Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Students Free

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the show today, Sinkei Henderson. Sinque is a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and on TV networks, including HBO and Showtime. A graduate of Harvard University, Sinque spent a year as a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles area, an experience that informed his new book, Sit Down and Shut Up, How Discipline Can Set Students Free.

[00:41] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:43] SPEAKER_00:

Sinque, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:45] SPEAKER_02:

Hey, thank you so much for having me. Grateful.

[00:47] SPEAKER_00:

So take us into the origin story of Sit Down and Shut Up. So I understand that you spent a year in a wide variety of schools in the Los Angeles area, schools from all different kind of demographic categories and different neighborhoods subbing. What was that like and how did it lead to this book?

[01:07] SPEAKER_02:

Well, first, as you said, I'm a writer for TV shows, The New York Times, New Yorker, that sort of thing. So different places. But I'm a night out. If it were up to me, I'd be in bed at four in the morning. That ends up kind of throwing my day off a little bit. But it's just my nature.

[01:25]

Out of that, knowing that a friend of mine who had been a teacher at a charter school would encourage me to substitute, just to organize my day, force me to wake up early, that kind of thing. And so... I did that, and I think from the opening story in the book, on my first day, man, when I say I got, as they say in the South, got called everything but a child of God, got cussed out so tough, it was shocking. But even more shocking, I sent the kid to the office, so I had the campus aide come retrieve the kid.

[01:56]

And not 10 minutes later, he was back in my class with a note saying, okay, to return to class. No detention, no suspension, no call home. no no apology and he was the main culprit in the class but he had his buddy so it wasn't like an isolated so the student wasn't just using curse words but it was actually swearing at you specifically and was sent straight back to class absolutely and it was it was a very tense very tense situation now that said i wouldn't say that i was necessarily a short guy i'm a big guy i was certainly very nervous. I also sensed that it was for show, but it didn't matter. This was just, I'd never experienced this before. And I know that even when I was younger, we never did that.

[02:38]

Like, I mean, I wouldn't say I went to a tough school, but, you know, I'm from a small town in the South. We might have cursed as kids around each other all the time. We never in a million years would have cursed at a teacher. Never in a million years would have threatened a teacher. I have first cousins who are certified members of gangs in the South Side of Chicago. Never once did they accost or threaten a teacher.

[03:03]

So I thought to myself, what the H is going on here? That said, I didn't love that experience, but I found that I loved teaching. That day, I sort of fell in love with it. But at the same time, as I went back the next day, I slowly started to realize, and as you said, by the end of the year, I've been in at least 50 different schools. One day, I would be in a rich, upper-middle-class private school, which costs $30,000 a year, and the next day I'd be at a poor school in East L.A.

[03:35]

So the contrast was so stark and so shocking that it just said to me in relatively short order, there's a story here and there's a book here. And there's a book about what people do not quite understand about what is going on in some of the toughest schools in the country. And I do want to say quickly, I'm an African-American black guy. This isn't just a story about black kids or Latin kids. This is actually a story really about what happens, the adolescent chaos that comes from economic breakdown in certain communities and then other types of breakdown. There's a story about drugs and that sort of thing.

[04:16]

One of the craziest stories. stories that I came across was actually about poor white kids in the Midwest. A writer named JD Vance wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy. A lot of people remember that book from last year. And he said, he quoted a white teacher talking about her, essentially poor white kids. And she said, it's kind of a harsh quote, so I just want to warn your listeners.

[04:37]

She said, they tell us to be shepherds to these kids, but they forget to tell us that some of them were raised by wolves. So the reason I say that is because I don't want to just as a black man, I don't want to just harp on and just make it seem as though I'm talking, running down black kids and that kind of thing, because I'm obviously not. I care about all of the students who rely on public education. But there's a larger story here for people in education and understand what's going on in people who are not in education. And I just really felt like something had to be done. This story needed to be told.

[05:11] SPEAKER_00:

And there's this theme in both JD Vance's book and in your book of the world being turned upside down. for students who can no longer trust the adults who are raising them to be the adults. So when those students come to school, the normal assumptions about authority, about respect, about who's in charge, those assumptions just don't hold in the schools that you visited that were truly struggling.

[05:36] SPEAKER_02:

It's true. You know, it's a really great point. So I'll tell you what happened to me. There was a mystery, I guess I should say, the first event that really convinced me, no, you've got to dig further here. At the same school where I got into that situation with that student, there was a teacher there who had gone to the same high school as a young man. And he said one day, he said, this school was always tough, but students used to fight each other.

[06:01]

Now they fight the teacher. And that stunned me. It blew me away because I thought that's exactly, that was an exact description of what the shift was, what the change was. And I didn't understand why it had happened. He clearly didn't understand why it had happened. And there was no indication of why.

[06:18]

I hadn't read it anywhere. I hadn't heard from any teachers. I hadn't heard from any principals. And then I figured out what it was. I was driving home one day and the great Jay-Z, husband of Beyonce, came on the radio and they were interviewing him. And someone asked him, what was it like when crack cocaine came into your neighborhood?

[06:38]

And he said the most startling thing. He didn't say the violence increased. He didn't say there was more police presence. He didn't say, you know, any of those things. What he said is it destroyed the authority figure. And I remember thinking, what the heck is he talking about?

[06:53]

And so as I listened to what he said and then started to do my own very aggressive research myself, crack cocaine was fundamentally a child's economy. There are actually economists who said you cannot underestimate the impact of crack cocaine on poor inner-city neighborhoods. It swept through those communities like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And when I say crack cocaine was a child's economy, because of the mandatory drug sentences that were laid down in the Reagan administration, if you were an adult and you were selling drugs or crack cocaine, you could go to jail for north of 10 years. So they gave the drugs to the kids to sell. So you had kids as young as nine or 10 involved in the drug economy, in the crack cocaine economy.

[07:37]

And because crack was so powerfully addictive, the adults were the ones that basing themselves in front of these young kids who were paying their mother's light bills, paying the rent, buying their shoes for their brothers and sisters because their parents, because there was no other, because the manufacturing jobs, you know, the economies in the inner cities had been depleted because of the loss of the manufacturing jobs. And so the only economy really in the inner city was the crack cocaine trade. There's another economist who said Black America was catching up to white America on all the major indices of advancement, graduation, infant mortality, the death rate. And he said the only thing that retarded the advance of the Black community more than crack cocaine was the Jim Crow laws. it was an apocalypse in the Black community. And it was an economy being run by kids.

[08:30]

And what I realized is I wasn't teaching those kids, but those kids grew up and they had kids. And they sent their children into schools with the same loss of regard and respect for traditional authority that they grew up with because of the circumstances that they essentially grew up in. And that changed my perspective. It shocked me, but it also deeply informed me just so that I understood that this was really a problem about chaotic communities and the poverty and the destruction that happens when jobs are lost. And now you look at the opioid crisis in the Midwest. So again, back to J.D.

[09:09]

Vance, and they're experiencing the same thing, the wholesale loss of manufacturing jobs, followed quickly on by the infestation of the opioids and with these adults who are so addicted and so powerfully addicted. The adolescent chaos that exists in these poor schools, white or black, really are a symptom of a much more profound sociological problem. And I try to get at that while also dealing with how do we treat the symptoms? You have to kind of talk about the source and treat the source, but you also have to deal with the symptoms, which are the immediate issue of behavior for kids and early behavior, disrespectful behavior. So the book tries to go into that and is complex and also tell, I think, an interesting story about my journey, my connection with certain kids. And that's what I think.

[09:59] SPEAKER_00:

Well, yeah, let's get into the school side of it because this is going to sound unfamiliar to many of our listeners, this idea that kids can swear at teachers, kids can shove teachers and grab laptops out of their hand because they say they want to watch a video and things like that that you relate in the book. This is not the reality in most schools, but it is a growing and alarming trend that you've observed.

[10:21] SPEAKER_02:

All I can say is every story that I described in the book is absolutely true. And those teachers who end up being assigned to some of the schools in the poorer areas of the country experience every day. And I was shocked by it as well. I mean, we couldn't do that when we were young. And the way schools have responded to it. So the first mystery of that year was when that teacher said, we used to fight each other, now we fight the teacher.

[10:47]

And I wanted to ask why. The second mystery was, Why was that kid sent back to my class without any consequences? So I saw this over and over and over again. Kids could do and say just about anything. And there was no detention. There was no suspension.

[11:03]

There was, as I said, none of these things. And I could not figure it out. I would ask other teachers. I would ask other subs. I would softly ask administrators. And there was just never a straightforward answer.

[11:15]

And I was baffled by it. And all I can say is, I'm not a proponent of the ban on suspensions. I saw with my own eyes the chaos that it engendered in those schools. I saw with my own eyes when the light bulb went off over kids' heads that they were no longer could be suspended. I literally was there at the creation, so to speak. And it just was a bad band-aid.

[11:43]

It was a thin band-aid on our gaping wound. And I had to sort of figure out what was driving that as well. And it was just really a wrong solution to a problem, is all I can really say. The complete removal of stringency and discipline. So, for example, when you ban suspensions, what you really are doing is you are also banning detentions. because the consequence we're not going to attention is you don't have a suspension.

[12:11] SPEAKER_00:

When it's a strange confluence of events, because on the one hand, I can see a pretty reasonable backlash against zero tolerance. You know, we had various incidents of violence that led to zero tolerance policies. And then the zero tolerance policies bring their own problems. Like, you know, we're suspending kindergarteners for bringing safety scissors to school and, you know, chewing their pop tart into the shape of a gun and things like that, that really do not need to result in suspension. So I think we're pulling back from suspension in some areas where that's justified. But you're talking about at the secondary level, particularly in cases of profanity or violence or just blatant disrespect for teachers, that both detention and suspension are no longer tools that administrators are willing to use in many schools.

[12:58] SPEAKER_02:

You have pointed out a really good issue there. The zero tolerance policies, for example, they emerge out of the crack cocaine era. And quite wisely, gun violence is so commonplace in schools now that we forget that during the 90s, it was actually quite shocking. And it came out of, again, the crack cocaine trade. Kids were part of gangs, and they were bringing the violence to the streets and to the schools. And there was a federal law that was laid down that said, if a student brings a gun to school, you got to expel them.

[13:28]

That's perfectly reasonable. The problem with zero tolerance was two things. One, mission creep, what's called mission creep. So they banned guns. If they banned guns, then a kid might bring a knife to school. So they banned knives.

[13:40]

So then if you didn't bring knives, kids would bring brass knuckles to school and get in fights. Well, you could break someone's jaw with a brass knuckle. So the things that were being covered by zero tolerance expanded. And then there was the issue of contraband. If you were huddled in the bathroom selling stuff, which was at that time drugs, you would, of course, be expelled because you were a drug dealer. Well, now I had a kid who was a middle school student, had a wad of cash, and he was selling potato chips.

[14:10]

Well, that's contraband now. So he literally had the police called on him. He was a seventh grader. That's overcorrection. That's when a law goes too far. And the other problem was really quickly with zero tolerance is there were no alternatives.

[14:23]

So when the kids were kicked out, they just went onto the street or they would go to these awful reform schools, which are really mini jails. And so there was no place for the schools. There was no remedial education for these kids when they were kicked out. Those are the problems with zero tolerance. It started to expand too far to cover too many things. And once the kids have been suspended or kicked out, there were no remedial education, no decent remedial education for them.

[14:52]

So now we look, but now we're looking at a situation where the rollback on zero tolerance is also going too far. They've gone from being too punitive to being. completely without any punitive measures complete without any stringent measures so kids can really get away with anything now and that's just a fundamental problem in our society is we don't know how to have half measures don't know how to say you know what this part of this large law is not working let's take the parts that are working and keep those going let's take the parts that aren't working and tweak those adjusting because you can't just like you cannot raise kids in a a ruthlessly punitive environment and expect to raise healthy-minded kids. You also can't raise kids in an environment where there are no punishments, there are no consequences.

[15:43]

I mean, we are raising kids not just to be read and write, but to be healthy-minded, psychologically mature citizens and adults. And the current methods in which we've thrown out all stringency really just is not working.

[15:58] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I think it's easy for us to miss that pendulum swing into the leniency and the just tolerating every kind of misbehavior, because we also have some new strategies that we're aware of. But you say in the book that things like restorative justice and things like more kind of trauma-informed approaches and more therapeutic approaches, you know, those are real things, but they're not really what's happening in schools that are just tolerating all kinds of misbehavior.

[16:26] SPEAKER_02:

You know, I've been trained in restorative justice, and carrots cannot work without the possibility of a stick. And that's just the matter. That's just what it is. And I absolutely believe in all the therapeutic, you know, group counseling, individual counseling. I believe in anything that essentially binds kids to a school emotionally and binds kids to the community of a school and to their classmates and to their teachers. that increases their desire to protect the school as their own little community.

[16:59]

And I think group therapy, individual therapy, sort of trying to deal with the emotional needs of kids, I am 100% behind that. I am 100% behind giving kids two, three chances, two, three, four, five, six, you know, many chances to make the kind of mistakes that adolescents make. But you absolutely also have to have bright lines and say, okay, you went too far today. You got to go home. You went too far today. You got to have detention.

[17:28]

There has to be those in place. They are not replacements for stringency. They have to be supplements for it, is what I would say, essentially. And the schools that I taught at that had the restorative justice, they just were trying to use it as a replacement. And those schools were chaos. Because, of course, kids game the system.

[17:49]

We all kids, no matter what income level, no matter what race, as soon as you realize you don't have consequences, you're going to do what you want. That's the nature of being a child. That's the nature of being a kid. It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with where you come from. I taught in rich schools.

[18:04]

I taught in poor schools. When the cat's away, the mice play. It doesn't matter. Using these phrases like restorative justice, we found a replacement. You know, I literally worked at a school where a principal was bragging in some article about how they, he's now doing restorative justice and has such a dramatic impact on reducing suspensions and student behavior. It was a complete hoax.

[18:28]

This was one of the most chaotic schools I had ever taught in. But because it's, you know, the popular thing to say, these new methods are working and that kind of thing, blah, blah, blah. That's what everyone's saying. And absolutely, it's just not true. I'm sure it's working in some environments, but you cannot use them as a full replacement for consequences, for more negative consequences, for unruly or disrespectful behavior. You just can't do it and hope to have a thriving school.

[18:55] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and in the book, you pretty quickly as a substitute teacher developed a way of detecting whether those norms and those boundaries were in place in a school environment. And you called it kind of a broken window theory of kind of order in the school. Tell us what that was when you walked into a school.

[19:12] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that phrase broken window is obviously very controversial and for good reason. You know, it's led to some horrifying public spectacles. So people have looked very harshly at the broken windows theory of policing, which I support. But the idea behind broken windows is that chaotic environments signal their chaos very quickly and usually through some sort of visual evidence. So in inner cities or tough neighborhoods, it's just literally, if you went into a neighborhood and you saw that windows were shattered and no one had repaired them, you knew that you were in an environment where there was no respect and they said there was chaos in that environment. I realized the same thing was going on in schools.

[19:52]

If I walk into a school, And I would hear students cursing. And they would see me, an adult who was in many cases, sometimes three times their age or certainly twice their age, swearing, cursing right in front of me and not embarrassed by it. I knew I was in for a tough day. I knew that all the authority in that school had disappeared. All the sense of the difference between an adult and a child had disappeared. I went into a school and I heard a kid say, person and they saw me hear them and they were embarrassed and they said oh my bad mister my i'm sorry i knew i was going to be roughly okay i mean you might have some tough moments here and there but generally i knew that the relationship between adult and child was still in place and so i called it the broken windows theory of public education swearing in front of adults and feeling comfortable not receiving consequences is a sign that a school the order in the school has pretty much completely collapsed

[20:47] SPEAKER_00:

And did you find that that was something that you were able to enforce in your own classroom, even in schools where that had become the norm?

[20:56] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. I found that it was very funny. What's so interesting about, again, the phrase you said is kids actually create discipline. That's the one feature of this that has gone missing. The idea that punishment is upsetting to them, I mean, there are kids who are so unsocialized that they may completely rebel against all consequences. But the majority of kids want boundaries.

[21:22]

The majority of kids craves a sense of order, craves a sense of who's in charge and who's leading us in that direction. And I found that in my classroom, I enforced the no cursing rule in my classroom, reason and of itself so ruthlessly and right from the top. I was funny about it, but it was serious. And if you curse, I gave you three warnings. If you curse and I heard you three times, you get put out of my class. And it never really got to the place where students, if I came back, they're like, you got to watch your mouth around Mr. Henderson.

[21:53]

Mr. Henderson don't play with that curse. He just like my grandma. She don't like adults cursing. She don't like no kids cursing. They loved it.

[21:59]

I remember I went to this one school. I mean, these kids were cursing to beat the bag. And each time they hit the, they thought I was joking. The third time they got put out. And they would start to tell on each other, even in private. They'd be like, oh, she just cursed her.

[22:12]

And they'd be like, you got to watch your mouth. I mean, they craved it. They knew that this is what they were doing was disrespectful. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They craved the order that I brought and just the tradition. And I would say, I don't care what you do on your own, on the playground, when you at lunch.

[22:26]

If I don't hear it, it's not my business. Don't do it around me. And they got it. So this idea that kids are only being punished and being hurt by discipline represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a child.

[22:39] SPEAKER_00:

And you even make the argument in the book that teaching that self-control, teaching that self-regulation is really at the heart of our mission to educate students to be able to participate in a democracy.

[22:53] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. So, you know, the traditional idea about education in a democracy is We're training kids to grow up to get great jobs in the modern economy. The real purpose of education in a democracy is to raise kids into being citizens, to raising kids into being able to interact with their fellow man in ways that continue the healthy functioning of the type of government that we live under, which is the most unique government that has ever existed, what they call a participatory democracy. And when you look at Things like so, for example, I'm a big supporter, as many people have Colin Kaepernick. I believe what he's doing is moral and righteous and good and decent. Many people don't.

[23:38]

But, you know, it is what it is. And when I look at Colin Kaepernick, when he initially was speaking out in anger by this police brutality, he the first thing he did is he sat during the national anthem. And then he had his Afro out and he was wearing pig socks and he was just really surly and angry. And he just was trying to figure out a way to protest something that he was very, very angry about. And rightly so. Then he spoke to, I believe it was an Army veteran who told him, look, I respect your right to protest.

[24:10]

But the way you're doing it feels disrespectful to me, feels offensive to me. And so the veteran told him, why don't you kneel during the national anthem instead? Well, Colin Kaepernick had the self-control. had this impulse control to get a hold of his anger at this very violent police brutality and to channel it in a way that was far more, I believe, responsible, far more beautiful. And so he started to kneel. And it has drawn, as we all know, many, many, many enemies and detractors from the president on down.

[24:49]

but it has also drawn enormous support from around the world. And certainly around the country. And you just saw gradually people kneeling, all over the country, white people, black people, all over the country, looking at that honorable, respectful protest of a man who had disciplined his anger, disciplined his justifiable rage at these outrageous things that happened with these black men who had been killed, and finding a way to channel that anger in a responsible, more adult, more mature away and it brought citizens flocking to his side again it created enemies for him But it took him out. It is a completely different form and completely different form of protest as a citizen in a country. And that's what we're raising kids to do.

[25:41]

We're raising them to have this type of self-discipline, this type of self-control, so that when they approach their fellow citizen and say, look, I need your help. I need your support. I need your backing in this struggle that I'm in. And it's essentially what we are training kids to do, to have the type of self-control that when they enter the public arena as active citizens in a volatile democracy, they're able to win allies for whatever struggle they have and whatever struggle they're fighting against.

[26:10] SPEAKER_00:

So, Sinque, thinking back on, you know, not only the research you've done, but your year as a substitute teacher in so many different schools and thinking of our audience of school administrators and knowing what teachers need from administrators in order to teach and in order to serve their students effectively. If you had kind of one wish list item for school administrators and something that you could get all of us to do when it comes to the set of issues that you tackle in the book, what would that be?

[26:40] SPEAKER_02:

You know, I'll say that the hardest thing that I dealt with was principals who have forgotten what it's like to be a teacher. And principal, I mean, there are different types of principals. There are principals who, at the time they became a teacher, their goal was to become a principal. And one of the problems with principal administration is once you become a principal, you sort of, they call it being captured. You become a part of the way the district looks at teachers, I should say. And I inevitably interacted with principals who talked down to teachers, who always told students, teachers about their success stories as teachers, you know, and they just forgot how difficult it was, in particular how difficult it is today with dealing with, you know, these environments where the behavior is much tougher and much harder.

[27:29]

And I would say as a consequential, as a very specific thing I can do is Be there for the discipline. Support your teachers with discipline. Obviously, if you have a teacher that's outrageous and not doing what they're supposed to be doing, you got to deal with that. But trust that your teachers are telling you the truth about the chaos in their classrooms and do everything you can do to minimize that. Helping them running interference with parents, running interference with parents, backing them up with kids, you know, and it should be a part. I actually think You need more PDs and from the beginning of school, you should start talking about who are our kids that we already know are probably going to come in with the school with a little more chaos than normal and start.

[28:12]

That should be at least half of the conversations that the principals are having with teachers. And they should take on that burden and absorb that burden for the teachers and involve the teachers in that, but also trust them that they're describing the what they're saying well. Again, if a teacher's not good, they're not good. But don't forget what it was like to be a teacher. You were not always a hero in the classroom. You were not always a success story in the classroom.

[28:39]

Remind the teachers of your mistakes. Remind yourself of your mistakes as a teacher. And trust teachers when they're telling you I can't teach in this class because these three kids are driving me nuts.

[28:51] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is Sit Down and Shut Up, How Discipline Can Set Students Free. Sinque Henderson, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:00] SPEAKER_02:

Hey, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the conversation.

[29:02] SPEAKER_00:

If people want to follow your work as a writer and learn more about the book, where's the best place for them to find you online?

[29:09] SPEAKER_02:

I have a Twitter account. It is French for I Am Sinque. Twitter is Je Suis Sinque. I also have a website, SinqueHenderson.com. I use my Twitter account pretty regularly.

[29:20]

I'll post about interviews that I have and that kind of thing. And please, I think you will find the book unusual. I think you will find the book informative. It's certainly not like your typical administrator book or principal book or teacher book, teaching manual. But I think nonetheless, people will be really moved and inspired. I hope inspired by it.

[29:44]

Absolutely. Well, thanks again. Thank you so much.

[29:46] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.