Unsafe spaces: Throw rocks at the teacher, get 'Tiger tokens'

A 16-year-old boy faces murder charges for stabbing a classmate at Maryvale High School in Phoenix. New court documents say Michael Montoya II, also 16, had stolen a gun from Chris Aguilar the previous day. Aguilar allegedly killed Montoya during class with a folding 4-inch pocketknife that he'd smuggled past metal detectors. He ran out of the classroom, dropped the knife, which had his name on it, and was arrested by a school safety officer.

Schools are claiming to be a "safe space" for LGBTQ+ students or for students fearing deportation. They need to be a safe space -- physically, not just emotionally -- for all students and staff and teachers.

Blackboard Jungle dramatized school violence in 1955

Lax discipline policies are creating classroom chaos, writes Neetu Arnold, a Manhattan Institute policy analyst, in City Journal. Teachers, citing "chronic student misbehavior as the top source of stress and burnout," quit.

Parents, worried about their children's safety, turn to homeschooling, private or charter schools.

"Restorative justice" often gets the blame, writes Arnold but it's far less common than Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), which has been around for decades. PBIS "masks its anti-punitive bias behind uncontroversial goals" such as collecting data and setting clear behavior expectations. It's not overtly political. The idea is to reward positive student behavior and avoid punishments. Schools have lots of discretion on how to use it.

The U.S. Department of Education has urged schools to use PBIS as an "equitable" way to reduce racial disparities in discipline, she writes. The easiest way to do that is to reduce discipline.

When Arnold talked to teachers, they described how PBIS "drove disruptive classrooms, undermined their authority, and made effective teaching nearly impossible."

"I worked in a school using PBIS," writes Elizabeth O in a comment. "The program was deemed exemplary and the principal received awards for the PBIS results."

. . . a student, requiring 1:1 support due to behavior problems, ran out of class, out the school doors and into a fenced off section of the school property. When the school principal and I followed him outside to direct him back into the building, he began throwing rocks at both of us. After ducking to avoid getting hit, the principal began negotiating with the 4th grader, and only when the principal began handing him the PBIS "Tiger Tokens", which were the designated school reward for good behavior (aka just following the rules) to be cashed in weekly for prizes, did the student eventually come out of the restricted area. He was continually given the tokens until he walked back into the classroom of the class he had disrupted earlier. No consequences for leaving or throwing rocks were given.

Students who disrupted her class received rewards when they calmed down. Those who tried to do the work, despite disruptions, got fewer tokens, writes Elizabeth O. At times, she had to move her class to the hallway while a violent student tore apart her classroom. When he calmed down he got Tiger Tokens. "As an educator, I found this system both demoralizing and dehumanizing."

The success of PBIS and other discipline methods is judged by the rate of suspensions and expulsions, writes Arnold. Principals are often under heavy pressure to keep suspensions down and to minimize racial disparities. States and local governments should require schools to report "baseline rates of infractions and classroom disorder," not just the use of consequences, she argues.

Schools should not return to the excesses of "zero tolerance," she writes. But they need "discipline policies that escalate consequences as conduct worsens," and take account of how disruptive students harm their classmates' learning.

Arnold wants to rethink "ideological narratives from the Obama era, such as the school-to-prison pipeline." (I once listened to medium-security jail prisoners complain that they'd gotten away with minor crimes as juveniles, again and again, then were shocked to turn 18 and end up behind bars.)

"Focused, orderly classrooms are essential for learning," Arnold concludes. Getting there "means listening to teachers when they report disruptive conduct instead of deferring to defensive parents." It takes more than Tiger Tokens.