Positive Classroom Discipline
Chapter 16 - Back-Up Responses Beyond the Classroom
That portion of the back-up system that lies outside the classroom,
the top half, consists of large and extra-large back-up responses.
Large back-up responses are for the most part equivalent to
sending a student to the office, whereas extra-large back-up
responses include follow-up sanctions such as in-school suspension,
suspension, and expulsion. Large and extra-large back-up responses
when used properly involve the collaboration of a team of professionals
to solve an extremely difficult problem. When used improperly,
however, the top half of the system can represent nothing more
than one person dumping a problem into someone else's lap. (For
a brief overview of smaller back-up responses within the classroom,
click here).
LARGE BACK-UP RESPONSES
Large back-up responses require that the administration directly
help a teacher in dealing with a management problem that began
in the classroom. Whereas a wide variety of things might happen
to students once they are sent to the office, a watershed step
in management has irrevocably occurred. The teacher has passed
the primary responsibility for solving the problem to someone
else.
Large back-up responses involve an immediate and dramatic cost
escalation insofar as any such response requires the time and
attention of several professionals. This cost escalation may
be entirely justified as the only sufficiently powerful way
of responding to any ugly situation. However, the repeated
use of the office for back-up by a teacher usually signals
an unwillingness or inability to manage behavior within the
classroom by any more effective means.
The Problem with the Office
The office is in deep trouble when students are "bounced"
there for moderate-size offenses. When a student is bounced
to the office, everybody loses. The teacher, in spite of any
pheasant posturing or bravado, has made a public demonstration
of his or her inability to deal successfully with the student
within the classroom. In most cases the teacher has gotten upset,
has felt stymied, and has finally had to pull rank to get back
on top.
The student has, most likely, upset the teacher even if the
teacher remains stone-faced. The student has thereby controlled
the situation, since in body language calm is strength and upset
is weakness. The student has probably also made a successful
show of bravery and prowess relative to the teacher. And, in
addition, the student has gotten revenge for any public humiliation
that may have occurred during the preceding escalation. The
student, therefore, is rewarded for provocative behavior within
the first few seconds of the confrontation, a reinforcement
error that cannot be undone by subsequent events in the office.
The outrageous student has no doubt also been rewarded by the
attention, laughs, and "oohs and ahs" of the peer
group.
The office also loses because it has no effective cure for
ineffective classroom management that can be reliably brought
into play after a student has arrived with a pink slip. When
several students are waiting to be seen, administrators can
usually only afford to admonish the students and send them back
to class - the old revolving door policy. Yet teachers keep
complaining that the office doesn't help them while continuing
to send kids to the vice principal as though he or she were
an exorcist.
Consequently, although sending a nice kid to the office may
occasionally produce repentance, in most cases sending students
to the office produces a no-win management situation for teachers
and administrators alike - one which is self-perpetuating rather
than self-eliminating. Indeed sending a student to the office
may have the dubious distinction of being the most overused
and overrated discipline technique in education.
Since using the office for back-up can be an expensive and
seductive trap, we will examine its use carefully. We will attempt
to understand how and why it so predictably malfunctions as
an agent of discipline enforcement. Since the magnitude of the
failure of the office in eliminating behavior problems is most
blatant at the secondary level, we will begin with a careful
examination of the way in which the office at a large high school
functions and malfunctions as part of the school-site back-up
system.
The Office at High School
The typical large high school has, on the basis of my conversations
with administrators, between 2500 and 5000 referrals to the
office per year for discipline problems that occur within the
classroom, including tardies. This astronomical total, which
remains fairly constant from year to year, stands as a testimonial
to a management method that does not self-eliminate.
Bouncing by "Office Junkies" The majority
of referrals at a school site (omitting tardies) are made by
a handful of teachers. The most competent teachers at a typical
school site will not only rarely make a referral to the office
but will also be totally unaware of the people who are making
the referrals, the number of referrals being made, and the reasons
for their occurrence. These referrals will consume the time
of half the administrative staff of the school site-usually
two people high on the salary schedule. The remaining administrators
will often have forgotten about the nature and extent of the
referral problem until some event forces the issue into their
consciousness.
Sometimes the event that causes a principal, for example, to
take a fresh look at office referrals is the illness of a colleague.
As one principal confessed to me:
"I had forgotten what it was like to be a vice principal
until I had to pinch-hit for Herman. I think I wanted to forget.
I spent the whole day dealing with one referral after another
and didn't get it damn thing done! And most of the referrals
were bullshit! I couldn't believe it. So-and-so was late to
class. So-and-so was chewing gum. So-and-so kept talking after
I asked her to stop. So-and-so forgot his book again. And the
referrals that really were big problems were in most cases made
into big problems by the way the teacher dealt with the kid!"
Teachers, however, have a different point of view, and their
point of view is often not heard until the entire school staff
has suffered long and hard at the hands of a minority of the
student body. At such times teachers, administrators, and even
parents may be forced to take a new look at the way in which
discipline is being managed at the school site. In times of
great stress all parties involved may join to form a "discipline
task force."
The Discipline Task Force I will tell a story of my
involvement with a particular discipline task force at a large
inner city high school that highlights the key problems of dealing
with discipline in the office. You must realize, however, that
for a high school task force on discipline to resort to calling
in an outside consultant, they must be suffering. The task force
is at loggerheads over how to deal with kids for at least a
year, and everyone hates everyone.
The Teacher If you talk to the teachers
about the problem, they say:
"We don't get any support! I have kids in my classroom
who try to get away with murder, and they know that the worst
that can happen to them is that I will send them down to the
office. Do you know what happens then? In 10 minutes they're
back! It's a big joke! And when I want some real help down
at the office, they give me the message, "What's the
matter, can't you handle the problems in your classroom?"
or "Don't send your problems down here because we can't
fix them any better than you can." The message over and
over again is you're on your own kid. Lots of luck. Some of
these students are a foot taller than I am-tough, street-wise,
big-mouthed kids-and being on your own leaves you pretty damn
vulnerable! Listen, I want some real help when I need it!"
The teacher's complaint seems all the more plausible when you
know the statistics on teacher assaults and injury at such school
sites to say nothing of burn-out. So I ask the administrators
what it looks like from their angle.
The Administrator The administrators that I deal
with in such situations are usually vice principals. Few principals
in their right minds would place themselves on the discipline
task force. A typical dialogue with a vice principal goes something
like this.
VP: Do you see that bench outside my office?
Me: Yeah.
VP: You know what that's for?
Me: Yeah. That's where kids sit while they're waiting
for you to see them.
VP: Right! Now, school opens up here at 8 o'clock in the
morning. Do you know when the first kid is on that bench?
Me: Eight o'clock in the morning.
VP: No. 7:50! The kid got into a fight while waiting at the
door. I talk to the kid for 20 or 30 minutes because he's
one of my regulars. He's all bent out of shape about something.
When I open the door to let him go to class, how many kids
do you think are on the bench now?
Me: How many?
VP: It could be five or more, but on a good day let's say
its only three. So I see the next kid, and when I open my
door the next time there are five or sick kids on the bench
for sure. At that point counseling is all over for the day.
I mean, if I don't speed things up, we're all gonna die!
The kids will be shoving each other off the bench and
making noise and hassling the secretary. The last two secretaries
we had quit within 6 weeks. Then somebody's mother walks in,
and some kid calls her a choice name. She goes to the principal,
and then we have an irate parent to deal with. I mean, if
I let those kids stack up out there in the office, it will
turn into a zoo! So, what do I do? Get 'em in, and get 'em
out. Hell, I know it's not helping very much, but it's better
than instant chaos! What are my choices?
Since chaos is clearly intolerable, most VPs and counselors
settle for survival. Yet, the revolving-door policy, perhaps
unavoidable under the circumstances, is neither good counseling
nor good discipline. The counseling is so superficial, in fact,
that it amounts to a parody on counseling-and most VPs and counselors
are well enough trained to know it. But when the students begin
to stack up outside, what indeed are the choices?
And after the lecture on good citizenship is over, does Bill
walk back to class muttering "mea culpa" to himself?
Are you kidding? As he swaggers into the teacher's class, someone
whispers, "How was it?" and Bill says "Shiiit!"
as he puts his feet up on the table. And now what is the teacher
going to do? And what is she going to do tomorrow when the same
problem recurs?
The Parent Once I've gotten the administrator's
perspective, I ask to talk to the parents. The parents say:
"My child was doing just fine until I sent him up to
that school, and now they tell me he's having problems. I
think it's the school's fault. He was a perfectly wonderful
child before he went up there. He tells me the classes are
boring!"
The kid may have a dossier 5 inches thick that goes back to
kindergarten, but who's counting. Satisfied parents don't volunteer
for a discipline task force.
Proper and Improper Use of the Office I have one piece
of advice to give to teachers about using the office to solve
their classroom discipline problems: don't.
The reason I say don't is not because I think that teachers
shouldn't send students to the office. That is not the point.
I don't deal with "shoulds" or "shouldn'ts."
I deal with the lessons of the school of hard knocks. The reason
a teacher is better off not relying on the office is because
the office is inherently unreliable.'
The office is unreliable not because people in the office do
not want to help teachers. That attribution by teachers, no
matter how true to their experience it may be, misses the reason
the office continually lets them down. The office is inherently
unreliable because its capacity to help was never that great
to begin with. As soon as there are three students on the bench
outside the vice principal's office, counseling is done for
the day, and the revolving-door policy begins. The office can
help teachers with discipline management. The problem is
that the office cannot help them very often. As soon
as the demand for service exceeds the supply, the entire system
jams and become useless! At a typical high school the office
becomes jammed by 9:30 a.m. What happens for the rest of the
day is simply a matter of survival.
And how many bouncers or office junkies do you think it takes
oil a faculty to keep the office permanently jammed? Any faculty
of sixty to eighty teachers will have (it least a half-dozen
bouncers, and that is more than enough. Owing to their
ineptitude or irresponsibility in classroom management, they
will jam their colleague's access to the office for back-up
all year long. The bouncers' more competent colleagues will
not understand why the office can never serve them. They typically
have no idea of the chronicity of bouncing among a minority
of their colleagues, much less who the bouncers are. All they
know is that when they need help it's not there - just as their
bouncer colleagues keep saying in the teacher's lounge. Such
topics are not well understood much less candidly discussed
at most school sites.
In short, the notion that teachers as a group can send students
to the office as a common means of fixing classroom discipline
problems is one of the most long-standing myths in education.
In spite of the daily evidence delivered in overwhelming quantities
that the practice does not work, nearly every one - teachers
and administrators and parents alike-seem unalterably convinced
that it should work.
Reinforcement Errors That Feed the Problem
The Teacher For the bouncer, sending an
obnoxious kid to the office is instant relief. Never mind that
they will be back tomorrow, at least they are gone today. Immediate
relief rewards the act of bouncing, and the long-term consequence-the
repetitiveness of the problem-is most logically misattributed
to the students. They keep disrupting because it is their nature.
They are "rotten kids."
The Principal If the administration were
to attempt to stem the flow of referrals by closing the door
and refusing to receive students, they would be met by a blistering
accusation of nonsupport, especially from the bouncers.
If the office does its best to respond to the constant stream
of referrals, even if it is just with the revolving door, at
least they are trying. When you don't know what else to do,
doing your best is certainly more rewarding than being hung
in effigy.
The Counselor Most VPs and counselors at most
high schools have little time to use their higher level job
skills that qualified them to be a counselor in the first place.
If they do have the luxury of adequate time to do some real
counseling, however, they must beware of committing a reinforcement
error in the process.
What is the incentive for lonely and troubled students to work
hard and act appropriately in class when an exhibition of inappropriate
behavior gets them some counseling? Since the luxury of real
counseling is in short supply in regular education settings,
the extent of such a reinforcement error is correspondingly
limited. But it can be rampant in special education settings
where there are more counselors and fewer students. In many
cases the availability of one-to-one TLC (tender loving care)
is the primary reinforcer for periodic outbursts in the classroom,
especially during difficult subjects. By delivering counseling
as a reward for having a severe problem, the hapless counselor
can collect a clientele of chronics, just like the nurse.
For counseling of a severe behavior problem to produce the
intended result, the time and place must be chosen carefully.
In training educators to deliver counseling in conjunction with
a back-up response, there is a rule of thumb that spells out
when it is OK to talk with a student about his or her problem.
The rule is: First you pay. Then we talk.
Until students have experienced the appropriate consequences
for their actions, a heart-to-heart talk is impossible. Before
the delivery of the negative sanction, a student's vested
interest is typically to wheedle his or her way out of the
consequence that she or he has earned by some form of blaming
and excuse making: not by joining the teacher in clarifying
values, feelings, and motivations.
The Student The rewards available for a student's
getting the teacher's goat have already been described. They
are entertainment, control, and revenge. Additional reinforcement
errors can occur as TLC is delivered in the counselor's office
as we have just discussed. As a result of being outrageous,
a student can talk to someone who listens, rather than having
to learn algebra.
The cycle is therefore complete - everyone is inappropriately
rewarded to some degree for using the office to solve discipline
problems-everyone, that is, except the poor, hapless competent
teacher who only needs the office once or twice a semester
and cannot understand why it is not there when he or she needs
it. Were the faculty to attack the administration for nonsupport,
the best teachers would join the bouncers based on their disappointing
experience with the office.
Reducing Abuse of the Office
A Response-Cost Program for Bouncers In Chapter 13 a
response-cost program for reducing abuse of the office was briefly
mentioned. To review, a response-cost program requires the construction
of a due process for dealing with a problem that is costly enough
to induce someone to take care of the problem in order to avoid
the due process. Response-cost programs are ideal for suppressing
irresponsible behavior in a situation in which direct suppression
via negative sanctions is awkward or inappropriate.
The repeated bouncing of students to the office for minor offenses
is a classic management dilemma calling for response-cost management.
If an administrator said, "Don't send them to the office,"
he or she would generate intense faculty resentment for lack
of support. If they bend to the unreasonable demands of the
bouncers, however, administrators commit a reinforcement error
by acceding to their demands while removing any reason for the
bouncer to learn better methods of coping.
A response-cost program to eliminate bouncing, however, will
not be a live option for an administrator until the majority
of the faculty (at least two-thirds) have been thoroughly trained
in effective methods of classroom management so that they understand
and support the administrator's goals and strategy. Thus, the
following program is usually not instituted until the second
or third year of involvement with a school site.
As mentioned earlier (Chapter 13), the administrator approaches
response-cost for bouncers from the perspective of doing a more
thorough and conscientious job of dealing with problems severe
enough to warrant an office referral. Far from being a ruse,
this commitment to dealing thoroughly with tough management
problems is not only appropriate but long overdue at most school
sites. Most administrators shy away from such a large commitment
to adequate follow through because they do not have time for
it. Being able to afford the due process of the response-cost
program, therefore, is a luxury that only appears as affordable
after most of the faculty have stopped making office referrals
and are standing squarely behind the new policy.
The new policy is simple:
- If a discipline problem is too big to handle within the
classroom, it is serious enough to warrant a systematic plan
to solve the problem developed by the teacher in conjunction
with key administrators.
- When a student is referred to the office, the teacher must
fill out an incident report (one full page) and describe those
management methods that were used before the office referral.
(A check-list can be provided on a separate page with room
for explanation.) The incident report must accompany the student
to the office so that administrators may know in adequate
detail what has happened.
- A planning conference of at least a half hour must be held
with the referring teacher and key administrators after school
on the same day to plan a future course of action in
dealing with the problem. This plan should focus on prevention
as well as remediation.
For the bouncers, the days of the quick, cheap, short-term
solving of classroom management dilemmas by simply issuing a
pink slip are over. They will either have to handle it themselves
within the classroom or become involved in a careful, systematic,
and therefore relatively costly problem-solving process.
Most bouncers will experience anxiety and will often express
anger. If, after all, they had adequate classroom management
skills, they wouldn't be bouncing. They are frequently burned
out and want to leave school as soon as possible. They see the
incident report and the planning meeting as a burden. So, what
are they to do? First they may try to gather support in opposition
to the new policy: "We get no support. That's their job,
isn't it?"
A naive, untrained faculty may well rally around the complainers,
the negative leaders of the faculty. But a trained faculty will
stand firmly behind the new policy. The bouncers must now cope
within their classrooms or spend a lot of time picking up the
pieces after school. At this point many of the teachers who
had been negative toward classroom management training finally
see the light and volunteer to learn new skills. Indeed, the
upgraded due process for handling office referrals is the final
mechanism whereby burned-out teachers are provided incentives
for actively participating in professional growth.
Keep Adequate Records Although the careful problem solving
of the new due process confronts the bouncers most directly
with a new set of responsibilities, in fact, almost all school
sites need to do a more thorough job of keeping track of serious
behavior violations. In all but a relatively few secondary sites,
no permanent records are kept of severe or recurrent behavior
problems. This sloppy record keeping can cost a teacher or a
school district dearly if a chronic troublemaker finally gets
into serious trouble with the law (violence, vandalism, drugs,
etc.). The parent can deny either any prior record of serious
misconduct or any attempt by school authorities to help the
child. With no record of serious incidents and attempts at management,
the educators in the room look like a bunch of dummies.
Although an incident report should always be filed for major
"altercations," any secondary teacher should keep
a log which records in simple terms the student's work habits
and noteworthy behaviors. A piece of notebook paper with three
headings is sufficient: (1) date, (2) work, and (3) behavior.
The work column can simply record assignments turned in and
not turned in although the log sometimes replaces the grade
book with notations for quality of work and extra-credit work.
The entries in the behavior column should be brief but can be
exceedingly revealing, for example:
9-15 Hits, gets surly, takes seat.
9-17 Nasty back talk-call parent and leave message.
9-18 Parent doesn't return call. Call again. They blame me.
Set up conference for 9-22.
9-22 Parent doesn't show.
9-23 Call parent. He is surly ("Get off our kid's back.")
Conference reset for 9-30.
9-25 Uses profanity in class.
9-30 Parent doesn't show.
Getting Out of the Office At those school sites in which
the demand by teachers for help from the office finally reaches
a low level, options open up to the vice principals and counselors
that were not possible before. They not only have time to devote
to students who really need special help with their lives, but
they can also deal with discipline referrals in a completely
different way. When the number of daily discipline referrals
to an administrator becomes moderate, it becomes more cost-effective
for the administrator to leave the office and go to the
student rather than having the student come to the office.
The advantages that accrue to going to the student's classroom
quickly become apparent when the administrator sees the gratitude
on the face of teachers as they come to the door. The administrator
is obviously going out of his way to help. Students are more
impressed by a vice principal at the door than they are by a
pink slip. The teacher also remains more credible as a discipline
manager to the students since, at least to a degree, the problem
is still being handled within the classroom. And the opportunity
for goofing off on the way to the office and in the office while
waiting to be seen has been eliminated. Finally, there is much
less wasted time not only for the students but for the administrator
as well. An administrator can often have four or five quick
conferences with students outside their classrooms in a single
period while monitoring the halls and school grounds in the
process. In addition, the continual presence of administrators
in the halls can suppress a lot of out-of-classroom problems.
Simple mobility or MBWA (Management By Walking Around) has proved
to be one of the most effective ways for executives in both
industry and education to stay on top of things.
The Office at the Elementary School
All problems of relegating discipline management to the office
at the secondary level apply to the elementary level as well.
Abuse takes roughly the same form for roughly the same reasons.
Yet the problem of bouncing seems to be less extreme at the
elementary level. Owing to the structure of the self-contained
classroom, elementary teachers face a different set of contingencies
for bouncing. First, in self-contained classrooms all students
are well known. It is naturally easier for a secondary teacher
to bounce a relatively anonymous student who is with them only
one period a day and in no way distinguishes him or herself
apart from getting into trouble. Second, in a self-contained
classroom there is no such thing as bouncing a kid and not having
to see him or her for the rest of the day. These kids always
come back to you wearing whatever chip on their shoulder you
helped put there. and you must live with the consequences of
your own discipline practices for the rest of that day. And,
finally, elementary teachers quite naturally tend to
see their students as children rather than as young adults.
Consequently, elementary teaching is more strongly infused with
the parent role. When students are sent to the office at the
elementary level, it is more often because they have done something
terrible for which sitting in the presence of the "supreme
authority," the principal, seems to be the only sufficiently
awesome thing to do.
One dilemma at the elementary level that is unique to small
school sites with only one administrator, however, is that the
principal is not there half the time! She is at a meeting at
the district office or with some planning committee or parent
group. If I had to rely for back-up on someone who was not there
half the time, I would look for good alternatives.
Why Use the Office At the elementary level one more
often thinks of taking students to the office rather than sending
them to the office. A teacher at any grade level typically takes
the student to the office not only to make sure he or she
gets there but also to confer with the principal about a plan
of action. One might, on the other hand, imagine a bouncer sending
a student to the office to get the problem out of his or
her hair and to make someone else responsible for dealing with
it. This contrast between taking versus sending a student to
the office shows the difference between responsible and irresponsible
use of the office in dealing with a discipline problem.
Irresponsible use of the office, whether at the elementary
or secondary levels, signals an abdication of management, an
attempt to give the problem to someone else rather than to seek
the other person's collaboration in a joint effort at problem
solving. Implicit within an understanding of the responsible
use of the office in problem solving lies a criterion for when
to use the office: There is no reason to bring a problem
to the office unless it requires the professional judgment of
at least one additional colleague (the principal, for example)
in order to figure out what to do next.
Smooth Moves
Collaboration with the Principal A teacher who
is effective in managing classroom discipline typically needs
to come to the office only with something that was sudden and
unforeseen-usually injury or fighting. After the teacher explains
the incident to the principal, he or she will often stand there
expectantly waiting for a remedy to be instantly coughed up.
The teacher apparently does not know what is going through the
principal's mind at this moment. To clarify, the principal is
thinking, "What the hell do you expect me to do about it?"
The choreography in this situation is for the principal to
take two relaxing breaths, stand slowly, look the student in
the eye, take two more relaxing breaths, and say
Billy, I want you to sit in this chair and look at the wall.
We will return in a minute. And when I walk through that door,
I will expect to find you looking at the wall! Do you under
stand?
Then the principal and teacher leave together. They close the
door behind them and keep walking. When teacher and principal
are out of earshot of the student, the principal turns to teacher
and says, "What the hell do you think we ought to do about
this?" If you are not sure what to do next, at least have
the sense not to debate it in front of the kid. If solving the
problem does not require the combined judgment of two professionals,
the teacher has no business in the office.
Phone Calls Question: If you decide to call the parent,
who explains what happened over the phone? Answer: The kid.
The principal rings the parent and explains the situation before
turning the phone over to the student to fill in the details
as the principal and teacher look on. Once the student commits
himself to a story over the phone with the latitude to lie removed
by the presence of the principal and teacher, he can't lie and
alibi so easily after he gets home. Many a fruitful collaboration
with a parent has been aborted at the beginning by the child
going straight home and lying in order to get a somewhat blind
or gullible parent to side with him or her against an "unfair
teacher.
Transition to Extra-Large Back-up Responses
The issue of sending or taking a student to the office brings
into focus a watershed event in the teacher's management of
a discipline problem within his or her classroom-seeking the
direct aid of someone else (a school administrator) in solving
the problem. Upon this event hang three issues:
- The size of the problem
- The teacher's competence in classroom management
- The teacher's taking responsibility for classroom management
Once the administrator accepts responsibility for fixing the
problem by dealing directly with the student, all three issues
have been resolved for all practical purposes. The administrator
has implicitly acknowledged that (1) the problem is sufficiently
large. (2) the teacher knows what to do before coming to the
office, and (3) the teacher has done all that he or she can.
If any of these implications is not accurate, the administrator
is responding to the wrong issue.
Consequently, before going further up the back-up system, we
will insert an additional step: Reexamine! The teacher
and administrator should reexamine the whole situation together
to reassess the nature and source of the problem. A sudden or
violent situation can force the teacher and the administrator
beyond large back-up responses on rare occasions. But if a situation
is at all repetitive, the mere repetitiveness of the problem
should serve as a red flag to all involved. Most students who
repetitively get to the office or beyond do so as a result of
mismanagement.
EXTRA-LARGE BACK-UP RESPONSES
The treatment of extra-large back-up responses will be brief.
We are now well beyond the confines of the classroom and beyond
the normal applications of positive classroom discipline. The
topic of extra-large back-up systems is potentially immense:
it covers the management of delinquent populations and the involvement
of education, both regular and special, with the juvenile justice
system and the families of court-referred youths.
For our purposes it will be most useful to restrict our focus
to those management procedures which are commonly known and
in use at many school sites. These procedures might well be
considered by a faculty and administration as they go about
constructing or reconstructing their school discipline policy.
Common Procedures
In-School Suspension In-school suspension is a variation
on time out which has received much attention in the past few
years, especially at the secondary level. In-school suspension
is time out for an extended period, usually a half day or full
day, in a private study area with a folder of assigned work
and academic supervision.
For the extremely or chronically provocative student, in-school
suspension offers an alternative to suspension from school which
keeps the student in a learning environment. The negative sanction
is social isolation. The message quite clearly is: You are going
to attend school. You can study one of two ways - either with
your friends or by yourself. The choice is yours. When applied
conscientiously, in-school suspension can be extremely effective.
The primary liability of in-school suspension is cost. The
first two prerequisites of operating such a program are (1)
a private room, and (2) someone qualified to supervise the room
and offer academic assistance at least once every 15 minutes.
The first two problems typically encountered by a staff considering
the use of in-school suspension, of course, are a lack of space
and supervisory personnel.
If adequate space and supervision are provided, the cost of
operating the system for a year can be high indeed since it
preempts the use of a much-needed room and adds at least part
of a salary to the payroll. If adequate facilities and supervision
are not provided, the school not only risks a lawsuit with strong
legal precedents supporting the student's "right to treatment,"
but the school also risks doing a botch job, which will make
the problem worse. The following conversation with a junior
high school principal provided a timeless example of how not
to do in-school suspension for cheap.
Principal: Hello, Dr. Jones. I'm glad you could come
out here today to speak. Of course, we don't have any serious
discipline problems at this school site. We have been
using a discipline management program here for quite some
time.
Me: Oh, really? What kinds of programs do you use?
Principal: Well, in-school suspension mainly.
Me: Oh, where do you hold it?
Principal: Well, there's this room down by the lunch
area that used to be for storage.
Me: How big is it?
Principal: Oh, about 14 x 20.
Me: Who do you get to supervise it?
Principal: Are you kidding? We're short one secretary
and three teachers today. I'm going to have to cover two periods.
Besides, even at best, there's nothing in the budget to provide
for supervision.
Me: How many kids are typically down there?
Principal: Oh, it depends. Maybe five or six, sometimes
up to eight or nine.
By doing a half-baked job of in-school suspension, the school
had in fact designed an incentive system to set up five or six
or sometimes eight or nine first-hours teachers to be faced
with an intolerable discipline problem. The reinforcement error
offered for outrageous behavior was the opportunity to be bounced
to in-school suspension. Any junior high student who not only
hates school but is also capable of being thoroughly obnoxious
who cannot make it down to the in-school suspension room by
9:00 a.m. to join the gang is definitely off his form. Indeed,
that is exactly how I found the system to be working when I
later consulted to the school.
Saturday School Saturday school as a means of dealing
with cuts and tardies can not only prove effective in suppressing
poor attendance, but it can often recoup a large portion of
its cost by generating the state aid for attendance that was
previously lost by cuts. Administrative costs are high, however,
and the concept must have parental support. Thus, any school
considering in investment in Saturday school should also consider
an investment in teacher training as well as a more sophisticated
school-site management system for preventing cuts and tardies
in the first place.
Suspension Suspension is fairly well understood by educators.
Rarely is it seen as fixing anything permanently. More often
it is simply regarded as the only thing left. Administrators
generally appreciate as well the frequency with which the intent
of suspension as a negative sanction is totally undermined by
rewards available outside school. These rewards range from watching
TV at home to hanging out at the local computer game palace
to dealing a few hundred dollars worth of drugs on the street.
With suspension, as with most extra-large back-up responses,
frequent experience with them reduces their effectiveness. They
probably carry far more weight as a possibility for a fairly
good kid than as a common reality for a chronic troublemaker.
Suspension depends heavily upon parental support and follow
through consistent with the intent of the school. If, for example,
caring parents express their concern to the child in an intelligent
fashion and carefully monitor the child's doing schoolwork at
home with no play until the normal school dismissal time, then
suspension has a chance. It succeeds, however, more as a vehicle
for communicating a need for involvement to parents than as
a one-shot Cure in its own right. To the extent that the parents
do not cooperate, the method is crippled.
More Extreme Procedures
Delivering a Student to a Parent at Work Dad or Mom
may well become more involved in supporting management effort
when their little darling is delivered to them at the office
or construction site at 10:00 a.m. with the accompanying message:
"Harold has done X, Y, and Z for the nth time today.
For him to be readmitted into the public (private) educational
system, we require that you bring Harold to school personally
and stay for a conference on - day."
The need for such a radical cure may not be within the experience
of most regular classroom teachers and may therefore sound extreme
or bizarre. But it is not at all farfetched for those who deal
with delinquent students, court-referred students, juvenile
hall school students, or severely emotionally and behaviorally
handicapped students. The objective of the intervention is parental
involvement in an effort to help the child. The first response
of the parents will probably be one of rage, and you have to
be willing to take the heat.
Accompanying the Student to School A sanction which
ranks on a par with the preceding one for involving the parents
of an incorrigible student, usually against their wills, involves
the school's requiring that, as a condition for readmitting
the student to school, the parent(s) must accompany the child
throughout the school day, including sitting next to her at
all times and riding next to her on the bus. The message conveyed
by the school is that, since their child cannot or will not
govern her own behavior at school. she will need adult supervision.
Since the school has no staff for such purposes, the supervision
will have to be supplied by the parents.
Naturally the student hates it, and the parent isn't too fond
of it either. But as a last resort it can work.
Call the Police Calling the police typically involves
felony or assault although it may be used for theft or drugs.
We are fast running out of options.
Expulsion In a sense the issue of expulsion is the issue
underlying all the more extreme back-up procedures. The question
raised by their use is: Are we going to pull out all the stops
to keep this student in public education, or are we going to
call it off?
Administrative Commitment to "Hang Tough"
Extra-large back-up responses should be extremely rare and
usually represent an attempt by school personnel to get sonic
kind of responsible action from the parents of an incorrigible
student. Often such a student would be in a special education
class, but not often enough. Parents of such students sometimes
covertly support the deviant behavior and usually say to the
school, that's your problem, not mine."
Before attempting to use a more extreme back-up procedure,
the school administration should make several key decisions:
- Are we going to take a united stand to keep this student
in school? If a parent can eliminate the program with an angry
call to the superintendent or a school board member, forget
it.
- Are we willing to upset our schedules for a while to see
this thing through to the end?
- Would we all feel better if the kid disappeared? Are we
really going to see it through?
Obviously, commitment is the main ingredient. The education
system is making its last stand to keep a student from washing
out. Options available to teachers and administrators vary from
state to state.
More extreme back-up options will provoke a mild to major family
crisis as well as a confrontation with the school system in
most cases, and such a confrontation can be quite stressful
to everyone involved. Such a crisis, however, is sometimes the
first painful step toward change. The cost is obviously high
by this time, but the potential results may well justify the
investment.
BACK-UP SYSTEMS IN RETROSPECT
A back-up system is a carefully designed hierarchy of negative
sanctions which is designed as part of a larger management system
to be used as infrequently as possible and for as brief a period
of time as possible. A back-up system exists to put the lid
on a nasty situation and to buy time for the implementation
of more sophisticated. incentive-oriented interventions.
A back-up system in using negative sanctions is relatively
dangerous because negative sanctions when misused can be destructive.
A back-up system when abused is ultimately most destructive
to the alienated students - the big disrupters who have long
since expended any store of sympathy they may have had with
their elders. They are the ones who are locked by reinforcement
errors into a pattern of behavior that is ultimately maladaptive
and self-defeating. They ultimately lose out on their education.
A successful back-up system is designed and implemented from
the bottom up as well as from the top down. The heart of an
effective back-up system is in the teacher's initial responses
to unacceptable behavior, which renders its recurrence increasingly
unlikely. Effective discipline must, of course, be supported
from the top down, and administrators must play their role.
But administrators can impose effective discipline on a school
site neither through a series of policies and directives nor
by the adoption of a tough hierarchy of consequences. Such a
hierarchy, though perhaps part of an effective back-up system,
is too little and too late. By itself it will never self-eliminate
and it will always tend to overload. Yet it will, in a perverse
and empty way, tend to please everybody by creating the illusion
that something "tough" has been attempted without
requiring real change from anybody.
As we get into large and extra-large back-up responses, we
get the sense that we are now only picking up the pieces rather
than preventing problems. Indeed, an analysis of the function
of administrators in responding to crisis in this chapter in
conjunction with the section "Why Back-Up Systems Fail"
(from Chapter 14 of Positive Classroom Discipline) will probably
face principals and vice principals with a clear look at a no-win
situation that is only too familiar. If these descriptions have
destroyed the illusion that administrators could and should
carry out a major back-up role for classroom management on an
hour-by-hour basis, then we are all better off. As long as teachers
expect the impossible from the office and as long as administrators
attempt to supply it, nobody will be in the market for either
a serious reevaluation of discipline management or a serious
training program for teachers and administrators.
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