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 
