Why Consequences Need to Escalate

Consequences have to increase if a behavior worsens or is repeated.

From a school discipline perspective, we have to have progressive discipline.

We have to have escalating consequences for continued or repeated or escalating behavior that puts other people in danger.

And this is really unpleasant.

As educators, this bothers us because we know the consequences alone are probably not going to change the behavior.

You know, if consequences could just change behavior by themselves, we could just punish everybody to perfection, right?

Like that just is not how human beings work.

But it is an important part of how organizations work because in an organizational context, we have an obligation to keep everybody safe.

And if we don't follow the evidence about what is going to put other people at risk, if we don't look at actual things that have occurred and respond with appropriate progressive consequences, then we're not going to be able to change the behavior.

then we're ignoring obvious signs that anything bad that happens is predictable.

We know that if this continues that people will be put in danger.

So if you have a student who is violent and they don't get consequences for being violent and then they get violent again and it gets worse, all of that is predictable.

And we have to understand that that is an adult responsibility to address that problem, right?

We have an adult obligation to put procedural safety in place for everybody.

And what procedural safety means is not that we can totally prevent any random thing from happening, right?

any given day.

But when a behavior is repeated, it becomes predictable.

It becomes foreseeable that something worse is going to happen if we don't act.

And historically, we have known that progressive discipline is a pretty good way to handle that type of situation.

It's frustrating in the sense that it doesn't necessarily fix the behavior, but it does make the organization a safer place and a more predictable place where the behavior is predictable, like the consequences predictable from the perspective of the student who is tempted to engage in the unsafe behavior and the consequences predictable from the victim's perspective, right?

So people know nobody's going to hurt me and get away with it here.

And I think that's what we need to restore in a lot of schools that have switched to restorative practices that don't provide that.

If restorative practices do not provide any kind of predictability, people are going to feel unsafe and people are going to withdraw from environments where they feel unsafe.

And for students, that means bad attendance.

We're having an epidemic of terrible attendance right now.

And I have to see the connection between that and progressive discipline disappearing.

Like if people don't have any guarantee that they're going to be safe when they go to school, if they know other people are going to do things that hurt them or hurt their, you know, just their mental sense of safety, they're not going to show up.

With staff, it means turnover.

It means people don't come back next year.

It means people quit mid-year.

So these are things we have to get right, and we have to not forget the work that progressive discipline does.

I talked the other day about Chesterton's fence and the idea that if you see a fence and you're like, I don't know why this is here, don't tear it down until you find out why it's there.

Figure out what it does.

And there's a lot to criticize about progressive discipline.

I get that people don't like suspension.

People don't like consequences because, of course, they're unpleasant.

But if we don't know what job they're doing, we can make some very serious mistakes like we're seeing in a lot of schools now.

So consequences have to increase if the behavior increases or repeats.

That does not fix the behavior.

It may mean that eventually that student doesn't get to be here anymore, and that's unfortunate, but it is better than people getting hurt.

Let me know what you think.