Elementary schools are “breaking bad,” concludes a new survey by the EAB research firm. “Teachers, principals, and district leaders all agree that behavioral disruptions have increased in grades K through 5 in recent years,” reports Denisa R. Superville in Education Week. But there’s a huge disconnect on how administrators and teachers see the problem.
Principals say their schools are using Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) to maintain order: Only 6 to 8 percent of students are severely disruptive, in their view.
Many teachers say they aren’t using the techniques their principals tout. And they see the problems as much larger: a quarter of students are severely disruptive, they say.
Disruptive behaviors included “tantrums, oppositional defiance, bullying, verbal abuse, and physical violence directed at both students and staff.”
There was also a gap between district administrators and principals, notes Superville. While nearly all district administrators said their districts had explicit protocols for managing disruptive behavior, “less than half of the principals thought their district did so, and 34 percent of principals said that their districts did not.”
“They are trying to get teachers to do so many different things, and the teachers often feel like it is restorative justice one week, then it’s PBIS the next week, then it’s SEL, then trauma-informed care,” said Pete Talbot, managing director of K-12 research at EAB. “That’s a lot to throw at teachers.”
One explanation for that gap could be the pressure school districts have been under to reduce suspensions and expulsions. As a result, teachers are left to deal with more of those discipline issues in their classrooms and fewer of those incidents are rising to the district level, Talbot said.
EAB estimated disruptions cost 144 minutes a week of instructional time, or almost three weeks of school.