Punitive Discipline Works — It Does What It's Intended to Do
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that punitive discipline serves its intended purpose of maintaining school order and safety, even if it doesn't 'fix' the individual student.
Key Takeaways
- Define 'work' correctly - Punitive discipline works to deter misbehavior and protect the school community
- It's not designed to rehabilitate - Criticizing consequences for not 'fixing' students misunderstands their purpose
- Safety is the primary goal - A discipline system that keeps schools safe is working, even if individual students don't change
Transcript
Discipline works and has always worked, but for some reason it's become very popular to say that it doesn't work.
And I think what people mean, they're wrong about this, but I think what they mean is it doesn't necessarily improve the student's life, right?
Like getting suspended from school may get you to change your behavior, but it's not going to change the conditions of your life that are contributing to your behavior.
If you're dealing with tough stuff in life, getting suspended is not going to change that.
But people who say this are wrong about the fact that punitive discipline does actually change behavior.
We have data on this.
About half of students who get suspended never get suspended again.
And if they get suspended a second time, about half of those students never get suspended again.
So it's just never been true that punitive discipline, or what I prefer to call exclusionary discipline, I don't know why we would call it punitive, just exclusionary discipline does work.
It does change behavior, and it's effective in the job that it's supposed to do.
The job that it's supposed to do is keeping schools safe and ensuring that schools can be orderly learning environments.
It was never intended to be some sort of therapy for the individual or some sort of life-changing force for the individual.
I mean, let's be realistic.
Getting suspended from school is not going to change your life, but it will change your behavior in school.
And if it does not, that's built in to how school discipline works, how progressive discipline works, where if you continue doing something that ruins it for everybody else, that makes everybody unsafe, that disrupts learning then you get suspended again and again and eventually you're out of there and that's unfortunate when that happens when we can't change a student's behavior but that's what we have to do if we want schools to actually be places where kids learn and not just places where kids misbehave and hurt other kids so let me know what you