School Discipline Is Simple — But Its Scope Is Very Limited

Is it too simplistic to focus on consequences and see consequences as the primary solution to school discipline problems?

I've gotten lots of comments like this one that talk about how complex this problem is.

And I think if we're thinking about student behavior and behavioral health and students' life outcomes, then yeah, there are a lot of complex problems there that school discipline cannot solve.

But school discipline itself actually is pretty simple.

It has been a solved problem for generations.

if we keep the scope appropriate, if we recognize that our responsibility as school leaders is to keep the learning environment safe and productive, keep students safe, if we're gonna compel kids to come to school, it has to be a safe environment.

And that is one of our biggest obligations as school leaders.

If you read the professional standards for educational leaders, safety is a big part of them.

And if we take on additional missions, we have to be very careful about a couple of things.

First, we have to be careful that we're not compromising our primary responsibility, which is to keep kids safe.

If we're trying to take on some sort of mental health role, if we're trying to solve problems in students' personal lives that we may not be able to really solve, if we're trying to fix family issues, if we're trying to fix mental health issues, if we're trying to fix behavioral health issues.

I mean, like, to be honest, In some cases, students need medication or different families or just big changes in their lives that go way beyond anything we can provide in school.

If we really want kids to have good outcomes, the student might need things that we just cannot provide as a school.

And it's not oversimplifying to say that our scope is limited.

The scope of our practice is limited because and that it's not appropriate for us to get into areas that are the domain of other professionals, right?

Behavioral health, mental health.

We are not psychiatrists.

We don't prescribe drugs.

We're not CPS.

We don't remove people from the home.

There are lots of things that might need to be done to help any individual student, but that we cannot do.

We cannot legally or ethically do.

And when we commit ourselves to missions that are beyond our scope, we end up failing at our primary mission, which is to keep kids safe.

So this idea that consequences are too simple, I think really depends on what our job is.

And if our job is to keep people safe, well, yeah, consequences are simple and they work to keep people safe, even if they don't fix every problem that a student might bring to school with them.

I want to fix those problems.

If there was something we could do to fix those problems for students who come to school and really struggle with their behavior, yeah, absolutely.

I would like to do that, but so far there is not much evidence that we can, and there's a lot of evidence that when we try to, we end up making the school environment unsafe.

So yeah, is it simplistic?

Is it simple to suspend a kid for fighting?

Is it simplistic to suspend a kid for bringing drugs to school or whatever the behavior issue is?

If it's serious, I mean, yeah, it is simple, but it is effective.

And I don't know how else we keep the school environment safe without those tools like exclusionary discipline, progressive discipline, consequences.

Let me know what you think.