Schools Need to Get Out of the Behavior Business
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that schools have taken on far too much responsibility for student behavior and mental health, and need to refocus on their core educational mission.
Key Takeaways
- Schools are not behavior clinics - The primary mission is education, not behavioral therapy
- Most behavior issues don't require school intervention - Normal developmental behavior should be handled by families, not elaborate school programs
- Refocus on teaching and learning - Stripping away non-educational missions allows schools to do their actual job better
Transcript
Schools need to think seriously about getting out of the behavior business entirely, because honestly, a lot of what schools are doing to try to improve student behavior is really behavior theater, right?
It's not anything that is actually proven to improve student behavior.
In fact, a lot of the things, even that professional therapists and psychologists do to improve children's behavior often doesn't work.
And I read the other day that therapy for parents actually in some cases works better than therapy for students directly.
So the idea that at school that we can do kind of amateur therapy, we can do different types of behavior interventions that are really just unproven theatrics, like maybe that stuff makes us less likely to get sued, maybe it makes us feel better.
there's just not a lot of evidence that it actually works and one kind of bizarre manifestation of this is if you look at the schools that have hired a whole bunch of new staff to deal with behavior behavior specialists behavior therapists bcbas these are not typically schools that are doing well with behavior and hiring all these additional staff typically does not make a positive difference i think what's happening here is that policies have changed so there are no consequences for behavior or students are being placed inappropriately when their iep team should have been empowered to place a student in a more specially designed program.
And as a result, their needs are not getting met and they're not succeeding.
So I think we've got all these situations going on simultaneously and we're trying to fix them all by fixing behavior, which is not something we can do in the first place.
I think the way we can address behavior in schools is to have rules and the way to tell if something that we're doing to support a student with behavior, the way to tell if that's working is if they're able to follow the rules, right?
If they're able to be safe, if they're able to stay in class and kind of the the traditional rules type things but when we try to throw out the rules and say well let's give it a chance for these behavior interventions to work if those behavior interventions are just theatrics that we hope will work but we actually don't really have any evidence like if they're just things that we're doing to make ourselves feel better or look better and they're not things that actually work Well, things are going to fall apart, right?
We've got to go back to rules and using rules to hold the other things accountable, the other things that we're doing, right?
See, rules are not just about holding individual students accountable.
They're about holding processes accountable.
And if we say, oh, we're doing all this great stuff to support this student, is it working?
Well, is the student violating the rules?
Are they hurting other people?
Are they throwing things?
Are they not going to class?
Well, yeah, but we just need to give it time to work.
No, it's not working if the student is not able to be at school safely, and that includes following the rules.
So I just think we've got to get out of this behavior theater business.
Let me know what you think.