Copyright 2000 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
Chicago
Sun-Times
June 17, 2000, SATURDAY, Late
Sports Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 768 words
HEADLINE:
Federal role has harmed schools
BYLINE: George Will
BODY:
The contest between Al Gore and George Bush
for the office of national school superintendent means Washington will expand
its role in education.
Until the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965, the federal government had essentially
nothing -- certainly nothing essential -- to do with
elementary and secondary education. Today the federal
government supplies only 7 percent of the money spent on such education, but 7
percent of $ 313.1 billion is a large lever for moving state and local education
policies in directions that Washington favors. And money is not the full measure
of the national government's impact on education. Consider school discipline.
Last month, Al Gore endorsed a good idea, "alternative educational
settings" -- special "second chance schools" -- for children
expelled from schools for disciplinary reasons. However, one reason such schools
are needed is that the federal government has complicated the task of
maintaining school discipline. To understand how this happened, see "Who Killed
School Discipline?" by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal, published by the
Manhattan Institute.
Because schools reflect the families from which the
pupils come, school discipline was bound to worsen as more broken families
resulted in more troubled or badly reared children. And maintaining order was
bound to become more difficult as popular culture became a sensory blitzkrieg of
promptings to sexual and other self-assertions by adolescents. However,
government has made matters worse.
In 1969, the Supreme Court held that
a school violated five students' constitutional rights when it suspended them
for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. Thus did matters of
school discipline become federal cases. Thereafter, a principal who confronted,
say, a student wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with "WHITE POWER" or with a
swastika had to construe the Constitution.
In 1975, in a case concerning
students suspended for fighting, the court expanded students' due process
rights, holding that students have a property right to their education. So
lawyers and judges were pulled even deeper into school discipline procedures,
presiding over -- at a minimum -- elaborate hearings with
witnesses. Designed to make schools more "fair" and "responsive," such
decisions, Hymowitz writes, made school administrators act defensively and look
legalistic and obtuse:
"When a New York City high school student came to
school with a metal-spiked ball whose sole purpose could only be to maim
classmates, he wasn't suspended: Metal-spiked balls weren't on the
superintendent's detailed list of proscribed weapons. Suspend him and he might
sue you.
"Worse, the influence of lawyers over school discipline means
that educators speak to children in an unrecognizable language, far removed from
the straight talk about right and wrong that most children crave."
What
also lies behind it is the therapeutic impulse.
In 1975, Congress passed
the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which requires schools to
provide disabled children an "appropriate" education, within regular classrooms
whenever possible. The act addressed real needs of many mentally and physically
handicapped students. But since, and partly because of, the passage of the act
there has been, as Hymowitz says, an explosive growth in the number of children
classified under vague disability categories.
Part of the legal
definition of emotional disturbance is "an inability to build or maintain
satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers." So children
who are unruly, for whatever reason, can claim -- and litigate
for -- protected status within schools that, before 1975, would have
had a freer hand to expel them.
The IDEA arrived just as society was
becoming suffused with the therapeutic impulse, which de-emphasizes free will
and moral responsibility, and postulates social or physiological causes of
behavior. This engenders a search for pharmacological treatments, or such
therapeutic "remedies" as role-playing games, breathing exercises and learning
to "identify feelings" and "manage anger." What Hymowitz calls "the skittish
avoidance of moral language" by the therapeutically inclined indicates an
enthusiasm for behavioral techniques and an aversion to "inducting children into
moral consciousness."
If school Supt. Gore or Bush wants school
discipline that arises from a moral environment that socializes children, he
should consider how schools stopped being moral communities and became cockpits
for lawyers and playgrounds for therapists.
LOAD-DATE:
June 21, 2000