A Different Approach to Discipline

A Different Approach to Discipline

  September 08, 2015    Verenice Gutierrez, PhD

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A Different Approach to Discipline

Ever since the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania released their analysis on suspensions and expulsions on August 18th, there have been several articles writing about the topic from a variety of perspectives.  As a school administrator I've cringed most at articles that suggest that what is implied in the report as well as in President Obama's reforms initiatives for school discipline is that students of color not be held accountable for their misbehavior.  That is not what I walk away with from the report or the initiatives.  Instead, I hear the call for the adults to have different approaches to school discipline because traditional approaches are leading to the disproportionality that has been documented.  I find it concerning that there are 84 districts in our southern states in which 100% of students suspended or expelled were Black.  That statistic requires further examination of the practices within those districts.  I don't know that any of them serve a population that is 100% Black which would be the only way that I could reconcile the 100% Black suspension or expulsion record but only to a degree.

In my first year as an urban K-8 principal I held seventeen expulsion hearings.  The offenses ranged from being in possession of a five inch serrated blade knife to possession of over $1,000 of marijuana (street value) to drinking in the bathroom.  The school was a mess and then some.  There are many factors that contributed to this environment and I had to change the environment because student safety was most definitely a concern.  Over the course of five years as the principal in the school I significantly reduced the number of expulsion hearings and suspension but it wasn't by turning a blind eye to misbehavior, it was by shifting the culture and the adult behavior.

One of the first adult behaviors that I addressed was what is being called race based discipline.  Who gets referred to the office is influenced by race, of the teacher and of the student.  The story I share most often is of getting a Kindergarten teacher to realize the impact of race in her actions and inactions regarding behavior.  The teacher came to talk to me with much angst about one of her Black male students whom I will call James (not his real name obviously).  James was dangerous on the playground she told me.  He play fights, he hits, he chases the girls and makes them cry.  She had tried everything from time outs to working with the parent but was now at her wits end with this child.  I promised to go observe him at recess and then meet with her again to discuss interventions and next steps.

I observed James at recess and he did engage in all the behavior the teacher had told me but I also saw what led to his behavior.  While observing James I noticed Aiden (not his real name) and Susie (not her real name) played a role in his behavior.  Aiden was the one who initiated the play fighting through imaginary swords.  His friends would then join him in outnumbering James which then led him to hit to defend himself from too many swords.  Susie often taunted James until he ran after her to get her to stop.  All her little friends joined in the running, squealing and tattling that James wanted to hit Susie who would then cry and proclaim she didn't know why.  I was ready to speak to the teacher.

At our meeting I asked the teacher what she felt needed to happen for James at this point.  Without hesitation she stated that James needed to be placed on a strict behavior plan that perhaps included isolating him at recess.  She also thought that James should have a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) conducted by the school psychologist.  In fact, she had already started the referral paperwork which she could have to me by the end of the day for my signature.  My response to her was that I also wanted a behavior plan and an FBA for Aiden which absolutely shocked her.  She said Aiden wasn't dangerous or of concern at all.  When I mentioned the play fighting she smiled and told me that Aiden was quirky that way.  He was always pretending to engage in Star Wars like play because he was into that geeky, nerdy stuff but he meant no harm.  Language for Black boy: dangerous; language for White boy: quirky, geeky, nerdy, imaginative.  Outcome for Black boy: Special Education referral; outcome for White boy: none. Yet both engaged in identical behavior.

I then addressed how Susie taunted and instigated James's interaction with the little girls.  Again the teacher had nothing but glowing things to say about Susie being a model student who was super intelligent.  She even told me that once Susie told her that James had threatened to kill her.  When I asked her why she hadn't reported this the teacher stammered about how she investigated it the incident and it turned out that Susie only thought he said it but he really didn't.  So why bring it up if it really didn't happen?  To prove that James was dangerous?  There was a lot of work that had to be done with this adult.  There was also work that had to be done with all three children around appropriate play on the playground.  However, James didn't need a behavior plan or an FBA or a suspension.  He and his peers needed to be retaught the rules of engaging in play during recess.  That was what the teacher had to do with her entire class as a next step.

There were also the referrals for insubordination or open defiance.  X student (yes, a student of color) is being openly defiant by refusing to stop tapping his pencil even though he has been asked several times.  The teacher took time out of instruction to write this referral and send the student to see me in the office.  I always asked students, "why are you here?" to which they often replied, "I don't know."  The second question, "what did you do?" may also be answered that way or with a firm, "nothing."  This openly defiant pencil tapper explained he didn't even know he was tapping the pencil or why this was the only teacher flipping out about it.  Dig a little deeper to find out that the behavior was a self soothing behavior which turned out to be the case for the openly defiant male of color who kept titling his chair. Neither behavior should have resulted in an office referral which led to the students missing instruction.  

Receiving referrals like this did result in a discussion about self soothing behaviors and how we all do it, even adults in staff meetings.  Trust me, teachers were not hanging on my every word.  Some of them were even texting or on Facebook during staff meeting but would crucify their students for such an infraction.  We talked about how whole schools are using exercise balls over hard plastic chairs because it helps students focus.  One teacher shared that she put velcro under the table tops so that students could rub it as a way to self sooth.  She didn't have any pencil tapping happening in her classroom.  Another teacher talked about tension bands that were wrapped around the legs of the chairs in her room.  Helped the squirmy little buggers to engage in learning while also getting some of the pent up energy out.

What about the student who just gets up while instruction is going on to wander around the room?  Well, is he/she disrupting instruction?  Is he/she a danger to themselves or others?  If not, dig deeper.  Does this child need to get up to help him/her attend better?  What is the overall impact of this behavior to the instructional environment and to the ability for others to learn?  Doing this work was not easy and it had to be done over a period of multiple school years.

Work also has to be done with the student body.  In year three of my principalship I started telling students that I saw that I was most disappointed that they had chosen to engage in behavior that disrupted their learning as well as the learning of others.  We talked about why learning was important, how they would feel if someone stopped them from learning when they really wanted to, what education meant for them and how they could advocate for themselves without disrupting learning.  There were students for whom this didn't work but it work for most of them.  Reminding them that the 15 minutes they had to spend waiting then listening to me lecture them were 15 minutes of instruction they missed.  I had some deep, honest conversations with students who were academically behind their peers about how they were using behavior to mask that they didn't understand what was happening in the classroom.  Being "bad" was better than being "dumb".

I will agree that allowing students of color to engage in behavior that isn't pro-social is not the way to address disproportionality in disciplinary data.  All students need to learn to sit still, raise their hands, wait their turns, etc.  They will have to do this beyond the school setting. What is needed is work with the adults while simultaneously working with the student body.  There was quite a bit of adaptive work that we engaged in over the course of several years to change the school culture as well as a variety of existing strategies that we adopted including restorative justice.  As we move forward with this dialogue about reforming disciplinary practice in K-12 school it is my hope that we remember to engage in adaptive leadership rather than focus solely on technical solutions.

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Superintendents: A Problematic Call to Action

Superintendents: A Problematic Call to Action

  August 25, 2015    Verenice Gutierrez, PhD

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Ronald Heifetz writes and lectures about technical vs. adaptive leadership. His work is captured in his book, Leadership on the Line (published in 2002).  I won't attempt to be expansive about his work but I am referencing here because of a call to action that I found in the School Superintendents Association to support a bill that would change how school districts have to fund special education.  You can read the call to action here: http://www.aasa.org/aasablog.aspx?id=37987&blogid=286

While I understand the rationale behind the call to action, I disagree with this approach to addressing mounting costs for special education.  I agree that a lot of money and resources are allocated to maintain current special education programs and delivery models.  However, the proposed solutions in the bill are purely technical.  What is necessary to address how and why special education programming isn't working is adaptive leadership.

The first step I propose towards adaptive leadership is a significant, comprehensive data dig.  Start with current Individual Education Plans (IEP) to have a full understanding of what services districts are currently providing.  What are the number of service hours that, per the IEP, special education personnel are legally obligated to provide in one academic year?  Once known, districts can determine if they have the appropriate personnel to deliver the hours that they have legally obligated themselves to provide.  This first step can be quite eye opening.  When we collected this data in my school my special education teacher came to this conclusion:

...the students I serve have high needs and the number of service minutes I am to provide exceeds the time constraints of the work week...I have 12 minutes between the end of my lunch duty and the time I have to be with students again.  This is my 'lunch break'.  There is no room in the schedule to account for a transition between groups; they are booked back to back.

I was fully aware of this issue.  This teacher was the second amazingly talented Special Education teacher I had hired for our building.  I prayed she would not leave us too while I worked furiously to get more support for her and for the students.  However, I had to work with a program administrator and a special education director who were stuck in technical, compliance driven leadership.  The adaptive task was to find ways that we could serve students in the general education classroom, where appropriate.  Another adaptive task was to be honest with ourselves and parents about what was written into the IEP.  Was it not only realistic but also necessary for student X to have 250 minutes of math support in one week.  This number amounted to 15% of the school week above and beyond the required 75 minutes of core math instruction for one child.  These conversations are not easy to have with the team, the parents or the special education department because the reaction is to find a technical solution where adaptive leadership is necessary.

A technical task that may happen after a true analysis of service hours has been completed may very well be a re-writing of IEPs.  And, if the team uses multiple data points to write realistic IEPs they may also find that some students no longer need services.  This was the case with our first amazing Special Education teacher.  Once she truly assessed students abilities and triangulated her data she found that some students no longer needed services.  Students were able to be exited from Special Education because we had hard data to demonstrate that they could be successful in general education.  There weren't that many students and I am not advocating to take services from students, simply be data driven.

A deeper part of the data analysis is to have hard numbers as to which students are referred to Special Education and for which reasons.  We found that most of the students referred for Special Education services happened to be second language learners.  That led to professional development for the staff about the process of second language acquisition, assimilation/acculturation and many sessions on the Special Education referral process.  Often second language learners will exhibit behaviors that are similar to those of a student with a learning disability.  However, the behaviors are appropriate for their linguistic level as well as what stage they may be in their assimilation/acculturation process.  The behavior does not necessarily indicate that there is a cognitive "problem" as much as the child is learning a new language and a new way of being.  The intersectionality of Special Education with Bilingual/ESL Education is a field that I believe needs to be of focus by educational leaders, especially those making policy and funding decisions.

The second piece of this work is "for which reasons".  If the data demonstrates an increase in "other health impaired" there may be cause to explore that further.  Aside from a high referral of second language learners we found a high referral of boys of color for "behavior".  Again, professional development was necessary to address how boys of color are often problematized for behaviors that educators do not find problematic in White children.  At some point I will do a whole post on this topic but here I will leave it only as an example. Remember that IDEA was originally meant to serve students with "true" disabilities such as blindness, deaf/hard of hearing or traumatic brain injury.  Yet, we have added other categories that students can be slotted into.  How are students being slotted?  Is it appropriate for them to be so?  These questions may have some technical solutions but I can assure you that there will be some adaptive work that will be required to create change if it is needed.

IDEA is now 40 years old.  Since its enactment in 1975 it has been reauthorized about every five years to ensure that students with disabilities are being appropriately educated.  As educators we should be involved in ensuring that policy appropriately reflects the reality of our school sites.  However, we should not be quick to list out technical solutions where adaptive leaderships is needed.

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How We Label Students Matters

How We Label Students Matters

  August 06, 2015    Verenice Gutierrez, PhD

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I have been reflecting on the path that lead me to be passionate about the intersectionality of Special Education and Bilingual Education.  Both of these fields are highly regulatory, there are federal mandates and benchmarks that must be reached annually.  Both fields require specialized training.  Educators that I have worked with that have made these fields their area of specialization are deeply committed to helping children.  Still, within these two fields we often find our most marginalized, vulnerable students for whom educational outcomes are less than desirable.

I am the oldest of five girls.  The two youngest are significantly younger than I, 18 and 20 years difference.  By the time the girls came along I was a college student working on a Bachelor's of Business degree.  As they grew, I wanted to ensure that their educational experience was different than mine in that I wanted them to have a quality education that wouldn't leave them with significant gaps as mine did.  Their bedroom was a classroom with the alphabet running along the top of the wall and the obligatory calendar corner where we learned days of the week, months of the year, counting, etc.  So despite the business degree, I ended up becoming an educator.  I enrolled in an alternative education program to expedite my acquisition of a teaching license.  I started substituting and fell in love with the process of educating children.

When the eldest of my two baby sisters entered school I had the first experience that lead me to combining the fields of Special Education and Bilingual Education.  Her two Kindergarten teachers wanted to refer her to Special Education because she just wasn't learning.  They felt she had a cognitive disability.  They wanted to know the conditions of her birth (breeched baby who had been without oxygen for a few minutes).  My mom agreed to the testing because it was sold as more support and who doesn't want more support for their child.  When the results came in there was discussion about two standard deviations from the mean, working within her potential, etc.  Basically we were told that my little sister was within the educable mentally retarded range.  No consideration was given to her being a Spanish dominant, second language learner through the identification process.  I remember I flipped out.  I wouldn't let my mother sign any papers and I wouldn't accept the diagnosis.  My baby sister could learn.  She learned every day in her little bedroom/classroom.  We read, we sang, she knew letters and numbers.  The only thing that worried us was that she inverted b's and d's and p's and q's.  Dyslexia, maybe, but definitely not educable mental retardation!

About this time the university open up an opportunity for a cohort to earn a dual Master's in Bilingual and Special Education.  I, and my sister's two teachers, were in the crowd of interested applicants.  I got in.  They didn't.  The more I learned, the harder I resisted and advocated for my sister to receive a proper education.

Then the baby entered kindergarten.  She refused to talk to the teacher the entire year.  She went into selective mutism.  This one they wanted to refer for Autism.  Autism?!  Why? How?  Because she wouldn't speak and they had no way of demonstrating that she had reached all the kindergarten benchmarks.  So I videotaped her meeting and exceeding all of the kindergarten benchmarks and speaking non-stop.  On tape she told me she wouldn't speak to her teacher because her teacher was an idiot.  I asked her why she thought that.  Well, the teacher told kids on the first day of school that they shouldn't cry or they would get sick.  "You don't get sick from crying," she said, "the teacher is an idiot".  And there you have it, five year old wisdom.  Not autistic.  Later this child would be put forth to be tested as gifted and talented.

Now my 18 years younger sister is enrolled in a Master's program for social work.  The 20 years younger sister is wrapping up a nursing degree.  However, had I not had access to the Master's program, had I not been with my mother at the various meetings, had I not resisted the labeling both girls would have had very different educational experiences and outcomes.  Their potential was being curtailed in kindergarten!  Their love of learning was going to be squashed because they would have been othered through the process of being labeled.  How I wish I could say that these were the only experiences I have come across in my 20 year career; sadly they are not.

When I became a principal of a school where 51% of the students spoke a language other than English as their first language I was shocked at the poor ESL service delivery model and alarmed at how Special Education was a dumping ground for so many English language learners and kids of color.  I found that students had been referred for not turning in homework and had been given a designation of being cognitively disabled.  Excuse me?  Not turning in homework is not one of the 13 exceptionalities nor should a behavior that may not be within a child's control be a cause for referral and subsequent evaluation.  Boys of color who couldn't sit still or mind their p's and q's where quickly referred for either ADHD (nope, teachers can't give this diagnosis I warned) or for Emotional Disturbance (this one lead me to pull out the DSM-IV and give a lesson on the spot).  I spent four years acting as the gatekeeper to Special Education.  I had to re-educate and re-train my staff to convince them that there is no magic fairy dust in Special Education, that we couldn't simply pawn the kids off to a specialist and that it was their responsibility to educate all children starting from where they were.  Yes, it is hard to have so much variance in skills.  Yes, differentiation takes more time and is hard work.  Yes, I expect you to do this.  Welcome to urban education.

In my last year I tackled the issue of overidentification of boys of color into the emotional disturbed category.  This was the toughest and most heart breaking.  The school had been quite effective at creating a direct school to prison pipeline.  A lot shifted when one of our 8th graders tried to stab his mother.  When he was adjudicated the judge requested his school file.  A file full of office referrals for insubordination, open defiance, fighting... Many of those referrals had resulted in suspensions.  So the judge went hard on him because he had a history of violence.  Our school file strongly supported the judge's assertions.  Except we failed that kid.  He had been screaming out for help since 3rd grade and the school kept being punitive rather than therapeutic.  We never stopped to question why he engaged in the behavior; we simply sent him out.  When we as a community looked at how our actions or inactions had set the course of this child's life, we all changed our behaviors and approach to handling "difficult" children in our school.  We became more compassionate.  We searched for ways to create a safe, inclusive learning environment while we taught the boys how to navigate the school system with more positive outcomes.

I am not going to claim to have fixed everything.  I did not create a utopia of a school building without any problems.  We still had our issues but I will claim that we (because I didn't do it alone) created a much better learning environment dedicated to producing positive educational outcomes.  So now I am in the next phase that leads me to want to have impact on a much broader scope.  I want to offer my experience, both theoretical and from hands-on experience, to other administrators who wish to address issues in their Special Education and ESL delivery models.  I am open to connecting with principals, directors, superintendents and school boards.  As a nation we cannot afford to continue to have the same results we have had with our culturally and linguistically diverse students.  All of us will be impacted by our nation's success of failure in meeting the educational needs of all our students.

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