The greatest good for the greatest number

Poor Elijah studied ethics when he was a sophomore. It turned out that right and wrong was such a complicated subject it took a whole semester.

Jeremy Bentham was one of the featured philosophers. Mr. Bentham believed that an action was right if it produced the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

Over time Poor Elijah has concluded that morality isn’t quite so quantitative, that moral laws of right and wrong are built into the creation just as surely as physical laws like gravity. But reckoning the greatest good for the greatest number is one way to guide us when we make moral decisions.

For example, if you’re driving your car and you face an unavoidable choice between striking 10 innocent pedestrians and striking one innocent pedestrian, the right decision, while agonizing, would be clear. Put another way, you’re facing the choice between saving one person and saving 10.

I teach 20 students at a time. If I were a private tutor, I wouldn’t have to choose between meeting the needs of one student and another, let alone one student and a roomful of others.

It’s true that teaching a class doesn’t always present a pressing dilemma. On many days in many classes, I can scramble around, ask different students different questions, say things several different ways, and do a tolerable job of meeting all my students’ needs. I teach to the middle and reach out to the edges.

However, the more extreme those edges, the more my instructional choices become dilemmas, a choice between two incompatible objectives. No theories or “best practices” can change that classroom fact of life.

Inclusion in regular classrooms of students at the extremes of ability and behavior is one of those rare instances where liberals and conservatives arrived at the same conclusion. Liberals found it more equitable, and conservatives thought it would save money. They were both wrong.

When dealing with the academic edges, adjusting expectations, materials, and assignments can help students at both extremes, while the rest of the class rolls on in the middle. Students who display extreme behavior, however, materially and detrimentally affect the rest of the class and, in common areas like corridors and playgrounds, the rest of the school.

We can disagree about inclusion’s general merits and its suitability for specific students. But we shouldn’t disagree in cases where addressing one student’s needs harms many students.

And yet, in the education world, we do.

I’m talking about the disruption of other students’ learning. I’m talking about threats, intimidation, and injuries. You don’t hear about these things because teachers and principals are bound by confidentiality laws and regulations. But I’m not exaggerating.

I’m also not minimizing the heartbreaking conditions under which some students live at home, or the trauma they’ve suffered outside of school. But that trauma shouldn’t license them to inflict trauma on other children at school.

At meetings over the years I’ve heard the parents of a disruptive or otherwise atypical student demand that the school meet their child’s needs. “I don’t care,” they say, “about the other children. I care about my child.”

I don’t condone that parental attitude, but I can easily understand why a mother or father, especially a desperate mother or father, might feel that way. I don’t understand, though, how school officials can adopt the same tunnel vision and place one student above all the others. And yet many do. The first mistake is thinking that public school is the proper venue for treating profoundly disturbed, often violent children.

The second mistake is allowing providers with little or no classroom expertise, and no obligation to the educational mission of public education, to deliver treatment in schools and classrooms where other students have a right to learn.

The third mistake, often blessed by superintendents and special education officials, is empowering these nonteaching professionals to overrule teachers and even principals and dictate treatment regardless of the detrimental impact of their methods and behavior plans on other children’s safety and opportunity to learn.

Children shouldn’t be subject to threats, malignant conduct, and injury because an aberrant student’s plan tolerates some violence and misbehavior to accommodate his “lagging” coping skills and “dysregulation.” Serial disruption shouldn’t be a standard feature of your child’s school day. Repeated removal of a student from class, with all the drama and chaos that precede and accompany it, shouldn’t be part of your child’s school routine. We shouldn’t have to evacuate classrooms whenever that single student won’t willingly leave. And yet we do. I’m not questioning anyone’s good intentions. I’m questioning their judgment. I’ve been teaching long enough to know that some children’s suffering, in their minds and in their homes, is unspeakable. Without critiquing the treatment today’s behavior experts prescribe, I recognize that many of these children need help.

Frequently, though, policymakers and experts hand problems off to schools when they shouldn’t. “Kids go to school. Let schools deal with it,” may be convenient, but it’s often inappropriate and rarely a solution.

There are clearly times when doing what’s right requires placing one student’s special need first. But a policy that inflicts predictable daily harm on the greatest number doesn’t serve them or the public good.

Officials running public schools should already know this.

But maybe it would help if we remind them.

We can disagree about inclusion’s general merits and its suitability for specific students. But we shouldn’t disagree in cases where addressing one student’s needs harms many students. And yet, in the education world, we do.