATED. Suspensions are strongly discouraged by the state, but would be irrelevant anyway since California has outlawed suspensions for defiance, which means no expulsions either.
One child in a class of 500 gets a huge proportion of professional support, even though there is no follow-up at home, effectively undermining any intervention on-site. This effort comes at the detriment of the other students in her classes and the ones who see the impotence and injustice in the system.
If you think the kids don't notice it, you've got another think coming. They see rules don't matter. They see there are no consequences. They watch some students be privileged & babied while others who need help slowly drift out of reach because adults must attend to this one.
This would've once been an extreme case. Now it's commonplace. There are more and more of these kids all over the country because state and federal regulations give "at-risk" students' FEELINGS primacy over the LEARNING of the bulk of the students.
Teachers are so exhausted managing behavior they lower standards for all students. Admin leans on teachers to the same end; they too are at their limit. Neither group can cope with brazen defiance plus complaints from parents upset their well-behaved child doesn't have an A.
It's also a big reason why teachers as a body don't push back harder against lessons from outside actors peddling particular narratives teachers suspect may be harmful to their students. They're tired of fighting. They're exhausted by the chaos of their day-to-day.
And that's how the state creates an environment that places compliance over learning, privileging those who harm education over those who come to learn.
There's only one way to win here, and don't think it's spending a gazillion bucks to get into a "good" neighborhood. Those schools face the same regulations and they're bleeding enrollment, so they accept any bodies — and increasingly those bodies come with all these issues.
Nope. The answer is to remove your kid from any state-funded institution. Their insane incentive system places the malefactors at the top of the priority list, burying students with the most potential in chaotic (sometimes violent), low-expectations classrooms.
I know you think you're not qualified to help your child take an education, but you are. You are, have been, and always will be your child's first, best teacher. You may think you don't have the time or the money -- but sacrifices can be made.
Your kid is worth it.
You can do this. There are people who want to help. People like: @kellyske, @rebelEducator, @Homeschool_LLC, @jacob_allee, @redheadmom8 and all the people on this list.
Fight.
First for your family.
Then for the band.
Then for the community.
Then for the Republic.
Then, maybe, we can keep it.
Kids really notice when students who are markedly worse behaved than them get rewarded and it's sad. The last school I worked at had a system called "positive referrals." They could be really great! Students who were observed by teachers doing something well or going above and beyond by being kind or community oriented would get a positive version of a write up, that notification would go to the principal, and then at the end of the week the principal would congratulate the student and share the nice message their teacher wrote about them, as well as giving them a print out to show to their parents.
HOWEVER.......
The kids who got the most PRs were actually the ones who were the worst behaved. Students who were usually terrible doing the absolute BARE MINIMUM would get a PR for not being disruptive, while the students who were consistently wonderful and hardworking get nothing. I remember seeing an interaction between ninth graders where students were talking about how a classmate of theirs who had a lot of behavioral issues but had improved slightly over the year got SEVEN PRs in one week, while the students talking who were both very lovely hardworkers who never got in trouble hadn't gotten a single PR, ever. I immediately wrote them PRs of course, but it felt really illustrative of how general positive reward system behaviors work.
Additionally, the chronic behavior issues mean that students who are generally well behaved and want to work hard get pushed up into accelerated classes regardless of how advanced they are with the material. Many accelerated students are below grade level, but they are pleasant and well behaved, and to avoid having to deal with their terribly behaved classmates have selected a "challenge by choice" option. Not being allowed to fail students results in AC standards being continually lowered. And because we've gotten rid of leveling, the teachers down at the bottom are left with classmates FULL of poorly behaved students, and the actually advanced students aren't able to take a truly advanced class.
A big part of the problem comes from the aversion to punishment. I’m not talking about physical punishment, but loss of privileges that really ARE a loss. Sitting and having a long, boring talk with some creepy, caring professional isn’t cutting it. Kids blow that off. In elementary school, losing field trips was a really big deal. Teachers took all kinds of really fun field trips at my school, and could use it as incentive for kids to keep it together for weeks. Then, our SJW principal decided that was too mean, and we had to have “full inclusion” field trips. There goes a great lever teachers had, plus, as field trips became more and more untenable due to behavior problems, they took fewer and fewer and now take only rare ones. This is a microcosm of the problem as a whole.
Punishment could also involve real work- weeding garden, shoveling mulch, cleaning playground- and that might help some kids who just have a ton of energy and school is hard for them to deal with.