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 Commentary:
Signs of the Times
Calvin & Tricia Luker,
OurChildrenLeftBehind
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https://www.bridges4kids.org.
Today’s Detroit
News ran an article about the Dearborn, Michigan Public School’s
Code of Conduct. The article trumpets the Dearborn School
Board’s recent “triumph” in expanding its Student Code of
Conduct to 40-pages. Dearborn Schools Director of Student
Services, Wageh Saad, is quoted as saying, “the student code of
conduct is really a way to have a social contract in the schools
-- 'These are things we don't do.' Students need to be aware of
these."
Of course, our first thought was to wonder what difference this
new, tougher student code of conduct is going to make for
students with disabilities whose disabilities manifest
themselves in behavior challenges. Are there now going to be
more reasons and more rules that will make it more easy for more
administrators to kick out more students with disabilities? And
in the spirit of No Child Left Behind, will the new, tougher
code of conduct also make it easier to kick out low performing
general education students so that schools can stave off the
inevitable “failing school” another semester or two longer?
We were satisfied with this initial reaction to the article. The
Dearborn Schools evidently has problems which it feels it can
address by toughening up its code of conduct. In our younger
days we heard such conduct referred to as treating the record,
rather than treating the patient. But that seems to be exactly
what is happening here. The Dearborn Schools doesn't want to
delve into the behavior challenges existing in the heart and
minds of its culturally diverse population – Dearborn has the
largest community of Arab and Arab-Americans in the United
States – so rather than understanding challenging behavior and
teaching skills that lead to a stronger social contract between
students, it chooses just to make more conduct illegal and
subject to discipline.
Isn’t that exactly where we are with the IDEA reauthorization?
The law has been implemented for less than two years. A clear
majority of the anecdotal and research data suggest that IDEA
’97 is doing everything that its drafters and its supporters,
including parents, advocacy organizations and teachers, intended
and hoped it would do. The positive behavior support provisions
within Part B, even though brand new with IDEA ’97, also seem to
be making a difference in the school learning opportunities for
all students, including those who do not have disabilities.
Enter the school administrators, school boards and their
lobbyists. What do they tell Congress? The school administrators
and school boards don’t tell Congress that IDEA ’97 is making a
difference or that students both with and without disabilities
are being afforded greater opportunities for social contact and
social skills development. No, they tell Congress they spend too
much time on paperwork and not enough time is being spent
teaching. What they are focused on is not the outcomes of the
students but the condition of the record. Their proposal for
IDEA reauthorization is to make it easier to treat the record –
their over-stated paperwork concerns – while at the same time
removing accountability structures like short-term objectives
and benchmarks that would dare hold them accountable for their
educational outcome through the students. The school boards and
administrators do not know how to measure or acknowledge teacher
or student performance and accountability. They only know how to
measure their own administrative performance and how to elevate
their performance concerns above the outcomes of dedicated
teacher and student performance.
Is it any wonder, then, that Congress would hear the lobbyists
loud and clear, because after all, what is accountable, in
Congressional terms, about excluding parents, students, families
and supporting organizations from the Congressional debate over
the IDEA reauthorization? Was the House of Representatives vote
a ringing endorsement of strong student outcomes, or was it a
complacent, even compliant following along with the school board
practice of treating the records to make them look good? And
won’t the same members of Congress go back home to their
districts and tell their school boards that they were with them
when it came time to deal with the paperwork issue and to duck
accountability for the student performance outcomes?
It seems like every week we have a different theme. This week
the theme is accountability. School boards who feel that they
will improve school behavior and the learning environment by
increasing the number of student code violations soon will
discover that even more time will be stolen from students to
treat records rather than confronting and solving core behavior
challenges. This Congress runs the same risk of diverting
accountability efforts from student performance to paperwork
performance if either proposed IDEA reauthorization bill passes.
Let us use one of our primary issues, elimination of short-terms
objectives and benchmarks, as an example of what we are
discussing. School administrators say it’s too much work to
chart performance on short-term objectives, presented as a
paperwork or record issue. But short-term objectives and
benchmarks, properly recorded and measured, demonstrate student
achievement, student progress toward goals, the effectiveness of
the IEP and the effectiveness of the school in implementing the
IEP. So, who is benefiting from eliminating short-term
objectives? And where does accountability fit in once they have
been eliminated?
It is tragic when school boards, the bodies elected by parents
and other members of communities to run schools, find it
necessary to resort to creating exploding school codes in order
to address what they perceive as exploding school conduct. Is
there a reason to be concerned about conduct in school?
Absolutely. But does the Dearborn action have any reasonable
chance of changing, let alone solving, broad student [and
teacher/administrator] conduct issues within school buildings?
We think not.
Will gutting IDEA ’97 and eliminating measures placed in IDEA
’97 to measure and ensure student/teacher/school accountability
to the IEP, the family and the community improve the quality of
education each individual student will receive? We think not.
How tragic it is that we are at this point where in order to
improve ourselves we deliberately walk forward into the mud we
just walked out of. This is exactly what the Dearborn School
District did with the school code of conduct, and this is
exactly what the school administrators are determined to
persuade Congress to do with IDEA. Let us hope that it is their
mistake that they think our measurement is clean faces rather
than clean boots. Let them know we see the whole picture.
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