Schools are not holding students accountable for showing up, doing the work and behaving properly, write Jonah Davids, a research fellow at Maine Policy Institute, and Kevin McCaffree, a University of North Texas sociology professor, on City Journal. Parents are partly to blame.
Permissiveness is not doing the kids any favors, they argue. "Schools are denying students the structure, incentives, and responsibility they need to learn and grow."
To reduce suspensions and expulsions and "address the trauma and mental-health challenges that purportedly cause behavioral issues," schools now devote time to "quasi-therapeutic" practices such as “restorative circles” (teacher-guided group counseling) and “restorative conferences” (facilitated conversations between a victim and offender involved in a conflict), they write. These have failed to improve student behavior.
Absenteeism is up, while academic standards are down. Lenient policies -- test retakes, no penalty for late assignments and credit for minimal or no effort -- have inflated grades, Davids and McCaffree write. Standardized testing "is falling out of favor among many education officials, who now advocate for more subjective measures of success to boost the passing rate for lower-performing students."
Both "parents and teachers now see students as fragile," they write. Instead of pushing their children to work harder to avoid failure, parents now pressure teachers to award higher grades for less effort.
Showering students with praise while denying them honest feedback doesn’t protect students from harm; it detaches them from reality. Without clear standards and appropriate consequences, students cannot identify weaknesses, learn from mistakes, or develop the resilience needed to improve.
"Public schools must reintroduce clear expectations and enforce them consistently, restore classroom order, enforce attendance, and uphold academic standards," Davids and McCaffree conclude. Parents "should support teachers in delivering honest feedback."
Teachers must treat students as trauma victims, Connie Marshner was told when she trained to become a substitute teacher.
About 30 percent of students have experienced four or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, such as parental abuse, neglect or divorce, a serious illness or injury, witnessing violence or moving to a new home, according to the training. "Every student must be handled with extreme caution and gentleness" as a potential "ticking time bomb," writes Marshner. "Since behavior is communication, in the words of the trainer, a student’s bad behavior is assumed to be the response to trauma — for which the student cannot be held responsible."
In the example given to future subs, they were told a teachers should not say in a stern voice, "Sit down and be quiet." Instead, writes Marshner, the teacher is supposed to ask kindly, "Is there something I can do today to help your day go better?"
"So, when a seventh grade boy is shouting obscenities at me because I told him to move to a different seat, I’m supposed to . . . explain the harm he’s doing to his peers by preventing them from paying attention — while the rest of the class watches and nobody learns what I’m supposed to be teaching," she writes. It's no wonder so many districts have trouble hiring teachers.