Should Students Lose Their Right to Public Education If Their Behavior Is Dangerous?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder asks a provocative question about whether there's a point at which student behavior should result in losing access to a traditional school setting.
Key Takeaways
- Rights have limits - The right to public education doesn't include the right to endanger others
- Alternative settings are still public education - Moving a dangerous student to an alternative school isn't denying them education; it's providing appropriate placement
- Other students have rights too - The right to a safe learning environment must be balanced against any individual student's placement preferences
Transcript
If a student's behavior is so bad that they're hurting other people, they're making learning impossible for everybody else, should they lose their right to an education?
Check out what Jerry Brooks said with now about a million views, and then I'll come back and give you my take.
If your child cannot behave in the classroom and their behavior is disrupting the instructional learning of other students, then they should lose their privilege to a free and public education.
If your child is throwing books and flipping tables and cussing the teacher out and disrupting the educational process for all the students in the classroom, then they lose their right to a free and public education and they should be turned back over to their parents who can homeschool them or can pay for them to go to a school that can handle their behavior.
Now, I'm not talking about special education students.
All right, so is Jerry Brooks right?
And how do we think about what this might look like?
I think fundamentally he is right.
No student has the right to disrupt and ruin everyone else's learning through terrible behavior, right?
Like in any human societal situation, you don't get to ruin it for everybody else.
You don't get to hurt people.
And I think we've got to really reassert that concept up to and including expulsion if we need to.
But how do we do this?
How do we do this in a careful way so that we're not kicking kids out willy-nilly, we're not going back to a ridiculous kind of zero tolerance approach?
The answer is progressive discipline, right?
Progressive discipline is how schools have, you know, for my entire career, managed behavior in a way that says, here are the rules, here are the consequences.
If you do this, you get this consequence.
If you do this, you get this consequence, and so on, all the way up to expulsion.
And sometimes we need to expel kids.
Sometimes kids' behavior is so unsafe and so ruinous to education for everybody else that they just have to go.
And we don't want to go there and We need to be very careful about how we go there, but I think we do need to have a process in place for that.
So if that's what Jerry is talking about, I gotta say I'm with him.
I think that is just what is necessary for keeping people safe.
Because remember, schools are constructed environments that we're responsible for, right?
Like this is not the streets.
It's not on the streets where, you know, the police can be called or retaliation can be put in, you know, can be a deterrent to bad behavior.
Everybody is forced to be in that environment.
And if we have a kid who is unsafe with staff members, unsafe with other students, like we're responsible as adults for dealing with that.
And the way we deal with that is progressive discipline.
Rules and consequences, they've always worked, they still work.
Let me know what you think.