Second-graders urge each other to walk peacefully and quietly in the halls. Photo: Maddie McGarvey/Atlantic

At a Columbus, Ohio school in a high-poverty neighborhood, teachers use different strategies to help children learn to calm themselves, writes Katherine Reynolds Lewis in The Atlantic.

Many students at Ohio Avenue Elementary come from troubled families and violent neighborhoods. Staff have been taught that “trauma can make kids emotionally volatile and prone to misinterpret accidental bumps or offhand remarks as hostile,” writes Lewis. “They’ve learned how to de-escalate conflict, and to interpret misbehavior not as a personal attack or an act of defiance.”

Teachers use a “patchwork of strategies” to help children develop “social-emotional skills”, such as self-control and empathy, she writes.

Recognizing that some children can self-calm with sensory toys, the staff lined the molding in the hallways with bottle caps, puzzle pieces, and plastic teddy-bear shapes for agitated children’s fingers to touch. A first-grade teacher, Jessica Bedra, applied for a grant to secure beanbags and stress balls that the children can manipulate or push their faces into when they feel overwhelmed. Another staff member filled Gatorade bottles with liquid and glitter as a tool that children can use to become centered. Suddenly the bottles were in almost every classroom.

. . . Teachers who produce the most orderly, productive classrooms combine a nurturing approach with clear limits and predictable routines.

With so many strategies being tried, it’s not clear what’s working, writes Lewis. However, the school received an A for progress on most of its recent annual report cards, which measure students’ growth based on past performance as part of the state’s accountability system.” A neighboring school, Livingston Elementary, received F’s. 

A “once safe and supportive” New York City school “fell into chaos as new administrators implemented a supposedly more positive approach to school discipline,” writes Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,  on The 74. Disorder led to bullying — and death.

Abel Cedeno was arrested in 2017 for the fatal stabbing of a classmate and now faces manslaughter charges Cedeno, now 19, said he was bullied for being bisexual. Photo: Go Nakamura/New York Daily News

“On Sept. 27,  2017, someone in history class threw a paper ball at Abel Cedeno, an 18-year-old senior who . . . had been bullied for his sexuality,” he writes. Cedeno pulled out a switchblade and stabbed two classmates at Urban Affairs Wildlife. Matthew McCree, 15, died.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged in his campaign to put “city schools at the vanguard of a nationwide movement to unwind traditional discipline in favor of a new progressive, or restorative, approach,” writes Eden.

At UA Wildlife, meaningful consequences for misbehavior were eliminated, alternative approaches failed, and administrators responded to a rising tide of disorder and violence by sweeping the evidence under the rug, students and teachers said.

In the 2013-14 NYC School Survey, 86 percent of UA Wildlife “teachers said order and discipline were maintained and 80 percent of students said they felt safe in the hallway,” writes Eden. By the 2016-17 survey, the founding principal and most of the old faculty had left. “Only 19 percent of teachers said order was maintained and only 55 percent of students said they felt safe.”

In the 2014-15 school year, a probationary principal, Latir Primus, took over. He lowered suspension rates by not enforcing rules, a former teacher told Eden.

According to the (staff) handbook, before referring a student to the dean, “the following documentation must be included: Student Misconduct Form, Family Telephone Log, Intervention Log, Witness Statements.” . .  . The staff handbook “defines the order in which staff should address these issues: 1. Teacher, Student; 2. Teacher, Student, Advisor (Dean If Appropriate); 3. Advisor, Dean, Parent, Student; 4. Guidance Counselor, Dean, Parent, Student (In Certain Cases); 5. Assistant Principal, Parent, Student; 6. Principal, Parent, Student.”

Furthermore, “Before any referral is made, the teacher should have followed the step [sic] below: Intervention Strategies, Conference with Students, Warnings, Called parent/guardian, Conference with parent/guardian.” For all these matters, “teachers MUST have the appropriate documentation. Teachers should be keeping anecdotal [records] on a regular basis, telephone logs, parental conference logs, intervention forms, and all other relevant documentation.”

Midway through the 2015-16 school year, Primus was replaced as principal by Astrid Jacobo. Things got much worse, former teachers told Eden.

“I remember one time, this was right when she started,” said a former STEM teacher I’m calling Mr. Garcia. “There was one student who was cursing in the hallway. Jacobo comes up very calmly, puts her hand on her shoulder, and says, ‘We don’t curse in this school.’ The girl yanked her shoulder away saying, ‘Get off me, bitch.’ She did that. Fine. What’s the result? Nothing. She didn’t get detention. Nothing.”

More teachers quit. New teachers got little support, writes Eden. He cites logs from 2016-17.

? Log 14873: “Today [name redacted] came into my class during a class that wasn’t his and smacked me in my face very hard.”

? Log 18220: “When I went to change the power point [name redacted] told me to not change ‘the f***ing slide’ and that is [sic] I did change the f***ing slide she would ‘f***ing slap me on the side of my f***ing head.’ ”

? Log 17119: “[Name redacted] was asked to put away his phone and do his work. He then proceeded to threaten Rudolph and myself. He informed us that we were ‘c***-sucking assholes’ and that I will beat the f*** out of you two on the last day of school. Threats should not be tolerated. I will attempt a parent call. Prior calls have not worked.”

UA Wildlife is slated for closure.

Students talk at the peace table at a San Jose Montessori school

Restorative justice can make schools safer, if it’s done well, writes Maureen Kelleher on Education Post.

She sends her daughter to a charter school “founded to create a peaceful environment.” Each classroom has a Peace Table where students discuss conflicts.

When her third-grade daughter was choked by another girl at recess, the teacher sent an e-mail, copied to other staff who help with safety and discipline.

Without using names, the teacher explained that a gossip situation had gotten out of hand and one of my daughter’s classmates had tried to force her into revealing what the others were saying.

The classmate put a hand on my daughter’s throat to try to force information out of her. Other girls in their class separated them quickly, and my daughter ran away to safety.

Back in the classroom, the girls took themselves to the classroom Peace Table and talked about it with their teacher. She emailed me afterwards to let me know what had happened and pledge the school’s support for my daughter.

Kelleher’s daughter said she would feel safe at school if she got to change her seat — just for a day — and if adults make sure to keep her classmate away from her in the halls and in gym and recess.

I emailed these requests to her teacher and got a positive response within the hour. We also agreed that her dad and I would come in and all three of us would meet briefly in the morning to review the safety plan and make sure we were all on the same page.

. . . The teacher let us know that the school is working with the classmate and her family to make sure she gets the behavioral support she needs to interact safely and positively with other students, but we didn’t focus on that very long. Our focus was on making sure my daughter would be safe that day and every day forward.

Two days later, after another Peace Table conversation, the classmate apologized. The two girls “exchanged small gifts as a gesture of friendship.” It was their own idea.

“It’s not easy to create environments where restorative justice can take hold,” Kelleher writes. Some parents at the school complain that “consequences can feel arbitrary or uneven.” However, she’s “glad my daughter is learning the skills to repair and rebuild relationships even when violent conflicts erupt.”

Most students at the school come from Latino families and are eligible for a subsidized school lunch.

How many schools are capable of doing restorative justice effectively? What does it take?

– Education Next 2015

The Obama-era push to reduce suspensions of black students ended up hurting black students, writes Gail Heriot, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, on the Volokh Conspiracy. Schools are “tolerating more classroom disorder, thus making it more difficult for students who share the classroom with unruly students to learn,” she charges.

During Arne Duncan’s tenure, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) threatened to investigate districts with higher rates of discipline for black students than for whites.

“The danger should have been obvious,” writes Heriot. “What if an important reason more African-American students were being disciplined than white or Asian students was that more African-American students were misbehaving?”

And what if the cost of failing to discipline those students primarily falls on their fellow African-American students who are trying to learn amid classroom disorder? Would unleashing OCR and its army of lawyers cause those schools to act carefully and precisely to eliminate only that portion of the discipline gap that was the result of race discrimination?

School administrators are risk adverse, writes Heriot. Instead of “don’t discipline a minority student unless it’s justified,” the rule became: “Don’t discipline a minority student unless you are confident that you can persuade some future federal investigator whose judgment you have no reason to trust that it was justified.”

In turn, this is presented to principals as “Don’t discipline a minority student unless you and your teachers jump through the following time-consuming procedural hoops designed to document to the satisfaction of some future federal investigator whose judgment we have no reason to trust that it was justified.” Finally, teachers hear the directive this way: “Just don’t discipline so many minority students; it will only create giant hassles for everyone involved.” 

The Obama-era guidance on eliminating racial disparities in discipline is Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law, Heriot and Alison Somin write in the Texas Review of Law and Politics. Well-designed studies show discipline disparities are a result of differences in behavior rather than discrimination, they argue. The article cites evidence and opinions from teachers indicating rising disorder.

Two Baltimore County teachers complained to Fox News that a culture of leniency has led to bullying and violence.

“I have been kicked. I have been punched. I have been thrown up against lockers,” stated one of the teachers.

“I’ve been spit on. A lot of chair throwing, turning over desks, screaming, running around the classroom,” added the other.

Of course, many educators support new discipline strategies, such as “restorative justice,” in hopes of ending the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Last week, a coalition of education leaders called on the Trump administration to keep the discipline guidance in place, reports The 74.

The federal government must protect students’ civil rights, said Cami Anderson, founder of the Discipline Revolution Project, in a media release. “We can and must do more to replace antiquated, harsh, ineffective, and biased discipline practices with student support systems that allow teachers to move away from these practices and toward alternative approaches to suspensions that help students thrive.”

Support for raising teacher pay is up this year, especially in states like Oklahoma where teachers have gone on strike or walked out.

Public support for raising teacher pay is climbing, reports the 2018 Education Next survey.

Two-thirds of those surveyed favored pay raises for teachers. When told about average teacher pay in their state, 49 percent said teachers should earn more, a 13 percentage point increase from last year.

Support for increasing teacher pay was strongest in states that experienced teacher strikes or walkouts this year, such as Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia.

Not surprisingly, there’s a sharp split in opinion about the Janus case: While 65 percent of teachers who are union members support agency fee rules, only 16 percent of non-union teachers say non-members should be required to pay fees. The survey found other differences:

Nonunion members are at least 20 percentage points more likely to support annual testing in reading and math, charter schools, and universal school vouchers. Union members are at least 20 percentage points more likely to support increasing school spending, higher teacher salaries and giving teachers tenure.

Here are the poll results.

Support for charter schools, which dropped last year, is back up.  Forty-four percent favor charter schools, while 35 percent are opposed.  “The uptick is concentrated almost entirely among Republicans,” EdNext noted.

The survey also find rising support for school vouchers for all students:  54 percent support universal vouchers, while 31 percent are opposed.  Most black and Latino respondents — but only 35 percent of whites — backed vouchers for low-income families.

Only 27 percent of those surveyed support federal regulation to eliminate racial disparities in school discipline. However support is up since 2017 among Democrats. Among black respondents, support remained at 42 percent, while disapproval rose sharply from 23 percent to 35 percent.

By 57 percent to 18 percent, “the public is overwhelmingly opposed to considering race in K–12 school assignment decisions as part of efforts to increase school diversity,” the survey found. However, the gap is narrowing slightly.

In Sit Down and Shut Up, Cinque Henderson recalls his year as a substitute teacher at high-poverty schools in the Los Angeles area. “Discipline can set students free,” he argues.

On his first day in the classroom, Henderson was cursed and threatened by one of his students. He called a monitor to escort the student to the office. He was back within five minutes with a note saying, “OK to return to class.”

Henderson blames the legacy of racism, fatherless ness, traumatic experiences and “the false promise of meritocracy” for classroom chaos.

Henderson rejects the cliches about kids’ rights, writes Larry Wilson, who’s on the Pasadena Star-News editorial board.

He quotes a teacher in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: “The want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

Solutions: “Teach impulse control … Bring back reform schools … and reform them. Reinstate classroom ejections … Hire more black men to teach. Make middle schools the most important schools. Bring back (limited) tracks. Crack down on cursing. … Sue school districts to compel rules around some basic level of parental involvement.”

Now a writer for television, Henderson left teaching because of an abusive principal. He told his story to Jay Mathews in the Washington Post and wrote about the principal’s eventual downfall in Medium.

Michelle Pfeiffer played an ex-Marine turned teacher of low-achieving students in the 1995 movie Dangerous Minds.

Teachers across the country are complaining that new, softer discipline policies aren’t working, writes Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in The 74. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is considering withdrawing the federal letter that pushed schools to limit suspensions and stress “restorative justice.” Why do teachers’ unions defend the federal directive when their own members say it leaves them unsafe in their classrooms? he asks.

Eden looks at districts where unions have have asked their members about new discipline policies. “Teachers say schools are deteriorating and that they don’t feel safe,” he writes.

In Oklahoma City, 60 percent of teachers say offending behavior increased since the letter came out (11 percent say it decreased). In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 60 percent say they’ve experienced an increase in violence or threats and 41 percent say they don’t feel safe at work. In Portland, Oregon, 34 percent of teachers say their school is unsafe. In Jackson, Mississippi, 65 percent say their school “feels out of control” on a daily or weekly basis. In Denver, 32 percent of teachers say discipline issues have hurt their personal safety and 60 percent say it has hurt their mental health. In Syracuse, New York, 36 percent of teachers say they have been physically assaulted, 57 percent say they’ve been threatened, and 66 percent say they fear for their safety at school.

Teachers say “progressive” or “positive” or “restorative” practices are ineffective in Santa Ana, California, in Hillsborough, Florida, and in Jackson, Eden reports. “Nationwide, teachers oppose the school discipline “Dear Colleague” letter about 3-to-1, he estimates.

On Facebook, a New York City teacher posted about being assaulted by a student who’d previously threatened the teacher with impunity. “I’m now bruised all over and in horrible pain,” the teacher wrote.  “Now that I’ve pressed charges, do I have a right to request that the student be removed from my classroom?”

Bakersfield (California) teachers blame new discipline policies for a rise in student misbehavior and violence, including assaults on teachers.

“More than 10,000 city school employees, from custodians to principals, and about half of them teachers, were assaulted or threatened by students last school year,” reports the New York Post. Incident reports increased by 4.5 percent from the previous year. School staffers also reported more incidents involving “altercations,” “physically aggressive behavior” and “inflicting serious injury.”

“Broward Schools have grown so tolerant of misbehavior that students like Nikolas Cruz are able to slide by for years without strict punishment for conduct that could be criminal,” reports the Sun-Sentinel.

The culture of leniency allows children to engage in an endless loop of violations and second chances, creating a system where kids who commit the same offense for the 10th time may be treated like it’s the first, according to records and interviews with people familiar with the process.

The district’s statistics are “deceiving.”

Students Suspended from School Compared to Student Population, by Race, Sex, and Disability Status, School Year 2013-14

Black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. In addition, special-education students and boys are much more likely to be suspended. Government Watchdog Finds Racial Bias in School Discipline was the New York Times headline.

Those statistics don’t prove that school discipline policies are racially biased, argues Gail Heriot, a law professor who serves on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in National Review. “Buried in a footnote, the GAO report concedes that disparities by themselves ‘should not be used to make conclusions about the presence or absence of unlawful discrimination’.”

The major reason for the disparity is that African-American students misbehave more than their white counterparts, concludes Heriot.

Just recently, the National Center for Education Statistics released a report showing that African-American students self-report being in physical fights on school property at a rate more than twice that of white students. Similarly, California’s former attorney general (and current senator) Kamala Harris reported in 2014 that African-American fifth-graders are almost five times more likely than whites to be chronically truant. In addition, as the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald has reported, African-American male teenagers from ages 14-17 commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of their white male counterparts. Why should anyone assume that rates of misbehavior in school would magically come out equal?

“The primary victims of the Obama administration’s effort to federalize school-discipline policy are African-American students attending majority-minority schools who are struggling to learn amid increasing classroom disorder,” Heriot writes.

The report also found that white students are disciplined more often than Asian-American students, she notes. Racial bias? Or behavior?

Heather Mac Donald, writing in City Journal, agrees that discipline disparities are linked to misbehavior.

The Justice and Education Departments’ Indicators of School Crime and Safety report shows far more gang activity, classroom disorder and verbal abuse of teachers in schools that are at least 50 percent minority, she writes.

In Minnesota, blacks are eight times more likely than whites to be suspended from school, reports Erica L. Green in the New York Times. School officials are under pressure to limit suspensions and identify discriminatory practices. However, some teachers say new policies have undermined school safety.

Simon Whitehead retired as a P.E. teacher at Southwest High in Minneapolis, after the new discipline policy “threw the school into complete chaos.”

Name-calling escalated to shoving, and then physical assaults. Profanity was redefined as “cultural dialect,” he said.

. . . “We do need to train teachers, especially white teachers, on how to interact with our African-American students,” he said. “But not expecting the same things from them is actually disrespectful. That would actually be racist.”

Despite the new policies, black students, who make up 41 percent of enrollment, still account for two-thirds of suspensions in Minneapolis schools.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is under pressure to rescind — or to preserve — what’s known as the “Obama-era guidance” on school discipline, writes Erika Sanzi in Education Post. A response to high suspension rates for black, Latino and special-education students, the 2014  “Dear Colleague” letter warned districts that disparate discipline numbers could be investigated by the Office of Civil Rights.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos

DeVos listened to educators on both sides of the debate last week. Many educators, parents and students say “schools are less safe” because the guidance has restricted “teachers’ and administrators’ ability to maintain order,” she wrote in a blog post.

Some teachers discussed the down side of out-of-school suspensions, DeVos wrote. A district administrator described how social-emotional learning “helped students learn to settle their differences without violence, and helped foster a nurturing school environment.”

However, others complained that teachers lost the ability to control their classrooms, “making it impossible for students to learn,” and driving teachers out of the profession.

Another teacher from New York described how students would regularly threaten their peers and teachers, but school administrators would not allow students to be disciplined, citing the need to reduce the number of suspensions. A former administrator from California told us that after her district changed its discipline policies, schools would send kids home informally to avoid impacting the schools’ suspension rates.

In the wake of the Parkland shootings, DeVos has launched a Commission on School Safety.

Sanzi has more on the teachers who spoke with DeVos.

Olinka Crusoe, an elementary school teacher in New York City, said removing students should be a last resort. “I want my students in school. I want them to learn the skills they need to manage their emotions and behavior during challenging situations.”

Annette Albright, a former behavior modification technician at Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, does not support the Obama-era guidance.

She was physically assaulted by three students and while the video of the violent attack is hard to watch, her school administration accused her of “provoking” the attack. And then they fired her.

She and others believe that the students were not held to account because the district was already under investigation by the Office For Civil Rights and was at risk of losing federal dollars.

Tynisha Jointer, a behavioral health specialist for Chicago Public Schools, said the guidance is being blamed for school leadership problems.

Suspensions are back up, notes Arthur Goldstein on NYC Educator. He’s a tad sarcastic about restorative justice, which was just endorsed by his union.

Once, I was teaching a class, and a student I’d never seen walked in. I told him he’d have to leave. He was offended by that, and thus he announced to the class that he was going to blow my head off with a 45. Clearly it was my fault. I should’ve taken the time to ask him why he felt he needed to come into my classroom, as opposed to whatever one he belonged in.

Rather than apologizing for failing to understand the intruder’s needs, Goldstein identified him and reported him to the dean.

I asked what happened, and the dean told me they had called the kid’s parents. I asked why he wasn’t suspended. He had problems, they told me.

Now here’s how callous I am–I said if he had problems that caused him to threaten people’s lives in public, he did not belong in the same building as my students. Can you imagine my level of insensitivity?

Students who are suspended graduate at lower rates than students who are not suspended, notes Goldstein. Is is the fault of the suspension? Or the behavior that led to the suspension?

When he brought a knife to San Diego’s Lincoln High School, the student’s special education team decided he wasn’t responsible because it was “a manifestation of the lack of impulse control caused by his disability,” writes Mario Koran for Voices of San Diego. Two weeks later, the student used a knife to slash another boy’s neck.

A student was arrested Jan. 23 at San Diego’s Lincoln High after he slashed a classmate’s neck.

Four years ago, San Diego Unified School District shifted from punitive discipline policies to a therapeutic model that tries “to address the underlying issues that lead to misbehavior, writes Koran. Yet the district “is only in its first year of training staff districtwide on how to effectively implement restorative practices.”

Lincoln High, reopened in 2007 after a $129 million rebuild, has struggled with staff turnover, poor academic performance and dwindling enrollment. Restructuring and rebranding attempts “have fallen short time and again,” writes Koran. “Now, educators, parents and students are coming forward to say they fear for students’ safety at Lincoln High.”

Nicole Stewart, who served as a vice principal at Lincoln from 2014 to 2016, said when the district softened its discipline policies, administrators started dealing with misbehavior by kicking kids out of school for the day. Instead of suspending kids who got into fights – which would show up in Lincoln’s suspension rates – they started sending kids home informally, a practice known as “blue-slipping.”

Stewart believes the practice led to inconsistent consequences and made it harder for teachers to control student behavior.

“The kids run that school from the opening bell to the closing bell,” Stewart said.

In her final year at Lincoln, Stewart hurt her back trying to break up a fight between students. She retired and now works as a consultant.

Consequences for assaulting staff vary greatly, writes Koran.

Lonnie Boswell, a substitute teacher, suffered neck and back injuries after he was charged by a student. “Boswell said the student wasn’t expelled, and weeks later came to school with a knife and tried to stab his classmate,” reports Koran.

In 2016, chaos erupted when a “play fight” between students at lunch turned serious. A school police officer followed a student into the parking garage and shot him with a Taser.  At some point during the struggle, a student struck the officer in the head, injuring him. Other officers who arrived used pepper spray to disperse the crowd of students who had gathered.

Superintendent Cindy Marten used the incident to display the district’s newly softened approach to discipline, and no students were expelled for the incident. Over the objections of the school police officers union, who said the decision set a dangerous precedent, district officials allowed the student to return to Lincoln the following school year.

That same year, “a student with a long history of violent and sexual offenses was caught with a box-cutter at school – an expellable offense – and was later suspended for slapping a girl,” reports Koran. “Administrators did not attempt to expel him, and several months later, he admitted to sexually assaulting a special needs classmate in the boys’ bathroom.”

La’Tia Taylor’s Chicago school replaced suspensions with . . . There was no alternative policy or training in how to deal with second graders like “Tony,” who was diagnosed with “anger impulsive disorder.”