The Plan B Classroom 247good idea if you’re interested in raising standards, but
most assuredly not a good idea if you want teachers to
respond to the behavioral, social, and learning needs of
individual students.
And to make things still worse, the zero-tolerance
driven discipline program in most schools is very much a
road map for Plan A: It’s a list (sometimes a very long
one) of things students can and can’t do and a list (some-
times a very long one) of what’s going to happen if they
do or don’t do those things. But here’s a true fact you
might want to ponder for a moment: Standard school
disciplinary practices don’t work for the students to
whom they are most frequently applied, and aren’t
needed for the students to whom they are never applied.
In other words, the school discipline program isn’t the
reason well-behaved students behave well; they behave
well because they can. We have little to show for all the
consequences—detentions, suspensions, expulsions, and
so forth—that are meted out on a daily basis to the ex-
plosive students in our midst. And yet the standard ra-
tionale for the continued use of consequences goes
something like this:
Administrator: We have to set an example for all our
students; even if suspension doesn’t help Rickey,
at least it sets an example for our other students.
We need to let them know that we take safety
seriously at our school.