This dramatic turn toward lawlessness in American schools post-pandemic is perhaps the most consequential story in education that receives little to no coverage.
This dramatic turn toward lawlessness in American schools post-pandemic is perhaps the most consequential story in education that receives little to no coverage.
W hen students return to classrooms in the coming weeks, the buildings they enter will not be safe. Forget test scores. At this point, schools are failing in their basic fiduciary duty to keep children from harm.
In the closing months of last school year, I spoke with almost 200 teachers. They told me that fights are constant with little consequence. They told me of the persistent anxiety as their schools teetered on the precipice of chaos, of the teachers who are cussed out, threatened, and disrespected every single day, and of how the public doesn’t understand the crisis we are in.
One woman lamented the “spiraling, out-of-control situation” in her school building, where “students consider themselves to be the authority.” In one year alone, she claims to have been called “more names and gotten more threats this year than the previous twenty-six.” A few wondered how their school would even function come September.
This dramatic turn toward lawlessness in American schools post-pandemic is perhaps the most consequential story in education that receives little to no coverage. We bicker about phonics or whole-language instruction, which books to read or banish from library shelves, whether Texas teachers can include the Bible as literature in curriculum — all the while teachers cannot maintain basic control of their classrooms, and students crack skulls on pavement.
Recent national surveys reveal that such anecdotes are not outliers but dishearteningly normal. At the end of July, the American Psychological Association released a survey of 15,000 teachers and other school personnel. They found over 80 percent reported verbal harassment, up from 65 percent before the pandemic, and 56 percent reported incidents of physical aggression. Other representative surveys confirm that rates of violence directed at both students and teachers have doubled from pre-pandemic levels. Student behavior regularly tops the list of teacher concerns — over and above teacher pay — even on internal union surveys.
To paraphrase Hemingway, this trend toward disorder happened slowly and then all at once. For decades, discipline proponents and equity hawks had equal and opposite sway over behavior policies. In 2014, Obama penned a “Dear Colleague” letter, threatening schools with legal action if they disproportionately disciplined students by race. A win for the equity hawks.
On the other side, so-called “No Excuse” charter schools boasted academic distinction, setting themselves forth as the exemplars of disciplinary traditionalists. Much of their success is credited to their broken-windows approach to policing small infractions such as uniform violations in an effort to define deviancy down and establish the orderly schools required for learning.
But after the summer of 2020, the traditionalists capitulated. Many leading charter-school systems renounced their reliance on punitive discipline and loosened their behavior codes. More broadly, public schools shifted toward restorative justice, an approach to discipline that relies on conversations with counselors instead of traditional punishments to maintain order.
A comprehensive RAND report found that while restorative justice does indeed decrease disparities in suspensions, such “improvements” come with an uptick in bullying and classroom disruptions. Suspensions decrease, but only because administrators overlook increasingly chaotic schools.
Thankfully, some jurisdictions are relearning basic lessons of human nature: If you permit or even reward bad behavior, you will get more of it, but if you give Johnny a lunch detention for talking back, he will, in fact, cut it out.
Conservative states are leading the way. Alabama and Florida, for example, have both passed “Teachers Bill of Rights” laws that empower teachers with greater ability to remove disruptive students and require administrators to dole out consequences. Louisiana passed two laws that compel teachers to remove disruptive students and requires expulsion for incidents involving knives and drugs as well as recurring suspensions. Even individual purple districts such as Clark County have rolled back their reliance on ineffective restorative-justice policies.
Sadly, not all states are adopting such common-sense policies. Indeed, both California and Illinois have prohibited the use of punitive discipline for willful defiance or insubordination. Any teacher worth their salt can tell you what these policies mean in practice. When a child can refuse to comply with a teacher’s demands, it communicates one thing: Anything goes.
There are important debates to be had about education, schooling, and instruction. Merit-based pay, classical curricula, and other such reforms are important and necessary, but behavior is primary. Neither phonics nor whole language, Shakespeare nor Diary of a Wimpy Kid will matter a whit if little Johnny can’t even hear his teacher over the sounds of chaos in the back of the classroom.