Copyright 2000 P.G. Publishing Co.
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
June 19, 2000, Monday, SOONER EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. A-11
LENGTH: 871 words
HEADLINE:
U.S. SCHOOLHOUSE;
WHEN SCHOOL DISCIPLINE BECAME A FEDERAL CASE, THE DECLINE
BEGAN
BYLINE: GEORGE F. WILL
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
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. The court said students do not shed their free speech
rights "at the schoolhouse gate" and schools cannot be "enclaves of
totalitarianism."
Thus did important 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. Could the principal prove that the behavior was "significantly
disruptive"? Did he want to litigate the question?
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, writes Hymowitz, 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 for being arbitrary and
capricious.
"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.
... Students correctly sense that what lies behind such desiccated language is
not a moral worldview and a concern for their well-being and character but fear
of lawsuits."
What also lies behind it is the therapeutic impulse.
In 1975 Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act (IDEA), which requires schools to provide disabled
children an "appropriate" education, within regular classrooms whenever that is
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 such as "learning disability" and
"emotional disturbance."
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 Superintendent
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.
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post.
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