Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
You’re probably familiar with the expression “the elephant in the room.” It means that there’s something important that needs discussing but that nobody wants to talk about or pay attention to.
At school most of the children in most of our classrooms are “elephants.” That’s because nobody wants to talk about them when experts convene to develop behavior plans for disruptive, dangerous students. Often these plans make little sense for the student they’re intended to help. But even when they have some therapeutic merit, they’re designed and implemented without any regard for how the plan and the student it’s attached to will affect the other students in the room.
When I’ve complained about this collateral damage, I’ve repeatedly been told that it’s not the behavior team’s responsibility to worry about how the plan will affect other children. The team’s job is to address the problem student’s problems regardless of the problems their solution causes anybody else, including the rest of the children in the allegedly child-centered classroom.
Don’t misunderstand. While students who cause the chaos in our classrooms are commonly the school-age equivalent of lawbreakers, others are truly troubled. I don’t know how some of the children in my class get up in the morning. I don’t know that I could bear their burdens, and my heart goes out to them.
But my heart also goes out to the other children in the room, the ones who spend their school days in fear and dread, the ones who lose their education while an expensive battalion of specialists, personal aides and assorted “interventionists” devote themselves to the disruptive, destructive few who torment the many and turn classrooms upside down.
When assessment rubrics rest on whether a student’s writing “rambles” or whether it “meanders,” and that indefinable distinction changes the score by 25 percent, it’s hard to take education data seriously. The issues researchers investigate are often so self-evident that it’s hard to understand why they got investigated in the first place.
Consider, for example, a recent study which investigated the “impact” that students with “three or more suspensions in a school year” have on their classmates. Researchers concluded that “a 10 percent increase” in a class’ exposure to “suspension-worthy” behavior produces a decline in math scores equivalent to what you’d expect if you increased the number of students in the class by 50 percent. The results “confirm what most teachers already know: that disruption has costs for students.”
Stop the presses.
Thirty years ago a team of behavior specialists told Poor Elijah’s seventh graders the story of Kafka’s “The Trial.” The main character, an innocent man, is arrested, persecuted, and eventually murdered without ever being told what he’s accused of. The specialists warned the 12-year-olds that if they didn’t cooperate with their classmate’s behavior plan, they’d be just like the cruel people who hurt the man in the story.
For the next two years this student wreaked nonstop havoc on his classmates’ education. Disruption, obscenity and violence became a routine part of their school day. When his behavior grew sufficiently intolerable, his plan permitted teachers to ask him to leave. Sometimes he left without a struggle. Other times his classmates got to watch his personal aide haul him bodily from the room. When he was good, meaning he had to be removed from only half his classes, he got a reward. This understandably irked the students who behaved themselves, didn’t have to be removed from any classes, and didn’t get a reward.
Today’s fashion in behavior management, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), rests on the premise that “kids do well if they can.” In other words, whenever a “behaviorally challenging” student misbehaves, it isn’t because he’s “manipulative, coercive, unmotivated,” “seeking attention,” “limit-testing,” or simply malicious. His bad behavior stems from “lagging skills” and “unsolved problems.” We need to see his actions through “progressive lenses” so our response is “more accurate” and “compassionate.”
Progressive CPS practitioners identify three alternatives for dealing with misbehavior and “behaviorally challenging” students. Plan A involves “solving the problem unilaterally,” which means you say, “Stop doing that,” and punctuate it with an “or else” of some kind if you need to. This works with most of us, including most students. Students who don’t respond get Plan B, where you try to solve the problem through “collaborative” reasoning and negotiation, which naturally takes time. Plan C amounts to “setting an unsolved problem aside” and doing nothing “for now,” usually because the student with the problem is emotionally “dysregulated.” This, by the way, is officially not the same as “giving in.”
There are a few flies in the CPS therapeutic ointment. First, I don’t generally bark unilateral orders at any students. I usually explain why we have the rules we do. Second, according to CPS methodology, we don’t need to reason with Plan A students because they’re reasonable enough to follow the rules, but we’re expected to reason and negotiate with the very Plan B students whose problems have made them unreasonable enough that they allegedly can’t follow the rules. As for Plan C, I’ve seen it in action. It’s students rampaging down corridors, throwing furniture, assaulting other children, and disrupting lessons while teachers vainly pretend to ignore them. It looks and sounds like mayhem and chaos.
Some policymakers recommend that we simply need to weigh the financial costs of “transferring a dangerous or disruptive student to an alternative setting” against the costs of endangering his classmates and disrupting their learning by leaving him in their regular classroom where a roomful of 7-year-olds can pay the price.
Disobedience isn’t always dysregulation. Disruptive behavior is more often self-indulgence than it is a symptom. Simple malice does exist, even in kindergarten. It doesn’t help when schools tolerate bad behavior, regardless of the excuses we offer for it and the elaborate, frequently ineffective plans we lay to deal with it.
We all bring problems to school. That includes me. Compassionately dealing with those problems is part of every day, and every student from time to time deserves a little slack. But when a student’s behavior goes beyond the ordinary, even when it stems from genuine problems, we owe compassion to his victims. We also owe them an education.
A classroom can’t be one student’s therapeutic setting.
Not if we expect all the other children to learn there.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Collateral damage.