Let's Design a School 4.1
Dealing With Troublemakers
Some of the feedback that I’ve gotten on this new school system centers around a single topic - what should the school do with troublemakers?
Keep in mind that the current school system doesn’t do a great job with these students either - we’re not trying to beat a high bar.
Categories of Troublemaker
When I use the word ‘troublemaker’, I mean someone that causes trouble to the school system I’ve designed. A student could be a troublemaker if they sold drugs on school grounds, disrupted active classes, bullied other students, etc.
Let’s begin by dividing these troublemakers into several categories:
Active lawbreakers
Very special needs
Defectors
Each of these categories will be addressed differently; we’ll cover the two easy ones first.
Active Lawbreakers
If a student is actively breaking the law on school grounds, that sounds like a police issue to me. I freely admit I don’t understand the relevant law very well, but I suspect it’s illegal for minors to sell just about any kind of drug, so all drug-dealing falls into this category.
So if students, adult supervisors, or other staff see a student selling drugs on school grounds, they can call the police, who can take it from there. The same applies to active violence.
In general, it’s the local police department’s responsibility to keep people physically safe, not the school’s. If there’s a constant risk of active violence (students in rival gangs, etc.), then it might not be a bad idea to station a local police officer at the school on a regular basis.
Very Special Needs
While our school will have some capacity to help children with special needs, that capacity is not - nor should it be - infinite.
Thus, some children will have needs that the school cannot answer. In the current American education system, there are ‘schools’ devoted to handling these children, and I imagine in my system there would have to be as well. I consider a full analysis of how that would work beyond the scope of this post.
Defectors
These are the thorny problems.
What do you do about the children that are - if you’ll excuse the misuse of clinical terminology - little psychopaths?
And they exist. Not just children with antisocial personality disorders, but children who are mean and cruel and sadistic for no reason at all.
(As for the children who do have reason to be those things, the hope is that they’d see the school guidance counselor/social worker and have those problems addressed, after which they’d stop being mean and cruel and sadistic.)
To be clear: I don’t have a magic solution to human cruelty in my back pocket. This is a hard problem for a lot of reasons, and no approach will work perfectly or all the time. In the end, we just have to try our best, and be willing to improve where we can.
We can’t just ignore these problems, though: ignoring bullies simply lets them victimize whoever they want to, so that’s not an option.
So what can we do about the defectors - students/children who deliberately hurt others, or are otherwise disruptive simply because they can be or want to be?
Solving the Problem
Broadly speaking, our schools have an existing infrastructure of counselors and social workers whose job it is to see to the physical and mental well-being of the students. If a student is being bullied or otherwise victimized by other students, they should go to a counselor/social worker that they trust and bring it up.
That adult would then begin a case file, to which other incidents could be added. If applicable, the victim and the bully’s parents could be involved.
Ultimately, though, what really matters are the consequences.
What can a disruptive or cruel student be threatened with, to make them stop the behavior?
(Remember, we’re talking about cases where we’ve already offered all the help and rehabilitation we reasonably can, and it hasn’t worked.)
Current System
In the current system, there are three punishments that I’m aware of: detention, suspension, and expulsion.
Aside from the last, I don’t think they accomplish a whole lot.
The idea behind detention, as I understand it, is punishment through boredom: make the student sit in a room for an hour doing nothing, or writing lines, or whatever. Some innocuous but boring task. This kind of boredom can be deeply unpleasant, sure, but it’s inconsistent, only matters if you get caught, and ultimately not that bad.
Additionally, detention is meant to be punitive - to control future behavior through fear of punishment and achieve justice through retribution. For controlling future behavior, students that fear getting detention aren’t usually the same as the students out being cruel to others for no reason. For achieving justice through retribution, well, it’s not useless or meaningless but we want to try to do better than that.
Suspension, for those that don’t care about their future or education, is a vacation, and thoroughly useless.
Expulsion solves the problems the student causes in the school by forcing them to go to a different school, where they are also likely to cause problems.
So what can we do differently?
New System
Forget detention and suspension. I don’t think they’re useful disciplinary tools, and I don’t think they function as preventatives for the students who need to be prevented from hurting other students or impairing other students’ ability to learn.
Broadly speaking, our school system has the infrastructure in place to care for its students, in a way that the existing system doesn’t. The current school system traps all its students together in a building for half a day, five days a week, and expects them all to sit still and orderly in a classroom for most of that time.
This is not a healthy expectation for children, and I expect a lot of abusive and disruptive behavior comes from the fact that they’re stuck.
In our system, a student is under no obligation to remain in any particular place; depending on the age of the student, they’re not even necessarily obligated to remain on school grounds at any particular time. If they want to leave, they can. If they don’t want to be in a classroom, they don’t have to be.
For most students, most of the time, this (combined with the counselors and social workers) ought to be enough to handle general misbehavior.
As for the defectors - students who are willfully harmful to other students, which is the only remaining category - a case would be built for them. Each incident would be logged in their case file, and their parents would be involved if possible. The student would be made aware at each incident that their behavior is not acceptable, and offered help, resources, and care to (hopefully) prevent reoccurrence.
Once a case file reaches a certain point - this point is difficult to define, but a majority vote of school staff could be a deciding factor - the student would be expelled. Expelled students would be banned from that school’s premises, and they would have to attend a different school.
At the next school, their case file would indicate that they’d been expelled from another school, but otherwise I think they should have a clean slate.
Expulsion (Three Strikes)
We (as a society) consider primary and secondary education - k-12 - to be a right. The government pays for every child to receive that education.
That being said, I believe that rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. The right to freedom of religion implies the responsibility to not deny others their worship; the right to freedom of assembly implies the responsibility to assemble peacefully. And so on.
Which is to say: if someone is not upholding the associated responsibility, we take away the right.
I therefore suggest: if a student is expelled three times, then after the third expulsion they have forfeited their right to a primary and secondary education. To be clear: they can still pay for it, but they have to foot the bill entirely, and they cannot attend a public school. The state (society) has no more responsibility when it comes to their education.
Keep in mind that it would take a lot to get expelled three times in the new school system: it shouldn’t be an accident or coincidence, nor should it be because of failing grades or lack of attendance. Students are expelled because they are substantially damaging other students’ safety and/or ability to learn.
He Said, She Said
One of the big problems with adjudicating schoolyard disputes is that children lie, and there’s often not a good way to determine what actually happened. It comes down to accusations after the fact.
Our adult supervisors ought to help with this - their purpose is literally keeping an eye on things, so they ought to be able to weigh in when something happens.
Many current schools have adopted the policy of simply punishing everyone involved in an incident - victim and perpetrator, especially when it isn’t clear which student is which. I find this to be lazy, bureaucratic, and morally offensive. It teaches students that the administration isn’t there to help them, doesn’t want to deal with their shit, and doesn’t care about justice.
Not the sort of lesson (or the sort of administration) I’d want children exposed to.
Instead, the students should be separated, asked for their timeline of events, and then the two timelines can be compared with any available evidence to see which is the most likely by one or more school officials. Repeated cases will build evidence of a feud or bullying campaign, justifying larger interventions.
Conclusion
The system I suggest isn’t perfect. No system is.
Unless we monitor students with video and audio 100% of the time, there will be problems, especially with assigning responsibility and blame - and I think such monitoring is unjustifiable.
That being said, I think the system of expulsion I outline above gives us most of what we want. For students expelled unjustly, they have a fresh start at a new school to take advantage of. For consummate defectors, they will have plenty of chances to change their ways, but if they fail to take any of them eventually they’ll be removed from the system as a whole.
If anything, I worry that the system errs on the side of too much mercy. To correct this, we might mandate that, past a certain threshold of incidents or actions, schools must expel their worst troublemaker at the end of each school year. That is to say, schools are required to expel one student past the threshold per year. If they have no students past the threshold, great! If they have multiple students past the threshold, only the worst must be expelled (they could expel others as well, but don’t have to).
I think that strikes a good balance, and prevents a student from consistently toeing the line with expulsion year after year.
What do you think?