The other students in the room

When people say there’s an “elephant in the room,” they mean there’s something important that nobody’s paying attention to. At school most of the children in our classrooms are “elephants.”

That’s because nobody talks about them when experts develop behavior plans for disruptive, dangerous students. Even when these plans have some therapeutic merit, they’re designed and implemented without any regard for how the plan and the student it’s attached to will affect the other students in the room. When I’ve complained about this collateral damage, I’ve repeatedly been told the behavior team’s job is to address the problem student’s problems regardless of the problems their solution causes anybody else, including the rest of the children in the allegedly child-centered classroom.

Don’t misunderstand. While students who sow classroom chaos are commonly the school-age equivalent of lawbreakers, others are truly troubled. I don’t know how some of the children in my class get up in the morning. My heart goes out to them.

But my heart also goes out to the other children in the room, the ones who spend their school days in fear and dread, who lose their education while an expensive battalion of specialists, personal aides, and “interventionists” devote themselves to the disruptive, destructive few who daily torment the many and turn classrooms upside down.

When assessment rubrics rest on whether a student’s writing “rambles” or “meanders,” and that indefinable distinction changes the score by twenty-five percent, it’s hard to take education data seriously. The issues researchers investigate are often so self-evident it’s a mystery why they got investigated in the first place.

For example, a recent study concluded that “a ten percent increase” in exposure to “suspension-worthy” behavior produces a decline in math scores equivalent to increasing the number of students in the class by fifty percent. The results “confirm what most teachers already know: that disruption has costs for students.” Stop the presses. Thirty years ago behavior specialists told Poor Elijah’s seventh graders the plot of Kafka’s The Trial. The main character, an innocent man, is arrested, persecuted, and eventually murdered. The specialists warned the twelveyear-olds that if they didn’t cooperate with a classmate’s behavior plan, they’d be like the cruel people in the story.

For the next two years this student wreaked havoc on his classmates’ education. Disruption, obscenity, and violence became a routine part of their school day. When his behavior grew sufficiently intolerable, his plan permitted teachers to ask him to leave. Sometimes he left without objection. Other times his classmates got to watch his personal aide haul him bodily from the room. When he had to be removed from only half his classes, he got a reward. This understandably irked the students who didn’t have to be removed from any classes and didn’t get a reward.

Today’s fashion in behavior management, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, rests on the premise that “kids do well if they can.” In other words, whenever a “behaviorally challenging” student misbehaves, it isn’t because he’s “manipulative, coercive, unmotivated,” “seeking attention,” “limit-testing,” or

We all bring problems to school. That includes me. Compassionately dealing with those problems is part of every day. But when a student’s misbehavior goes beyond the ordinary, even when it stems from genuine trauma, we owe compassion to his victims. We also owe them an education.

simply malicious. His bad behavior stems from “lagging skills” and “unsolved problems.” We need to see his actions through “progressive lenses” so our response is “more accurate” and “compassionate.”

CPS identifies three alternatives for dealing with misbehavior. Plan A, “solving the problem unilaterally,” means you say, “Stop doing that,” and punctuate it with an “or else” if you need to. This works with most of us. Students who don’t respond get Plan B, where you try to solve the problem through “collaborative” reasoning and negotiation, which naturally takes time. Plan C amounts to “setting an unsolved problem aside” and doing nothing “for now,” usually because the student with the problem is emotionally “dysregulated.” This, by the way, is not the same as “giving in.”

First, I don’t generally bark unilateral orders at any students. I usually explain the rationale behind the rules. Second, according to CPS methodology, we don’t need to reason with Plan A students because they’re reasonable enough to follow the rules, but we’re expected to reason and negotiate with the very Plan B students whose problems have made them unreasonable enough that they can’t and don’t follow the rules. As for Plan C, I’ve seen it in action. It’s students rampaging down corridors, throwing furniture, assaulting other children, and disrupting lessons while teachers vainly pretend to ignore them. It looks and sounds like mayhem and chaos.

Some policymakers recommend weighing the financial costs of “transferring a dangerous or disruptive student to an alternative setting” against the costs of endangering his classmates and disrupting their learning by leaving him in their regular classroom where a roomful of seven-year-olds can pay the price.

Disobedience isn’t always dysregulation. Disruptive behavior is more often self-indulgence than it is a symptom. Simple malice does exist, even in kindergarten. It doesn’t help when schools tolerate bad behavior, regardless of the excuses we offer and the elaborate, frequently ineffective plans we lay.

We all bring problems to school. That includes me. Compassionately dealing with those problems is part of every day. But when a student’s misbehavior goes beyond the ordinary, even when it stems from genuine trauma, we owe compassion to his victims. We also owe them an education.

A classroom can’t be one student’s therapeutic setting.

Not if we expect all the other children to learn there.

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