Exclusionary Discipline Isn't Bad — It's the Best Consequence for Dangerous Behavior

exclusion is one of the best consequences to use in schools, but there's been a lot of pressure in recent years to get rid of any kind of exclusionary discipline, because obviously students miss the opportunity to learn when they are excluded.

But the question is, what should be the appropriate consequence when a student does something that jeopardizes the learning?

And I think people who don't work in schools, but who talk about discipline and talk about exclusionary discipline in particular, Like, they lose sight of the fact that whatever the student is doing that got them excluded from school was stopping the learning, right?

The learning was not taking place already, and that's why the student got excluded.

So if you get in a fight, well, no learning is taking place while you're getting in a fight.

Lots of kids are distracted from learning.

They're, you know, distressed and disrupted because of that fight.

So excluding kids for that behavior results in more learning, right?

It doesn't result in less learning.

Like, yes, they need to be out of school for a while, and they don't learn much during that time.

but it results in more learning overall.

And I think that's what we've got to keep our eyes on.

And we've got to remember that historically, the other consequences that schools used for serious misbehavior were much worse.

I'm not even gonna say what they were because they were not appropriate.

And I'm glad now that we have exclusion as like the least harmful and yet serious enough consequence in response to serious misbehavior in schools.

See, when we're in schools, we have a responsibility.

When we bring kids together, we have a responsibility to keep them safe and to make sure that they can do what they're there to do, which is to learn.

And if we're afraid and unwilling to exclude kids when they violate that social contract, when they make the learning impossible for other people, when they are unsafe, then we are failing to uphold our obligation to all the students that we have essentially forced to be there, right?

School is a compulsory environment, but it's also an artificial environment where the adults set the rules.

And one of the rules that adults set in a school environment is that you don't retaliate, right?

You can't beat people up because they beat up your little brother, right?

The things in day-to-day life, you know, if you go to the park, like we don't have these same rules and people have to act differently to, you know, to keep themselves safe.

Well, we specifically tell kids in schools, you can't retaliate.

If somebody hits you, you don't hit them back.

So we have to be the ones as adults to say, here is how we are going to keep you safe.

Here's what we are going to do if someone is unsafe.

An exclusion for those reasons is not a bad thing.

It is in fact the best thing and it is the most logical and most humane consequence to behavior that's incompatible with a social setting.

And this is not something that schools invented, right?

The idea of exclusion for inappropriate behavior is not an idea that schools invented.

It's as old as human society, right?

The whole idea of society is that people get included or excluded based on their behavior, right?

Like, you can come sit around my campfire.

You know, 10,000 years ago, you can come sit around my campfire if you were willing to like not steal from me and hurt me and my family like that is that is how society forms is we constrain the worst behaviors through extending offers of inclusion and if those worst behaviors occur then we exclude people and we say i'm sorry like you're ruining this you can't be a part of it let me know what you think