“Madam, we guarantee results—or we return the boy!”—Rev. Francis Patton, President of Princeton (1888–1902)
While the United States Department of Education sets its sights on unprecedented academic success before the year 2000, educators are floundering in an oil slick of low scholastic performances. Studies of elementary and high schools document a high percentage of illiteracy, inadequacy in math and science, falling SAT scores, and the inability of millions of American students to satisfy minimal employment standards. Sporadically, and as if it were an entirely unrelated issue, we hear outbursts over “violence in our schools.”
Every month 130,000 teachers are victimized by robbery or theft, and 5,200 teachers are attacked. Some of the attacks are so vicious as to generate newspaper headlines: a 3rd grader tore several ligaments in his teacher's thumb, a high school student bit off his teacher's ear, a group of students—angered by grades on a test—ganged up on their teacher and set her hair afire.
The violence is by no means a one-way process. Generally, however, teacher violence is a response to student violence. Both acts are actually struggles for authority and power.
Where Academic Failure and Violence Meet
It is precisely in the realm of authority and power that academic failure and classroom violence meet. Teaching and learning cannot exist in an uproar, and that uproar need not be a mass phenomenon. One child can paralyze learning for a whole class or even an entire school.
As a young teacher of 4th graders, my own nemesis had been 10-year-old Cody. Cody who turned over desks when classmates were working with paints, Cody who beat rhythms on the desktop all day, Cody who bit the custodian in the buttocks as the man bent over to repair the radiator. Cody performed at center stage from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with inappropriate behavior bordering on the bizarre and barbaric.
For any teacher competing for authority and power with a “Cody,” the way is seldom clear. Does one ignore or respond? Cajole or punish? Even the elimination of individual “Codys” is no guarantee of permanent peace. As if it were a mischievous Law of Pedagogic Nature, new candidates for the role of class disrupter arise to replace their predecessors.
The Battle Against Barbarism
In my search of the literature for others who—after years in classrooms that too often resembled the savage child-ruled society in Golding's Lord of the Flies—had also concluded that the battle to educate and the battle against barbarism were deeply integrated phenomena, I eventually found the most eloquent expression of that integration in the writings of Jacques Barzun. In discussing the abandoned and orphaned children who were discovered after great societal catastrophes, roaming in wild packs, even walking on all fours and grunting like beasts, he said, “The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human, they are made so.” That formulation was to be permanently emblazoned on my private banner as a teacher and, 20 years after I had begun my educational journey, as a principal.
For the record, neither Jacques Barzun nor I literally mean that educators bear the entire burden of the “humanization” of the young. In all societies, the process of teaching the young is undertaken by a group of interlocking systems and institutions. Children are instructed in the virtues and vices praised and condemned by their societies, and these ideas and values are further enforced by an organized system of rewards and penalties. While a “culture” encompasses vastly more, this is the minimum glue that holds a social fabric together and that creates “humans” in a society's desired image.
The challenge of such acculturation is complex in the pluralistic United States. Members of our society vary dramatically in professional and economic status, familial composition and education, religion, race, ethnic background, language, and, frequently, value systems. For the professional educator, the primary challenge is to create a minimum shared value system and ethical culture that can permit the educational process to function.
The magnitude of that challenge varies enormously with the size and heterogeneity of a student population. The most complex problem is to be found in the completely mixed demographic situation. Here the educator—facing American pluralism in all its socioeconomic variety—must attempt to unify the almost ununifiable. That is the situation I faced.
Chaos Control
In 1985, I was named principal of James P.B. Duffy School No. 12, an elementary school in Rochester, New York. Five years later, I was honored by local, state, and federal institutions, agencies, and professional groups, and I was one of those recognized at the White House for creating a model American school.
James P.B. Duffy School No. 12 is the epitome of a “mixed” demographic population. The students, who number more than 950—far more than the population of many American towns—come from every corner of a complex industrialized city and emerge from the usual subcultures. Between 65 and 70 percent are minorities, and 68 percent of our students fall below the poverty level. A significant group—25 percent of our classes—are emotionally disturbed and learning disabled. Half of the population arrives in buses.
School No. 12's academic problems embodied the universal list of scholastic calamities Americans read about in the press. Performance in reading, written composition, and math were mediocre at best. Students were devastated by even the most minimal challenges in science. As for “social studies,” few could identify the city or state in which they lived, none could name any other than the current President, nor could they explain the significance of any national holiday. Reference skills were nonexistent: students were unable to differentiate among a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and an atlas. A high percentage of students were repeating grades or had to be passed on despite their ineptitude because by state regulation they were too old to “repeat.”
Violence, too, punctuated the school day. Older children occasionally terrorized younger ones, sometimes extorting money from them. There were daily outbreaks of fist-fighting. Students conspired with older brothers to bring bicycles to school at dismissal time so that they could run down supervising adults. Ethnic and racial groups locked horns at every opportunity. Emotionally handicapped students were in constant anarchy: they threw food, overturned furniture, and ran wildly through the building tearing displays off the walls and knocking down people during their rampages.
In the face of these outbreaks, teachers reacted in different ways. Some, who had frozen into passivity, did nothing to control the problems and neglected any available preventive measures. Others became petty tyrants, harassing children with abusive lectures or insisting on formal public apologies following misdemeanors. Some teachers expressed their anger in physical forms: one teacher tipped over the desks of 2nd graders if their contents were not organized in a prescribed way; another assigned, as punishment for misconduct, the performance of 100 push-ups. Some fought violence with violence: One teacher threw a pail of water over squabbling 9-year-olds as if they were fighting dogs. While there were no instances of outright battery by teachers, neglect and retaliatory actions were sufficient to keep the faculty in a state of chronic agitation and to breed angry gossip about peers.
Suspension of the Suspension Policy
In this disastrous situation, what solutions were invoked? Essentially the same two that were invoked when I was a student teacher more than 25 years earlier: (1) temporary extraction of the misbehaving student from the classroom by the principal for a few hours, and (2) suspension of the student from the school for one to five days.
In my first year as principal, I had suspended students 106 times. Had I acceded to all teacher requests, it would have been 300. A quarter of a century had passed; the world had been scientifically, technologically, culturally, and geopolitically revolutionized—but not one new idea had emerged in the world of education to deal with the disruptive “Codys.” As I analyzed the problems in the 950-citizen “town” of which I had become mayor and police chief—with delusions of being an educator—I realized that it had verged on the miraculous that anyone, including the most diligent students, had learned anything at all.
Long before I had an alternative to propose, it was clear that suspension did not work. The fact was that teachers defensively rationalized a system that no longer worked. Crippled by the apparently unsolvable problem, they relied on suspension like a crutch. But, in the course of observing our dependency on the failed “solution,” I reached one conclusion: neither they nor I would be free to think creatively about a new strategy unless the pseudo-solution were abandoned. So, one year after my principalship began, I informed the staff that I would no longer suspend students and demanded that they propose alternative modes of discipline.
This act of apparent psychological brutality worked. For almost two intensely disagreeable months, the majority of teachers responded with everything from sullen silence and secretive gossip to overt grumbling and hostility. I was sustained, however, by the knowledge that a minority understood. A sturdy nucleus of allies, willing to engage in fresh thinking, emerged.
The Rescue Operation
A progression of committee meetings ensued over several months. Needless to say, “group thought” is disorderly, but from the confusion three themes emerged. The first might be called the “rescue operation.” If children were not to be expelled from the classroom unless dangerous to themselves or others, we had to rescue teachers from classroom disruption and from their own confrontational behavior. Our goal was to provide all teachers with the wisdom and self-restraint that had characterized the very best teachers all along, and our strategy was a support group.
The Climate Committee was composed of 8–10 teacher volunteers, at least one administrator, and a few parents who could be called on short notice. The group's first duty was to serve as an informal “court” where conflicts could be resolved rationally outside of the classroom. In cases brought before the committee, neither the teacher nor the student were automatically assumed to be right or wrong. The committee, after listening to both sides, decided on the consequences. More often than not, the student was found culpable, but it was not unheard of for a teacher to be told in carefully couched language that the incident might have been handled in a better way.
The results were so reassuring that the Climate Committee soon became a standard feature of school life. The degree of enthusiasm of its members is best captured by the fact that they were ready to meet before or after school at a moment's notice or, if necessary, to move en masse to a student's home.
Our Ten Commandments
Second, we sought to escape the confusion that invariably occurs when directives are left to individual interpretation. We outlined our new procedures in writing and issued them to all staff members. Curiously, although there was little question in any teacher's mind about the types of misconduct that make teaching nightmarish, it was extraordinarily difficult to express rules in a simple, coherent fashion. We wrote, amended, and rewrote the rules over a period of three years, and only recently have we been satisfied with them.
The reason for the difficulty lay in a taboo against “authoritarianism,” which had been pounded into the heads of a generation of teachers. We had all been taught that it was an act of tyranny to say “thou shall not.” Good pedagogy required “positive” expressions. Since it is impossible to say “Don't fight,” “Don't swear,” or “Don't bring weapons to school” in a positive fashion, we continually ended up with lists of soothing bromides about good fellowship, which no one took seriously.
- No weapons—real or toy (first offense to committee).
- No pushing, tripping, hitting, or fighting.
- No swearing.
- No threatening.
- No insulting others.
- Stay where adults are in charge.
- No class disruption or refusal to follow adult direction.
- Respect things that belong to others (no stealing, extorting, destroying).
- Do not touch fire alarms; do not bring matches.
- No alcoholic beverages, drugs, or cigarettes.
It had taken 70 adult American educators three years to develop the nerve to say “No!” The heavens did not split asunder.
- At the first infraction, the teacher counsels the student and informs a parent.
- On the second infraction, the teacher hand delivers (to me) a referral to the Climate Committee.
- A date is set usually within 24 hours for parent, child, and teacher to appear at a hearing.
After a handful of experiences, the staff realized that the hearing system could actually be imposed on students and, above all, on their parents. It had not required armed guards or the police. It had only required strong moral purpose, dedication to education itself—and a single warning. Should a parent resist attendance at a hearing, he or she was to be told, “Your child will not return to the classroom until you participate.”
We had all underestimated the desire of parents for the education of their children and their understanding that this could only be achieved within a simple moral framework. It was not only middle-class parents who responded; even those parents who were assumed to be unreachable—the “uncaring mother,” “the father on drugs”—pulled themselves together and showed up. The power of our “ten commandments” was profound. We had tapped into the root system of traditional American values.
By the same token, our system of punishments was remarkably efficacious. Since this was an elementary school, and infractions were seldom criminal matters, our punishments consisted of reparations. A child who ripped up a stack of class compositions had the task of reproducing every one. Two children who fought in the lunchroom were afforded the pleasure of each other's company for a month of lunches in a private, supervised place. After all the girding of loins, the great moral revolution at School 12 was anticlimactic. Its purposes and values had been built into almost every home in the land. It was only the educators, guided by several generations of educational theorists, who had not known it.
A System of Rewards
- Once a week, exemplary conduct wins a reward from the teacher in every classroom—for example, watching a short movie on Friday afternoon.
- Three sequential weeks of good behavior are rewarded with an enjoyable schoolwide activity such as a full-length movie with popcorn.
- Any child receiving an A in citizenship (good conduct) on a report card is awarded a Good Citizen Badge, which brings with it special privileges. (Holding on to one's badge was deemed so desirable that some good citizens were guilty of unpinning theirs during lunchtime so that they could revel in a few rowdy moments.)
- The child who receives an A in citizenship on four successive report cards attends a Good Citizens' Banquet in June, where children are treated to a spaghetti dinner with brownies for dessert—served to them ceremoniously by the staff.
With the institution of this system of rewards, a fever of good conduct broke out in our school. This happy result came as a surprise to most staff. In fact, many had felt it was improperly competitive and violated the principle of equality by ranking some children as better citizens than others. We were unprepared for the notion that strong incentives combined with strong disincentives could dramatically influence children's behavior and win the ardent cooperation of parents.
A Blue-Ribbon School
Teachers changed. Passivity and bitterness were replaced by enthusiastic participation. Even in this large urban setting, we were able to individualize our responses to behavior problems. Students changed: They wished to be “good citizens,” they wished to avoid hearings for misbehavior, they were eager for rewards, and they acquired a greater capacity for self-discipline. Parents changed as well. Before we had an ethical culture in the school, many parents couldn't be reached by phone and refused to come to school. Some berated teachers and administrators and rationalized the misbehavior of their children. After a system of shared ethics culture was created, most parents participated gladly in reinforcing it.
Eventually, the disciplinary problems that had so tormented us shriveled to a negligible size. There are only occasional breaches of conduct—on an average, fewer than one disciplinary hearing a week and a few suspensions a year. As a result, the quality of teaching and academic performance has risen. In 1989–90, state test results were the best they had ever been: between 94 and 99 percent of children performed above the state reference point in reading, math, and written composition. Staff now spend more time on reform and renewal. Administrators are free to do the more fruitful work of planning, communicating, and coordinating. Finally, we have been named a “Blue Ribbon School.”
I am asked incessantly, “How did you do it? The truth is that we at School 12 faced the fact that we had forgotten what our forbearers of 50 years ago knew so well: that one of our most crucial missions is the civilizing process itself, that this historic professional mission had been eliminated from our intellectual repertoire, and that we had to reinvent the wheel.
Educators must understand that the solutions to their problems will not be found in sources external to themselves but, rather, inside their own heads. That is where we, at School 12, found the answers—and so can they.
