Year after year, polls show that school discipline is a major concern of parents and the general public. They're right to be concerned. But school boards across the country are doing very little about it. Most school boards take a legalistic view. "We're obligated to provide an education for all kids until they're 18, so there's nothing we can do" is the usual answer.
The failure of school boards to act had led many to make a hero out of New Jersey high-school principal Joe Clark, who set himself up as the law and arbitrarily kicked out students and chained shut school fire exits. The desire for a safe and orderly environment also has led many parents to take their kids out of the public schools or move to districts where there are fewer serious discipline problems.
School boards could do much more. In a Jan. 6th editorial, The Washington Post praised the Prince George's County, Md. School system for its policy of expelling any student who brings a weapon or drugs into a school. The expulsion isn't just for a few days, either. It's for the rest of the semester and the following one.
Other serious violations of school order are punished with suspensions rather than expulsions. "Fighting and serious insubordination are punished with suspensions from one day to six months. That's a reasonable way to keep troublemakers from ruining the orderly atmosphere required for learning and achieving generally, which - it seems sometimes to be forgotten - is what the schools are there to provide. The price of disruption, violence and fear-inducing danger is paid by the other students. It is their account out of which the high cost of tolerating gross misbehavior comes."
The Post also commended on the complaint of the parent of a student who had been suspended many times. The parent wanted to know why the school hadn't done enough to improve her daughter's behavior and charged that suspending her daughter was just a way of making the job of being a teacher easier. The Post didn't buy that. "The awful irony of [the parent's] statement - the school could more properly have been asking the question of her - appeared to elude her. The point is that the schools cannot be expected to do everybody else's work, take on every other institution's problems and still do the job they are there for. It is wrong to expect regular classroom teachers to devote precious instruction time to police-type functions. Those students who court serious trouble must, along with their parents, accept the responsibility and consequences of what they do, and not ask the students who are there to learn to accept these burdens."
Of course, if the policy of expelling and suspending students resulted in huge numbers being ousted from school, there would be serious questions raised. Also, there's the question of whether the tough policies work: does the punishment result in better student behavior? Out of a total of 103,735 students in Prince George's County, 12,289 were suspended and 123 were expelled for drug or weapon possession. But there's good news about how the discipline policy is working. According to the Post, "Student misbehavior and crime has declined an impressive 39 percent in the past five years. As students and parents have gotten the message, suspensions and expulsions have also dropped dramatically."
How does this differ from what Joe Clark was doing? This is not the arbitrary and vigilante style of action of one principal. The school system adopted the rules, and the rules are explained to students and parents clearly and frequently. At the beginning of school each year, the entire behavior code is presented to all students and discussed, and copies are taken home. The code is then distributed again to parents at meetings.
Prince George's County is planning to expand in-school suspension programs and may also provide evening schools with special counseling help for students who have been kicked out of regular school. That's a good step. But the school system deserves support for realizing that it's just plain wrong to sacrifice the education of the overwhelming majority of students in order to meet our obligation to the troubled few.