No Suspensions for Fighting? That's How You Turn Your School into a Fight Club
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that eliminating suspensions for fighting sends the message that violence has no real consequences, predictably leading to more fights.
Key Takeaways
- No consequences means more fights - When students learn that fighting won't get them suspended, the incentive to avoid violence disappears
- This is entirely predictable - Every school that removes consequences for fighting sees an increase in violent incidents
- Students need a clear deterrent - The knowledge that fighting leads to suspension is one of the most basic safety mechanisms schools have
Transcript
What can you do if your district has accidentally turned your middle school into a fight club?
I saw this question from a middle school administrator today asking about what to do about fights.
There just have been so many fights this year and they don't seem to be stopping and the alternative measures that are put in place don't seem to be reducing the number of fights.
And my question of course is always, are you following progressive discipline?
Are you suspending students for fighting?
And of course, the answer was no.
And I want to be very clear that I'm not blaming the principal or the assistant principals for this situation.
This is almost certainly a district and probably also state policymaker issue that somebody has decided without evidence that it is possible to safely run a middle school and not suspend students for fighting.
And I don't know where you would have had to spend time to get that idea.
It's certainly not in the middle school.
Like, if you think...
You can run a middle school and allow fighting.
I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know what planet you're from.
But people would reject that framing like, oh, we're allowing fighting because they're doing something.
They're doing some alternative to suspension.
But clearly it's not working.
Like if you wanna do alternatives to X and what you're doing as an alternative works as well as X does or reasonably close, then okay, that's a true alternative.
When that's not the case, what we're having here now is we're actually allowing fights, right?
If you don't suspend students for fighting and they're fighting and they're not responding to the alternatives, then you are allowing fights.
Like what we tolerate is what we're going to get more of, right?
We're creating a culture where fighting is allowed because clearly nobody is taking the, you know, the alternatives to suspension seriously.
And that puts us in a position of basically running a fight club, right, where students are compelled to come to school.
They are required by law to come to school.
And when they're at school, they are allowed to fight.
That's the situation, right?
It is voluntary to fight.
It is mandatory to be at school.
And there are no circumstances under which you get sent home for doing that.
Well, we are allowing that.
We are promoting that.
We are putting students in a situation where they are fighting with one another.
And we've got to really look at our liability there.
Like, what happens when we get a kind of Karate Kid level brawl?
I don't know if you saw some of the later seasons of the new Karate Kid show, and it was kind of ridiculous.
But, like, I'm really worried that some schools are going to get there because they don't have any boundaries in place around behavior.
They have all these alternatives that they're putting all this faith in, these unproven alternatives to suspension, and they're not willing to say, you know what, you can't do that here.
If you do that here, you're going to get sent home.
If you do it repeatedly, you're going to get sent home repeatedly or placed in an alternative school or expelled.
We're putting a powder keg together, right?
We're putting a pressure cooker together when we allow fight after fight after fight and don't have a boundary in place that keeps everyone safe.
So if you're in this situation, again, my sympathy, but like I want you to understand the situation you're in and I want you to understand that it may not be your fault.
Please don't blame yourself if you're having to deal with ridiculous state and district policies that have put you in this position.
But don't believe the people who say that there are alternatives to suspension, because there really are not.
There are not alternatives to distance from violence, right?
If you were to tell a domestic violence victim that there are alternatives to leaving...
Well, I don't have a lot of faith in those alternatives.
I think if you want to help your friend who is a domestic violence victim, be safe.
The safety comes from getting out of that situation.
And when you have fighting, when you have violence in school, the only way to keep everybody safe is to remove the student who was violent for a period of time.
So let me know what you think about this.
How do we deal with this kind of fight club that's being created by bad discipline policy?
Let me know what you think.