Copyright 2000 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
The
Plain Dealer
June 15, 2000 Thursday, FINAL / ALL
SECTION: EDITORIALS & FORUM; Pg. 13B
LENGTH: 846 words
HEADLINE:
COURTS HELPED KILL SCHOOL DISCIPLINE
BYLINE: By GEORGE 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, 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 world view 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, 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, 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.
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. "
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