Discipline in private and public schools
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Grinch oldna...@mindspring.com
New York Times, 5/8/2001 Not Apples and Oranges but Mandarins
-- by John Tierney Whenever I compare the New York public school system with its largest rival, the Roman Catholic system, readers pelt me with apples and oranges. The two systems shouldn't be compared, they say, because the Catholic schools have unfair advantages. One favorite complaint is that the Catholic schools dump problem students back into the public system.
That complaint sounds plausible enough, since the Catholic schools are more free to get rid of students, either by formally expelling them or by informally persuading parents to look for another school. But are students at Catholic schools really more likely to get the boot?
No, according to a rigorous new study showing that private schools are, if anything, less likely to get rid of students than are public schools. In fact, the study found that public schools seem to have stricter disciplinary rules.
The new study involves students in public schools who entered a lottery open to low-income families across America that was run two years ago by a New York charity, the Children's Scholarship Fund. The typical winner used the grant to attend a private school with tuition of less than $3,000, most often a Catholic school.
Researchers at Harvard University compare the scholarship winners with a demographically similar control group: the lottery losers who remained in public school. At the end of the first school year, more than 3,000 students and parents in both groups were interviewed.
The private-school parents gave their children's new school an average grade of A-minus, while the public-school parents gave theirs only a C-plus. The students and parents reported much less fighting and cl***room disruptive behavior at the private schools, but not because troublemakers were being booted.
The private-school students were no more likely than the public-school students to be suspended or expelled. (The rates of suspension and expulsion were lower in the private schools, although not enough to be statistically significant.) Nor was there evidence of students being informally asked to leave: the private-school students were no more likely to switch schools than were the public-school students.
What kept order in private schools? Not codes of conduct. Only 15 percent of the private-school students said there were strict rules for behavior at their schools, while 93 percent of public-school students reported strict rules.
"The rules at public schools seem to hamstring teachers and principals," said a co-author of the study, Paul E. Peterson, a political scientist at Harvard. "Parents are unhappy with public schools because they feel their children are treated as cogs in a wheel instead of as individuals. The private schools don't automatically suspend a kid who breaks a rule; the teacher will talk to the student and parent to figure out what's wrong." You can see the contrast clearly in New York City, whose public schools are governed by the Citywide Standards of Conduct and Uniform Disciplinary Measures, a code that cl***ifies 37 varieties of infractions according to "level of severity" between one and eight, with punishments mandated for each level. There are further adjustments made for the age of the student.
Thus, a fifth-grader who is guilty of "committing arson or causing a riot" (infraction No. 29) merits a punishment at Level 5 or 6, which could mean "restitution" or a 30-day suspension. But a sixth-grade arsonist or rioter can merit a Level 7 sentence, which means an automatic one-year suspension and transfer to another school.
The New York Catholic school system, by contrast, does not dictate any punishment for arson. There is no centralized code of conduct. "We ***ume we don't have to tell everyone that students can't burn down the school," said Nora Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Catholic system.
"Discipline is left to the discretion of the teachers and principal in each school." Public-school officials aren't entirely to blame for their mandarin rules. Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy has been trying to make them more flexible, but he's constrained by legislators and bureaucrats in Albany. "State law requires a more detailed conduct code than I would prefer," Mr. Levy said.
But his quandary illustrates a failing of the public system that can't be cured with money or by blaming the students. The public schools' chief disadvantage against Catholic schools isn't that they're stuck with the problem students. Their basic problem is that they're accountable to politicians instead of parents.
Anonymous anonym...@anonymous.anonymous
Another factor maybe the student to teacher ratio is higher for public schools than private schools.
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racquet ...@hvc.rr.com
Issue in point: Catholic schools can remove troublesome students and return them to public schools.
Issue now changed to the frequency at which a student in the general school population is likely to be removed from a Catholic school relative to a public school - A totally different issue.
Ok, this is shaping up all right so far..
Which isn't related to the original issue, nor the revised issue..
Somehow we got back to the original issue.. That's good, and the study seems to indicate that there was no difference in suspensions and repulsions.
Yep, strick rules rigorously enforced would, no doubt, help. Undoubtably.. The issue then becomes: Why were the rules gutted in the FIRST place, and the answer is the courts, which ultimately means the citizens whose servants the courts are.
The teacher talking to the student, the counsellors talking to the student, the aministration talking to the student, is STANDARD operating procedure. It's called due process, and REQUIRED by any district which would like to avoid lawsuits (read ALL). This compalint doesn't hold water.
Instituted, no doubt, after suits of unequal treatment brought by parents of kids punished more severely for what the parents viewed as the same offense. All subjectivity was removed from punishment because it represents unequal treatment which our legal system frowns on.
And since people signed on to this when they agreed to attend, there's no grounds for complaint. IOW, the situations are different, and the private schools DO have an advantage in this regard. One public schools will never be allowed.
Yep.
Politicians do what the public says it wants - period. When enough of the public changes its mind, then so too will the politicians.
Nothing operates in a vacuum.
Joni J Rathbun jrath...@orednet.org
The average is generally lower for public schools than for private schools. Didn't use to be true but it today.
But I want to know how many Catholic schools do not expell students who attempt to burn down the school.
mwi ...@merle.acns.nwu.edu (Mark Patrick Witte)
But note that the strict rules were present in the public schools, not the private ones.
The rules were gutted? It would seem that Peterson is saying that the rules are in force in the public schools.
A given public school cannot remove a student to a disciplinary institution for cause?
racquet ...@hvc.rr.com
Depends on your definition of strict.. Private schools do not tolerate bad behavior at all. Public schools have to. I consider the "rules" stricter for private schools. You choose to define "strict" as being explicitly stated and/or inflexible. The two are not the same.
He's mistaken. He's operating from one point of view and ignoring the other to justify his point of view. Surely he would not accept a system in which there were NO rules (the obvious opposite)?
Well let's see.. Barring an attempt to blow up the school, a student is counselled, perhaps held for detention, given inschool suspension, 3-5 days suspension, alternative schooling (if available), put on home teaching (with due process), and then MAYBE expelled (which means the kid becomes someone else's problem since he can't be denied an education). A private school simply boots him out at any point it wishes.
"susupply" susup...@mindspring.com
Professor Witte's habit of using words strictly according to definition will always get him into hot water with the misc.educationists.
[snip] Why not?
As Dr. Bob Hartley said to Mrs. Bakerman: Why don't you go with that.
For just a few examples that pop all the strings in this racquet: http://www.crossroad.to/text/articles/zerotol.html <<-----------------------------------------------------------------
Should Twana Dawson, a Pensacola, Florida high school sophomore, be expelled for bringing a nail clipper to school? Her principal, Norm Ross, seems to think so, even though Twana intended no wrong. Nor did she realize that the small knife attached to the clipper - which she used to clean her nails -
would violate the school's Zero Tolerance policy. (WND, 6-7-99) But the lack of "intent" doesn't stop today's self-proclaimed social engineers from pursuing their goals. Remember, the nationwide Zero Tolerance policy began long before Mr. Ross used the violence in Littleton as his excuse for the harsh penalty. Our government has been using each new eruption of violence to win public consent for its unjust policies, just as it uses comp***ion for the mentally ill as a rationale for its m***ive system for monitoring and managing the "mental health of the population."1 Both programs, mental health and zero tolerance, are vital parts of a far more insidious program of intimidation, control, and cultural transformation. While the process began decades ago, the pieces are finally fitting into place. And, as Raymond Houghton, Professor of Secondary Education at Rhode Island College, predicted almost three decades ago, few Americans know what is happening.
"...absolute behavior control is imminent.... The critical point of behavior control, in effect, is sneaking up on mankind without his self-conscious realization that a crisis is at hand. Man will... never self-consciously know that it has happened." PREPOSTEROUS PENALTIES FOR GOOD KIDS John Turner couldn't understand what had happened to him. The twelve-year-old honor student was arrested during a school recess, handcuffed, taken to juvenile hall, fingerprinted, and forbidden to call his mother. He had to sign a $250 bond and may face steeper punishment along with a lifelong police blot on his personal computerized data file "if found guilty".
What could a good sixth grader do to deserve such bad treatment?
"He hit back," says his mother, Alyne Turner.
In 1997, during a January cold spell in Louisiana, the students at his elementary school were kept inside during recess. "Another student began picking on John, calling him names," says Mrs. Turner. John responded to the intimidation by telling his adversary that he must be stupid if he thought those insulting words were true.
The other boy hit him in the face. It hurt-especially since John was wearing braces. John reacted and hit back. The other students agreed that John had been provoked.
But that didn't matter. There was "a fight" and John had participated. He had failed to follow the prescribed steps toward "conflict resolution". By suggesting that the other boy was "stupid", he failed to "respect" his tormentor. He had broken the ground rules for the politically correct peace-making process which demands a standard of self-restraint that would disqualify most adults.
John's school Like Twana, a straight-A student in San Jose, California was expelled for bringing a finger-nail clipper to school. Amber Nash, a high school honor student in Gobles, Michigan, brought a knife to school to cut a friend's brithday brownies. She was suspended for ten days.
In Alexandria, Louisiana, eight-year old honor student Kameryan Lueng brought a family heirloom to her second-grade cl***. She didn't realize that the little knife attached to the chain of her grandfather's gold-plated old pocket watch would violate the "zero tolerance" policy. Her punishment was suspension from school and remediation at Redirection Academy.
"They were studying Colonial times, and Kameryan thought her teacher would be interested in seeing something old," said her mother, Cheryl Lueng.
"Kameryan cried when I told her she couldn't go back to her school on Monday. She feels like a criminal."3 How can schools justify their harsh punishment when their victims intend no wrong? And why do most of the victims seem to be honor students and high achievers?
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