Discipline

"In Chicago-area public schools, African-American students are five times as likely to be suspended and nearly eight times as likely to be expelled as white students,” reports the Chicago Tribune this week. 

The Trib analyzed “little-noticed” 2004-2005 school year data from the US Department of Education and saw that “In every state but Idaho...black students are being suspended in numbers greater than would be expected from their proportion of the student population.”

These statistics aren’t particularly new; I feel like we heard this a few years ago, back when zero-tolerance discipline started making the news.  The question is, what now?

Alexander Russo wonders if it isn’t time for “differentiated discipline” to go along with all that differentiated instruction we’re all doing.

The Trib article mentions a program called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS), which seems to be funded by the US Office of Special Education Programs.  According to their website, “The purpose of school-wide PBS is to establish a climate in which appropriate behavior is the norm.” The system focuses on preventing issues rather than punishing students after the fact.

Thoughts about either of these solutions?  Anyone’s school implementing PBIS?

Labels: Conversations, News

At my first school they tried despertely to implement PBIS, with few successes in my opinion, though the people in charge touted lots of “progress.” It was clear to me that the amount of “collaboration” that was supposed to be happeneing was boiling down to stacks of paperwork on each child in what could be considered basically as “behavioral IEP’s”

But the esence of it was follow-up collaboration with other teachers, and adminstrators in charge of the program, without whom we could not make any decisions regarding consequences (unless they were positive ones).  Even the consequences we could create were strictly extrinsicly motivated ones and did nothing to make the student want to change not only their actions, but their perspectives as well.

Unfortunately, the way I have seen this system in action undermines children’s abililty to think, and bueracratizes everything adults do into minutae.