Teachers Are Quitting Over Violence — And Here's Why

Teachers are quitting over violence and concerns about violence.

I've seen news story after story after story that indicates that teachers are very afraid of the violence that is taking place in our schools.

Not just the extreme violence involving weapons and the teachers and administrators who were shot this past school year, but concerns over the lower level violence that's not being handled well.

And it's impossible not to connect the dots between those, right?

To see lower level violence, hitting, throwing furniture, threats, not being handled and worse things happening.

Because if you read the stories, you know, about the teacher who was shot by a six year old, you know, all of those warning signs were there.

All of those protections that should have been in place were not in place and things were not done that should have been done.

And I think we're going to continue to see an exodus of teachers from the specific schools where there are no guarantees of safety, where behavior is not handled effectively.

And the way we've always handled behavior effectively in schools is through progressive discipline, that if you do something you're not allowed to do, especially if it's unsafe, there are consequences.

And if you do it again, or if you do something especially bad, there are more serious consequences.

And there are conditions under which you will not continue to be in the classroom or continue to be in the school if you do something bad enough.

And we don't want students to be out of school.

So in a lot of cases, we've tried to eliminate those consequences, but that doesn't eliminate the behavior.

All it does is disrupt learning and make everyone feel unsafe.

So I think we've become very squeamish about consequences.

We become very squeamish about progressive discipline in the service of maybe pursuing other goals.

like getting our suspension rate down, but we can't let the school environment fall apart.

We can't let our credibility as administrators disappear completely because we're afraid to impose consequences to keep people safe.

And I think that's exactly what we need to do is follow progressive discipline.

It has always worked, just like sweeping the school has always worked.

We keep schools clean because you can't really have school if you don't clean the school periodically.

There's not a lot of research on sweeping the school.

There's not a lot of research on progressive discipline because it's obvious and it was universal until just very recently.

But I'm very concerned now that progressive discipline is under attack from a lot of people who say, well, no, it's the consequences that are ruining kids' lives.

You're sending them straight to prison by giving them a detention.

And I think those claims, those accusations don't really hold up to scrutiny.

I've been reading a lot of the research myself, and I'll be sharing some of that on my webinar on progressive discipline.

So you can sign up at principalcenter.com slash progressive.

I want to take you through the logic of progressive discipline and why a lot of the criticism and concern about it is really unfounded and why we really need to get back to the fundamentals of keeping people safe.

So principalcenter.com slash progressive.

Everything is for free.

Nothing is for sale.

I will see you there.