No Excuses Discipline?

This week’s article summary is Beyond the Viral Video: Debate About No Excuses Discipline.

At the article attests, discipline in schools finds all of us (teachers, kids, parents) "pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.”

This topic has been prominent in our SAIS Self-Study discussions about what we need to focus on in the next few years.

While the video linked in the article (take the minute to watch it) made me bristle as a teacher, the article more importantly made me take stock of where I place myself on the traditional-progressive continuum with respect to school discipline.

First, I clearly want my students to over time develop intrinsic decision-making and control. While an optimist, I also understand that most of us develop these intrinsic habits and skills within extrinsic limits. As a kid, I’d like to say I did my homework because I knew it was helping me learn, but in reality the consequence of not doing my homework was my motivation.

Second, I want a classroom to reflect a growth-mindset approach, meaning mistakes and errors (be they academic or behavioral) are how we learn and grow. How terrifying for me as a kid would it have been if every decision I made (some of which were the wrong choice) seemed like a summative Final Exam. 

Third, I think of Sarah Morgan’s Teacher Feature article a few weeks ago on how paramount the need to belong is and that misbehavior is often more a manifestation of not feeling "wanted, appreciated, and loved.” 

I have spent my entire professional career in prestigious independent-private schools—hence, I can’t judge the merit of no-excuses discipline in the high-poverty schools featured in the article. 

Yet, from the article I can certainly—as we all can—reflect on what sort of discipline/behavioral system to we believe in and foster in our classrooms and schools. 

Joe

--------------

Let’s examines school discipline policies in light of the much-discussed video of a New York City charter school teacher harshly reprimanding a first grader for an incorrect paper.

More than perhaps any other issue in education, the discipline question finds individual students, teachers, and parents pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.

On one side are those who argue that the “no excuses” approach adopted by many charter schools is the only way to keep students on task and solve racial and social-class inequities that are exacerbated by lax discipline. Strict teachers are nothing new, but the no-excuses approach evolved in the 1990s to address the challenge of chaotic classrooms and disrespectful students in high-poverty schools. The approach was partly inspired by the “broken window” approach to community policing, which held that “sweating the small stuff” (fixing broken windows and other symptoms of disorder) created a climate that discouraged more-serious crimes. The “small stuff” in schools includes messy desks, gum chewing, pen tapping, doodling, trash on the floor, untucked shirts, loud talking, laughing at classmates, whining, eye rolling, teeth sucking, loud yawning, noisy movement from class to class, and running in the hallways.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that no-excuses tactics are abusive, racist, and not an effective way to close the achievement gap in a number of ways:

The end doesn’t justify the means. Even if students make significant academic gains in no-excuses classrooms, the argument goes, harsh treatment by teachers and administrators leaves emotional scars. Most no-excuses schools advocate “warm-strict” – a balance of high expectations within nurturing relationships. But it’s clear that some educators get carried away and act in ways that can easily be experienced by students as abusive – for example, the New York City teacher in the video tears up a student’s incorrect paper in front of the class and raises her voice as she sends the girl away from the group. The real question, of course, is what happens downstream for students – how they do in subsequent grades, college, and life. Data are just beginning to be gathered on that.

No-excuses discipline doesn’t teach the habits of success. The absence of misbehavior doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning. Additionally, strict, controlling discipline during school hours doesn’t prepare students to handle themselves responsibly in less-structured environments. All the silence had prepared them only for situations with tight supervision and no social interaction. As soon as students find themselves a bit older, on the bus without their teachers, they often don’t have the tools to resolve conflicts without putting themselves in danger. And how could they? The school hadn’t taught them. The same argument is made about teaching very structured procedures in English and math classes. It might produce high scores on standardized tests, but students can fail to develop the independent thinking skills that are essential for success in college and life.

Here are arguments made by supporters of the no-excuses approach:

No-excuses consequences don’t have to hurt kids. If practiced with skill and within a day-to-day climate of warmth and high expectations, strict consequences can be very helpful to students. Taking the example of correcting students’ grammar and speech patterns, which might inhibit students from speaking, John King (founder of a successful Boston charter school) says, “If done well, you’re giving kids lots of opportunities to speak. You say the sentence back to them grammatically correctly, or you ask them a question.” The challenge for rapidly expanding charter networks is ensuring that balance of warmth and strictness in every classroom. “The more ‘replication’ schools emerge,” says Green, “the farther away each new school is from the good intentions of those who created the philosophy – and the higher the risk of teachers misinterpreting the idea and falling down the slippery slope toward a disconnected desire for control and compliance.”

No-excuses schools are capable of change, and they are changing. Schools are learning from early mistakes and fine-tuning their approach to discipline. There’s more staff training, close monitoring of classrooms, and clear statements by school leaders like this one from Stacy Birdsell-O’Toole to her teachers: “We are not a yelling school. We do not yell at kids. If I see you yell at a child, I’m going to pull you to the side, I’m going to have a talk with you, and then you’re going to go back and you’re going to be successful.”

To me, the no-excuses approach to teaching needs radical overhaul. The behavior first, learning second formula prescribed by broken-windows theory – and for that matter, by most American schools – can successfully build compliant, attentive students, at least in the short term. But it cannot produce students who think creatively, reason independently, and analyze critically. Students cannot just ‘track’ the teacher, follow every direction, and repeat right answers in choral back-and-forths; they also need to learn to track arguments, pay attention to their work, and evaluate evidence in order to agree or disagree respectfully. And they need to have ample opportunities to make mistakes, both behavioral and academic, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their teachers. I’m saying that educators need to embrace new, more complicated structures that feel messier in the short term but build more permanent learning in the long term.