Recently, I came across an article highlighted on essayist Wesley Yang’s substack page where Yang asked a former Teach for America (TFA) teacher to write about his experience. Yang wrote an introduction, encouraging readers to notice the “non-school” factors causing serious behavioral issues inside the classroom in the account. The essay is disheartening, and the author is not answering questions or solving problems, but merely laying bare the troubling situation in many district schools today. As I read the piece, however, I was also struck by how teachers, like this TFA teacher, have been rendered powerless in their classrooms, especially when more than 80% of U.S. public schools now report that the pandemic has negatively impacted student behavior and socio-emotional development. The problem is not simply about what has happened to students outside the classroom, but rather, how now teachers have no power to manage disruptive classroom behavior.

For example, describing his experience, the author writes, “We’ve been told several times that it is against the law for teachers to physically break up fights without a specific certification. We’ve also been told that we are legally liable for injuries sustained in our classroom. I’m not sure if either is true. What I do know is that teachers and staff members at my school are constantly using their bodies to interdict violence.”

Can you imagine experiencing physical violence and not knowing how or if you were allowed to stop it? How would learning ever be possible in an environment that has escalated to the teacher having no other power in his or her classroom but to become the punching bag. It is no wonder there are now several teachers suing districts for taking no action to protect employees from students with a known history of violence. 

For public schools, many traditional behavior management systems were thrown out when “restorative justice” behavior policies replaced “zero tolerance” policies deemed racially discriminatory. And although there were certainly race issues that needed to be faced in many school discipline cultures, it is easy to see that the schools went from one extreme to the other. In fact, 12 middle school principals in Portland wrote a letter to their district begging for help with the situation. “The baby,” or behavior management in this case, was thrown out with the bathwater, leaving teachers no middle ground with which to conduct classroom management. 

In the TFA essay, the teacher describes his only ability for reprimand being the green-yellow-red clothespin system. When a student commits offenses, the student moves from green to yellow to red, a system that may work with 3-year-olds, but certainly did not motivate a 12-year-old girl to stop beating up a classmate. 

It is telling that the teacher in this essay recalled that the only weeks in which he felt that he was being successful in the classroom was when his most disruptive student had temporarily left the school, but when that one student returned to the class, learning ended for all of the students in the classroom. While the teacher considered himself a failure in the classroom, it was actually the administrators who demanded that one highly disruptive student remain in the classroom, ultimately failing both the teacher and the other students in the class.  

Sadly, the caretakers and families who cannot afford private school or who cannot move from their district are left with no other option but to subject their children to possible violence and a complete lack of learning. In the schools and districts where this is a reality, students desperately need other educational options if administrators refuse to modify disciplinary policies. What are the options?  Check out our website to learn more about problems with school assignment, and how school choice can put families and caretakers (rather than misguided school administrators) back in the driver’s seat of their children’s future.