Iowa debates whether to disallow the use of chokeholds in public schools. (Wikipedia provides a handy list of common chokeholds, including the anaconda choke and gogoplata.)

The often educational Sherman Dorn believes that this recounting betrays an ahistorical mindset because “the early 1970s [were] a time when everyone was complaining about the misbehavior and immorality of youth.” If the topic of discussion were the state of the nation overall, he would be right. Rates of teen pregnancy were far higher in the early 1970s than they are today (although, teen pregnancy rates kept rising throughout the 70s and 80s). But the caller in question referred only to Douglass High School, and his claim that Douglass was a far better school in the early 70s than it is today seems to be corroborated by the HBO documentary. At the very least, it wasn’t then the undisciplined free-for-all that it was in 2004-2005.

Talk radio is always interesting—it can be hard to get a word in edgewise! But the callers can sometimes bring clarity. Certainly that was the case today when one gentleman, a Douglass High School alumnus, called in to say that when he was enrolled, in the early 1970s, bad behavior and teen pregnancy were actively stigmatized. Now, he pointed out, bad behavior goes unpunished and schools open up daycare centers next to the cafeteria. It is not incorrect to note that misguided policies share some of the blame for this shift, nor is it incorrect to note that such accommodations have probably incentivized undesirable outcomes.

Thanks to a friend for sending this mind-boggling Palm Beach Post article:

PORT ST. LUCIE—A 5-year-old kindergartner was “voted out of” his classroom at Morningside Elementary on Wednesday when his teacher asked his classmates to take a vote on whether they wanted him in class, police say.

Teacher Wendy Portillo told the boy, who is known to have disciplinary issues, to stand in front of the class that day, according to police.

“The teacher decided to bring him in front of the class and let the other kids tell him what they didn’t like about him, kind of ridiculed him,” said officer Michelle Steele, spokeswoman for the Port St. Lucie police.

Portillo then had the class take a vote on whether to boot the boy out of the class and send him to the principal’s office.

The class voted 14-2 to send the boy out for the day, Steele said.

Yes, this teacher should stop watching so much Survivor. Maybe she should even be fired. But should the teacher face criminal charges?

After conferring with the state attorney’s office, which said the case didn’t meet the criteria for an emotional abuse case, police are not pursuing this as a criminal incident, Steele said.

After conferring with the state’s attorney office? Doesn’t our criminal justice have enough to do? You know, fighting crime?

We know that the best schools “sweat the small stuff”; they do not overlook untucked shirts, they do not permit poor posture, they do not deign to hold different students to different standards of discipline.

Instead of following that model, schools in Anne Arundel County are taking the opposite approach—i.e., “training staff in how to work with people of different backgrounds....” Consider these alarming sentences:

Teachers and administrators may misinterpret the body language and occasional confrontational behavior that some African-Americans learn in their neighborhoods and use at school as a way of standing up for themselves, veteran educators say. They will often back down if they’re made to feel safe.

Ella White Campbell reinforced such sentiments by telling the Baltimore Sun, “Being rude means one thing to you and another thing to me.”

Of course, being rude generally means one thing to employers, which is that he who is rude is not hired. Anne Arundel County wants to lower its rates of suspension of black pupils—rates that, according to the NAACP, indicate “discriminatory treatment.” The true discrimination, the soft-bigotry of low-expectations bit, is Anne Arundel’s new position of pretending that black children should be held to different standards of discipline than should non-black children.

New Jersey education officials have admitted that an African-American vice principal inappropriately punished 15 Hispanic elementary students in Camden. The principal forced the students in a fifth-grade bilingual class to spend a week eating their lunches while sitting on the gymnasium floor. This was “punishment” for behavioral problems in class.

Parents and activists claimed that the incident was another example of racism directed against Hispanics. State education officials, however, in a report released this week refute those allegations. Although the principal’s actions were insulting and demeaning to the students, the report says they were not biased because similar punishments have been meted out to non-Hispanics.

Prejudice is not the issue; common sense—or the lack of it—is. I’m all for greater principal autonomy. I’m also for stricter discipline in the classroom. If students are disrupting a school’s learning environment, they should be punished—and quite severely. Our schools have become way too lax in maintaining proper and respectful student behavior. But this principal’s actions are beyond the pale. Besides hygiene considerations (eating off a floor is a sure way to contract unhealthy bacteria and germs), the punishment was degrading. These kids are not animals, and they should not be treated as such.

Whatever happened to principals notifying parents of students’ disruptive, unruly behavior? If that doesn’t do the trick, there are other tried-and-true measures, such as after-school detention, suspension, or if the students are especially bad, expulsion. In short, there are many effective ways to enforce discipline and order without resorting to barbaric humiliation. This principal, whose name has not been released to the press, should be reprimanded, and told clearly and unequivocally that such practices are unacceptable.

Speaking of legal issues in schools.... According to Education Week:

A federal appeals court has ordered an Illinois school district to allow a student to wear a T-shirt proclaiming “Be Happy, Not Gay” to protest a high school event meant to promote tolerance of gay students.

First, one struggles to understand Judge Posner’s thinking when he writes, “‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ is only tepidly negative; ‘derogatory’ or ‘demeaning’ seems too strong a characterization.” Seems that “derogatory” exactly describes such a slogan. Is a sartorial expression of “Be Happy. Not Italian” (or whatever) similarly “tepidly negative”?

Possibly it is by Judge Posner’s thinking, which he elucidated in his decision by writing, “People do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or, for that matter, their way of life.” One suspects that lots of people wouldn’t classify homosexuality as a belief, akin to Christianity or global warming or that Miley Cyrus is better than Bach, but as an immutable thing—like skin-color or ethnicity. It’s good to protect everyone’s right to challenge beliefs, generally speaking. But should students have a protected right, in school, to challenge the validity of another student’s being?

Second, and more importantly: Why is Judge Posner even bothering with this? Why is any judge? The answer, of course, is that Tinker established all sorts of k-12 student rights that make it incredibly difficult for administrators to exercise authority on their campuses without ending up in court. A far better route, the one put forth by Justice Clarence Thomas in the recent Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, would be to allow individual school leaders to run their campuses as they see fit. Students should be entitled to a certain level of decorum, though, and allowed to learn without interruption.

Which is why the controversial stuff—passing out birth control; holding sexual education classes; founding clubs for homosexual students; wearing arm-bands that signify one is for/against war; wearing T-shirts that degrade another’s views, race, haircut, etc.—needs to be left outside k-12 public schools. Principals would be smart to take this stance. Otherwise, we’ll never see an end to the bickering and the judicial rulings.      

Bottom line, the courts are too entrenched in public schools and it’s a mess. Principals are right to wonder why their authority to maintain order is in this way stanched.

Coby’s latest spark—that students (or their parents) who rated their teachers online could provide useful feedback—is intriguing. He’s right that such k-12 rating websites exist (see here) but haven’t reached a critical mass of users. Even if they did, though, the whole idea has a major drawback: This.

What is fair criticism and what is insult? What is fair moderating and what is censorship? Do we really want to inject more of this legal mish-mash into the school day?

Surely this is better than attacking a teacher, but still, not so good.

Why is it necessary to measure student behavior by race? Test scores are in this way disaggregated to prevent schools from ignoring struggling low-income and minority students, who in the past were often written-off as beyond hope. (Monitoring test scores by race is still problematic, I think, for lots of reasons, but at least its basic justification is strong.)

But what is the justification for observing in a study that black youngsters do worse with “Essential Life Skills”? Should teachers put extra effort into, I dunno, making sure that their minority pupils are suspended less frequently, making sure that their poor pupils don’t act out in class?

The latest National Review contains this article (subscription required) about the spanking debate (whether or not to spank one’s children). It’s an odd piece that skips not lightly from presenting the controversy’s history, to illustrating the problems with a spanking ban, to hypothesizing that less spanking has spawned the prevalence of pharmaceutical methods of youth discipline, to weirdly comparing the “choice” to spank to the “choice” to have an abortion.

Nonetheless, out of the convolutions can be plucked several useful bits. First, that the evidence for and against spanking is inconclusive, and second, that the practice works for some parents and doesn’t work for others.

It seems safe to apply these to the k-12 setting and also make an argument for educational choice, which is that parents ought to have the choice to enroll their children in a school that exercises reasonable forms of physical discipline if parents so choose. To say that the watered down discipline at most public schools results from the fact that such schools enroll students whose parents subscribe to radically different notions of appropriate punishment is not to be wrong.

Sixteen-year-old Jim Hennessy is angry. His rights have been violated, as has been his “personal freedom.” What’s at stake that caused the New York Times to give Jim’s story prominent attention? Free speech? Religious expression? Not, it’s worse; Darien High School had the audacity to require Jim and his peers to pass a breathalyzer test before entering a school dance.

“What you do off school grounds should be your own business,” says Jim.

Um, yeah, Jim, maybe that’s true if you stay off school grounds (and then it’s your business and your parents’ business). But setting sobriety as a prerequisite to school functions is hardly a step toward the Third Reich. Nor is it a panacea; as the local school board chairman admitted to the Times, “It doesn’t solve the problem of teenage drinking. But it solves the problem of teenage drinking at school dances.”

It’s hard to fault Jim entirely, though. He’s lived his entire life in the age of student “rights” guaranteed by the Supreme Court, no less (see here). Believing he has the right to attend school dances drunk is just the logical extension of decades of court decisions, you might say. What would help is the Court deciding, a la Clarence Thomas, that minors don’t have free speech rights—much less the right to get bombed. I’d drink to that.

News update: School officials have decided to go easy on an eighth-grader caught purchasing contraband goods. Was it guns, drugs, or tobacco? Actually, none of the above. It was candy—and not even the hard-core kind like Snickers or M&M’s, which if consumed in large quantities can really pack on the pounds (trust me, I know). It was a bag of Skittles.

For this “offense,” Michael Sheridan, an eighth-grade honors student in New Haven, Connecticut, was suspended for a day, barred from attending an honors dinner, and stripped of his title as class vice president. You can read the full story here.

Following local media reports and a public uproar, Superintendent Reginald Mayo said in a statement last week that he and Principal Eleanor Turner will clear Michael’s record and restore him to his student council post.

Nothing more clearly demonstrates the growing loss of common sense and proportional judgment in our nation’s schools than Skittlesgate. Apparently, the New Haven school system banned candy sales in 2003 as part of a district-wide school “wellness” policy. Leaving aside whether prohibiting candy sales is something schools should be concerned about (whatever happened to teaching reading, writing and, math?—things schools aren’t doing very well), buying a bag of Skittles from a classmate hardly warrants a suspension . Back in the good old days when I was an eighth-grader, suspensions were meted out for serious offenses: school violence and destruction of property, vicious bullying, and verbal abuse of teachers.

“I am sorry this has happened,” Turner said in a statement. “My hope is that we can get back to the normal school routine, especially since we are in the middle of taking the Connecticut mastery test.”

Turner adds that she should have reinforced in writing the verbal warnings against candy sales. In other words, a little common sense would have spared everyone—including Michael and his parents—a lot of unnecessary grief.

It’s a sad commentary that district officials are focused on silly things like bags of Skittles, when real problems, such as rampant drug use, teen pregnancy, and school shootings continue to plague our classrooms.