Teaching Interrupted
Do Discipline Policies in Today's Public Schools Foster the Common Good?
05/10/2004
Teachers and parents say too many students are losing critical opportunities for learning -- and too many teachers are leaving the profession -- because of the behavior of a few persistent classroom troublemakers. Teachers in particular complain about the growing willingness of some students and parents to challenge teacher judgment and threaten legal action. But both teachers and parents support a variety of remedies, including stricter enforcement of existing rules of conduct, alternative schools for chronically disruptive students and limiting parents' ability to sue schools over disciplinary decisions. Prepared with support from Common Good. Available for free download only in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.
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Today's new crop of administrators punish teachers who try to report or remove persistent troublemakers in the classroom. Substitute teachers are fired over this. And, a substitute teacher who is assaulted by one of these students can count on being fired immediately for reporting it. I know because the Garfiled High School principal got me fired for this reason.
AS a former faculty member of Garfield High School, I was have to ask; what happened that made a student assault you? I was never once threatened by students at Garfield, neither my own, of those whose classes I covered as a sub. Nor did I encounter persistent troblemakers that I, as the trained professional, could not turn around. During my time at Garfield, I saw how poorly and disrespectfully many subsitutes treated students, not to mention not implementing the lesson plans I had left. Perhaps you should consider a career that doesn't involve students, get more training and think about how you may have contributed to that behavior before blaming others.
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