Paul Lauter, distinguished author and scholar, found the following disciplinary principles, which were posted in German state schools in the early twentieth century, circa 1910.
The basic idea: No excuses! Conform! Obey! Authority is always right!
Sound familiar?
Translation:
–Students must sit up straight
–Hands must be kept together on the desk (table)
–Feet must be placed side by side on the floor.
–Students must keep their eyes on the teacher.
–Laughing, whispering, talking, moving or looking around are forbidden.
–Students must signal with the pointer finger of the right hand; the left hand supporting the elbow.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A Deep Love & Respect To All who fight this tooth and nail. Literally chewing and clawing their way through the current totalitarian mindset into a moment of authentic teacher & student encounter, inquiry and adventure.
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Did all the children following these rules learn to read, write and do math?
If so, that would be better than the current system. Currently many school children do not learn to read, write and do math. Over 40% of North Carolina high school graduates need remedial work in their first year college (community or 4 year).
Once they learn to take care of them selves by reading and following directions they are more prepared to earn a living. Not learning those basic skills condemn them to a life of poverty or crime and prison.
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So what? I needed remedial help, too. Since then I earned two bachelor degrees and one masters from two well-regarded universities. I have also published dozens of articles. Today, I am a world-class teacher.
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The children following all those rules learned to be Nazis.
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To answer your first question, Tom H: NO!
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WOW!!! GOD BLESS YOU TOM
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Instead of encouraging our students to follow directions and obey rules we prefer to suspend them from school, get them roaming the streets, join gangs, shoplift and then lock them up in jail.
It’s setting kids up for failure, when you do not give them rules to guide them!
We cannot keep creating our own problems; check all the white cops shooting black kids: in almost all the cases, although the the cop UNPROFESSIONALLY escalated the situation BUT the black kid DID NOT FOLLOW DIRECTION.
It all started or was encouraged by INDISCIPLINE in schools…check all the records!!!
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Of course if a student chronically disrupts class and shows flagrant rudeness, even cruelty, to a teacher, he should not be punished. Because punishment doesn’t work. And punishment is abuse. And it only turns kids into fascists. And the teacher probably did something to deserve it. But I wonder what the anti-punishment crowd thinks should happen if one student bullies another student to the brink of suicide. Should the bully not be punished? Or if a student constantly race-baits another student, or sexually-harasses another student? Should punishment be off the table then too? Should a student be punished if he smashes the classroom window? Yes? But not if he smashes the learning process or individual psyches?
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Duane Swacker: agreed.
And it is precisely these sorts of practices and mindset that lead to predictable (and avoidable) failure over and over and over again for the vast majority of students.
Exactly why this sort of thing is literally missing, even as an allusion or hint, from the website (and reality) of Lakeside School. *Bill Gates. His two children.*
Now I wonder why that is????
😎
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“Did all the children following these rules learn to read, write and do math?”
Hard to believe someone even said this. Talk about missing the big picture…
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What exactly do you mean by they did not learn to read, write and do math? Having some expertise in the area of reading, I find it a gross generalization to say they “could not read.” If this is because the students did not score as well on standardized tests as the college in which they enrolled would have liked, it was probably do to a lack of reading among young people today. This results in lower levels of broad background knowledge and lower levels of vocabulary than can be gained by reading textbooks only.
As a teacher, if I wanted to know if someone could read, I began looking at the results students obtained on standardized history tests. This told me they could read and understand material they had been taught.
Reading tests include passages from many areas and incorporate many styles of writing. To do well on them, one must have multiple experiences in life or through reading. I have seen English as a Second Language students score better on standardized reading tests than native English speakers. This was because they simply spent more time reading in either their native language or in English.
Self-reported reading for enjoyment correlates highly with higher reading scores on standardized tests. Reading makes you a better reader so you begin to like reading better so you read more.
Motivating young people to read is the trick.
On the other hand, perhaps you are referring to an inability to think about what is being? That perhaps can be remediated through class discussion and given the emphasis on test prep and right answers in some of today’s schools, thinking may have been left out of the curriculum.
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Thank you for your comments rum, etc.
Very glad you stuck it out and today others are benefitting from your persistence . How about the kids who dropped out or did not get the remedial work — how are they doing?
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Utah’s model “stack em deep and teach em cheap” doesn’t work so well. Too many children in a classroom invites chaos. The teacher spends to much time on management and not enough time teaching. Sometimes the idea of herding cats really applie. Too many children in a classroom also means that children do not get the attention they personally need to succeed. When there are too many children in classroom, some children fly under the radar, they do not complete assigned work, daydream, or allow more competent children to do the heavy work in class discussions. There is so much work to do that the teacher cannot complete the task of following through for each child. If we want better results, we need to limit the numbers of children in each class. This is absolutely needed in the early grades where the teaching of reading and early math skills are taught. This is the foundational work needed for success throu out a child’s education. Too many children in the classroom guarantees failure for some.
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Amen! You should see me doing lunch duty–often alone–with hundreds of middle school students. Anyone who says that “class size doesn’t matter” should try out a Utah school sometime.
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You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
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And the corollary as proposed by a now retired “country boy” high school biology teacher in reference to all the silly mandates from the adminimals that he knew were worthless thoughts: “And I ain’t suckin on the back end to make it drink!”.
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rum, sodomy & the lash: ah, you put me in mind of Dorothy Parker—
“[When asked to use ‘horticulture’ in a sentence:] You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”
😏
And I love her prescient description of rheephormster delight: “The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed.”
$tudent $ucce$$: ain’t it grand?!?!
😎
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American classrooms in 1908 were veritable laboratories of student-directed free expression–talking out of turn, roaming the classroom, and ignoring the teacher and/or her directives were the norm. It worked so well that class sizes were expanded to 40 or 50 students or more.
It was this free-wheeling child-centered environment, not a culture of high expectations and discipline, that built the foundations of the citizen army that overthrew evil and saved the world.
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IN 1908 AMERICAN SEGREGATED SCHOOLS….LET’S BE REALISTIC AND SPEAK THE TRUTH. HOW MANY STUDENTS OF COLOR DROPPED OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL OR GET SUSPENDED AND END UP IN JAIL COMPARED TO STUDENTS IN THOSE 1908 SEGREGATED SCHOOLS????
DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOLS IS AT ZERO-LEVELS (IF NOT SUB-ZERO)…AND WE SEE IS HAMPERING STUDENTS OF COLOR MORE THAN WHITE STUDENTS. WHO GET SHOT BY POLICE? (BLACK STUDENTS). WHO GETS RUFFLED UP IN CLASS BY POLICE?? (BLACK STUDENTS).
WE HAVE TO RE-THINK THIS NEO-SLAVERY MENTALITY THAT SETS UP AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDNETS FOR FAILURE!!!
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You lived back then, Timmy?
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This day after Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for this comment.
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If my sarcasmometer is mal-functioning Tim. please let me know. But if it is working please do some reading on American public schools from 100 years ago.
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I expect you’re joking, so I don’t get the point. Early 20thc rural schools were the norm, small, w/student desks bolted down in rows to face teacher desk on raised platform. Rules were not much different than those posted for 1908 Germany, & enforced with paddle ruler, corner stool w/dunce cap. In cities, the influx of immigrants drove the large size of classes, not some scaling up of a freestyle environment. Immigrants resented the ‘Protestant indoctrination’ & established parochial schools whose strict enforcement of behavior & corporate punishment was legendary right up thro the early 60’s.
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It’s such a shame!!!… 1908 American schools indeed…the anti-punishment movement can stake and say anything to destroy students of color
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One of the most interesting elements I see is the Sütterlin on the board – but of more interest in the context of this educational blog:
This picture of Schulregeln seems to be contrasted with KIPP schools – strict rules for low income schools.
This picture isn’t just from any school – it’s from a school in Rixdorf. [as can be seen on the board]
Rixdorf has been and continues to be an Arbeiterbezirk – a working class neighborhood. [It’s in what is now Neukölln / Kreuzberg in Berln.]
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CLASSIC NEO-RACISM
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Right, expecting poor students of color to strictly adhere to rigid rules that are not imposed on affluent white children is racism. Nothing “neo” about it, though.
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Yes, it is neo- because it is a new way of undermining the capabilties of students of color! Our students need discipline – call them rigid rules if you wish! Our upbringing defers from the White. Education that does not take into account the cultural differences of students is a disservice!
And you see it play out daily in AMERICA….school-prison-pipeline!!
It is the new form of slavery!! NEO-SLAVERY! NEO-RACISM!!
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Please give this a read, Olukayode: http://mytruesense.org/2013/10/02/the-agenda-behind-educating-black-and-brown-children/
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“Our students need discipline – call them rigid rules if you wish! Our upbringing defers from the White. Education that does not take into account the cultural differences of students is a disservice!”
Exact same argument with slightly different labeling has been [mis]applied to just about everybody under the sun, e.g., the Irish, and “poor white trash” from Tennessee and other places, and Italians. Same old same old.
Children of all backgrounds shouldn’t be treated like animals and sent to the equivalent of dog obedience school in order to be trained into a willing acceptance of a lifelong lowly status in society aka servility.
So yes, Dienne, there’s nothing “neo” about it.
😎
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“Our students need discipline – call them rigid rules if you wish!”
So you (and I presume you’re black) are making the argument that black kids need a different kind of education than white kids? Are you sure you want to go down that road? And talk about racism in the same breath?
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Unless I’m mistake, there is discipline in every classroom. Just not the Eva Moskowitz type silent prisoner discipline.
Anyhow, didn’t Hitler take the kids from their parents and educate them as he saw fit, choosing occupations for each? How’d that work out for that population?
If parents choose to send their kids for an education in silent obedience with infractions for a crooked tie or untied shoe or untucked shirt or an “inappropriate” hairstyle – and the like – who am I to argue with them anymore? I’m so tired of arguing that children should be treated like individual human beings and be able to enjoy full books instead of close reading, and be able to be creative, etc.
The problem with people like Eva is that she is a greedy pig who wants all the “scholars” – rhymes with dollars – to feed at her trough. Her idea of choice is no choice, all Eva all the time, everywhere, for every kid.
We can’t peacefully co-exist because it isn’t about the kids, its about the cash. More schools for Eva, Kipp, etc., more money for their investors. More technology, more money for Bill Gates. Treat them like disobedient prisoners, dumb down the education, make them compliant….so they can go on to serve the 1% as cheep labor. Community college? Its good enough for “those kids.” Ivy league uppity college will still exist for the kids of the wealthy, where even if they are dumb as rocks (George Dubya) they can grow up to be president, because their pedigree and connections will make it so.
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Thank you for this article, Donna. I have read and digested it. I am a staunch supporter of DuBois outlook on Negro education (and needless to say that I oppose Booker’s). Yet, I do not see nor agree with the parallelism the author seeks to establish between what Rockefeller did sponsoring Eugenics or clamoring for a special type of education for people of color AND the current need for structure, discipline and high expectations for our African-American students.
From my name you could tell, I was not born in the U.S. My current students in the predominantly African-American school where I teach can not compete with students I taught in third-world Nigeria in subjects like Biology and Chemistry, especially if these American students do not take AP versions of those courses.
The reform being financed by the corporate guys (Gates and Walmart coy) are essential to bring the content standards to par with THIRD-WORLD NATIONS (TALK LESS OF ADVANCED NATIONS LIKE CHINA, et al). Their procedure may be faulty but their intent (which I disagree is the same with that of Rockefeller and Booker) is GOOD (high academic expectations)! Let stop telling black children that they cannot achieve; NOT ALL BLACK STUDENTS WITH BEHAVIOR OR DISCIPLINARY ISSUES NEED IEP or SPECIAL EDUCATION!!!
OUR CHILDREN CAN AND SHOULD ALSO ASPIRE TO GO TO HARVARD, YALE, et al
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The Waltons, et al. do not want all children, or poor children, or low class, middle class, etc. to go to ivy league colleges. They want for those children, if they do not go to work for McDonalds or Walmart and such, to attend community colleges, where degrees in hairdressing and lawn mowing will become the norm. Dental hygienist, medical billing coder….THAT is the future the Waltons want for children not of the caliber of their own. Think on that.
If you truly believe that the Waltons and the 1%ers want poor kids to attend Harvard, you’re mistaken.
The common core is the dumbing down of curriculum, not the holding to high standards it purports to be.
I have never believed, nor stated, that children with behavior issues or hued skin tones require IEPs or special education. I think all children should be treated equally. I’ve written here before that my sis in law-s nephew is a genius with Asperger’s syndrome. He required thousands of dollars more in education suitable for his talents, gifts and idiosyncrasies. He will be graduating high school soon and attending college (i don’t know where) and wants to work in NY. If it were up to the Waltons, he’d likely have been medicated and hospitalized for his social inabilities.
Anyhow, we can agree to disagree. I believe every children deserves a chance to imagine, to create, to think critically, to THINK, to HAVE THOUGHTS….not be treated like a silent future criminal and taught to fill in bubble tests, such facts, for Eva Moskowitz’s scholars, rhymes with dollars, that won’t even get them into “select” high schools.
What good is knowing how to fill in a bubble while keeping hands behind backs and walking a silent line?
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I insist it is neo-….how many Irish teenagers were imprisoned? How many Italian kids were shot repeatedly by police for insurbination to authority?
better to have dog-house obedience than to keep our children in perpetual slavery…neo-slavery!
IT IS EVIL TO TELL OR TRAIN CHILDREN TO DEFY AUTHORITY. WE SEE THE RESULTS PLAYOUT DAILY IN TODAY’S AMERICA!!!
I don’t need to give you names….Was it an Italian kid or Irish white trash kid that was shot 16 times in Chicago???
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This is a list of the colleges attended by the alumni of KIPP schools just in New York City. Plenty of Ivies as well as places like Oberlin, Davidson, Trinity, Bryn Mawr, Tufts, etc. — 1%er havens all.
http://www.kippnyc.org/kipp-through-college/kipp-college-list-colleges
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Tim,
Overall, for those who survive KIPP and get accepted to any college… only 30% of that creamed subset finish all the way to a Bachelor’s Degree, the other 70% quitting for some reason or another.
What went wrong with that 70%?
There’s something about this militaristic pedagogy that is not conducive to success at the university level. Even KIPP has acknowledged this, and to its credit, is trying to fix it.
For example, at private schools, when students engage in some kind of organized illegal protest against school leadership — over whatever… it could be many things — the teachers and school leaders are inwardly contented at such a development. They’ve done their job.
I remember one story about a KIPP student raised an objection that nothing was being done to commemorate Black History month. He was disciplined severely, and barred from an upcoming field trip. This story is somewhere on the net, written by the student himself.
The upshot: obedience must prevail at all times.
Compare this kids coming out of a private school… where they are encouraged to think for themselves, question authority and orthodoxy, etc. When those KIPP-sters have to go head-to-head with those kids, they get clobbered academically.
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Olukayode Banmeke
The point you’re making is perhaps easier to understand from a parental viewpoint. Looking at a different sector– the wealthy NJ area– there is a number of kids who fall off the radar due primarily to the sort of poor parenting/ lack of moral family values that can flourish in areas like mine. Alcoholic parent, a parent who smokes dope or drinks with their kid, parents who buy their kid out of every scrape with the law, who exert undue pressure on admin/teachers to change Johnny’s grade, emotional neglect/ absent parents. The school system cannot really compensate for this. But sadly it is usually complicit, by caving to parental pressure, by enforcing its own rules rarely or inconsistently, by changing rules for star athletes & the like. The kids may avoid jail & shooting, but very often start young on alcohol/drug addiction & take an extra decade or two to become independent & productive.
Our local pprs as we speak are full of news of the million-+ settlement the town has to pay a rowdy, blatantly über-wealthy family whose drunk, entitled, verbally-abusive son triggered a fracas w/cops yrs ago (young man gets a special big check in his own name). Yes, cops technically overstepped the line, but a family w/any moral bearings wouldn’t have hung on like a dog w/a bone to its entitled, righteous, expensive lawsuit against its neighbors. The message is a clear to local youth: there are no real boundaries for those w/enough gall & enough $. And all the neighbors have to pony up the cash to fix problem created by upbringing of negligent parents.
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What is going on out there? I retired in 2013 and spent most years teaching African-American and Hispanic students. There were days when discipline was an issue in the large urban schools, but crowd control is any speaker’s challenge. I made an effort to match the lesson content and its delivery to the group I was teaching. However, I never found it necessary to impose the kinds of discipline that this site speaks about. And I have to wonder why these schools impose these structures when they have selected for kids who will abide by this regimen. If the kids accept this structure, they probably don’t even need it!
One year a head counselor set up classes in which the students were clustered based on behavior. My team got the well-behaved kids. I needed few “good manners” (I gave up on rules) to have attentive, disciplined students. It would be fun to take credit for these “disciplined” classes, but it was not me. It was most likely their social/economic class, family structure, and community support, just as it was when I taught in an all-white small town.
It has always seemed to me that the public has wanted to turn its back on the issue of discipline. Meanwhile, schools are left to follow ridiculous centralized discipline regulations that are meant to forestall law suits, that sound good to the public, and that result in chaos in some classes. This is definitely one area in which teachers need to be experts and not fresh off the street.
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Not much point in arguing the extremes, as perhaps an ignorant emotionally-challenged twit like David Coleman may have you do. You can learn from them, with huge grains of salt, but argue from a sane, humane middle, not as if we never evolved.
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The irony is overwhelming!
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Googling Marc Tucker, Bill Gates, or other prominent yet shady privateers will, sooner or later, bring up references to fascism and eugenics. And did 1908 German education influence 1936 German education? Well, here it is again so you can mark the similarities:
http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/frau01.htm
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Yet, “Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.”
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I don’t think we can push that point very far. U.S. schools of 1908 weren’t too far removed from the rules in the posting. Heck, in France in the 1950’s kids were still hushed up & sat in rows facing the teacher, reciting their lessons by rote.
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This kind of discipline of the body as well as mind is what allowed Hitler to transfix Germany with horrific results.
The military utilizes this kind of discipline to get soldiers to follow orders no matter the circumstances. If what is wanted is a citizenry who follow orders without question, utilize these tactics.
If we wish to educate, what we have perceived as developing humans to their highest potential as human beings then do what American education has been about.
One educates people, one trains animals. The kind of discipline described above is a kind of training, not education wherein children learn to discipline their minds to seek ever broader parameters of perspective, to seek those “glimmers of truth”, to think critically.
It is absolutely true that a kind of discipline which allows for the educative process to proceed is imperative. Without it education of groups of people cannot take place. Chaos is not conducive to learning but group stifling of body and mind is not what it is all about in my book.
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We are a nation at risk! Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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I don’t what kind of education tells students NOT to follow directions! This is the evil that is being perpetuated in the name of anti-reform movement; yet, almost every month in America, black children face the brunt of this anti-structure, anti-discipline deception!
Instead of talking about 1908 and Nazi Germany education which nobody on this blog/ comment thread experienced (were alive in 1908??) WHY NOT TALK ABOUT THE SCHOOL-TO-PRISON-PIPELINE brought about by lack of functional MORAL education in our system. What is the purpose of an education that those NOT instill in students VIRTUE, viz, respect for authority, love, humility, civility??
Or is discipline antithetic to American-freedom? I vouch the Founders of this Greta Nation will condemn such virtue-less of approach to socializing children.
How do you explain the high incident of black students being shot down, and violated by White Police? It is NOT just racism…it is LACK of discipline. And CHECK THE RECORDS, CHECK THE RECORDS, if you’ll be honest: this same victims of White Police brutality and violence have the same RECORDS OF LACK OF RESPECT FOR SCHOOL AUTHORITY!
LET’S STOP DESTROYING OUR KIDS!
It’s unthinkable that a teenager would be handcuffed, let alone put in jail in third-world countries!
Do we prefer to jail our teenagers than to help them obey rules???
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It’s completely sick that you, a black person, blame police brutality on black people instead of putting the blame squarely where it belongs – on the police system that serves the white supremacist order of society. You can say you support DuBois over Booker, but your words here say otherwise. You are all about respectability – if black people act properly, there will be no problems, you are saying. But history has proven that wrong time and time again. As DuBois says, it’s not how a black person acts or dresses or how well educated he is – it’s his mere presence in a racist system that is the problem. Beating kids into submission the way Moskowitz and others do is not protecting them from anything, it’s just depriving them of the humanity they could otherwise experience.
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I once worked in a high school that had several excellent black teachers from Africa and the Caribbean. They shook their heads in dismay as they watched many of the African-American kids put all their energy into fooling around and cultivating a tough persona, and very little energy into academics. There was plenty of defiance of authority, but it was gratuitous and counter-productive defiance, not the useful and important kind we want when faced with evil regimes. A handful of activist teachers –white, black and Hispanic, all American-born –all but praised the misbehavior as Standing Up to the Man and combatting institutional racism. There were frequent insinuations that, because much of the faculty was white, that white teachers were somehow at fault for the low achievement and misbehavior, and that dialogue and training were required. I agree with Mr. Banmeke that the tender-hearted enablers of egregious misbehavior are actually harming black kids.
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It is the elephant in the room…”nobody wants to say that our kids need to do better…because we do not train them to know better!!!”; I guess I’ll leave at that! When you read DuBois, always place it context (prior Brown vs. Board). You will tell me that training kids to defy authority is NOT evil?
I say it is not just sickening BUT EVIL, to absolve ourselves and our kids totally of blame in the CURRENT rampant cases of police brutality! The adult or the professional (in this case, the racist police system) should take majority of the blame; YES, but we must be honest with ourselves, we have our own share of the blame. OBEYING DIRECTIONS is not demeaning!
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I’m starting to believe that today you came out of the blue and are totally turning a discussion about one thing into something else. Do you believe that women in burkas who get raped by their village men were being seductive when covered from head to toe? Then those same women are stoned to death for being whores because they were asking for it the same way you are stating that people of color are baiting police because school didn’t turn them into obedient machines? I’m wondering now who exactly you are. I don’t believe for a moment your stories anymore.
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Right. Tamir Rice should have just obeyed the police and he’d be alive today.
Oh, oops, he didn’t have time to obey before he was shot dead.
I’m starting to agree with Donna – you’re just a troll pretending to be black. But on the chance that you are real, seek help. You have some kind of deep seated Stockholm Syndrome.
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Donna, you are entitled to your own interpretation of what I have said. You don’t have to believe me or know where I came from. “Obedient Machines”, “Baiting Police”…those are your own words NOT MINE!
The question is: Is there a correlation between those individual black teenagers who were victims of unprofessional and racist police violence and the victims’ schooling experience?
Have we and are we setting of black kids for failure by insinuating that ALL forms of defiance to authority is acceptable?
I don’t know who you are or what you do? But I’m sure you wouldn’t prefer to have your own students wearing monitoring anklets in class or having a probation officer visit them during class…ALL because they have ran foul of the LAW!
I haven’t changed the subject: What type of discipline is appropriate in k-12 education? How is the lack of discipline and moral instruction negatively affecting our students and setting them up for failure in the larger society?
Again, I repeat go and check the high school disciplinary records of black students who recently were victims of police violence; then you’ll see the EVIL that is being perpetuated by the so-called ANTI-PUNISHMENT movement in America!
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I just think it is interesting that as a young white middle-class farmer’s daughter, I was taught that if a policeman or deputy told me to do something, I was to do it. As my father said, they had weapons and whatever the issue was, it would be dealt with later. I am not sure I had ever seen a policeman at that point, but I remembered it later in NYC when a policeman ordered me to stop my car as I was driving slowly on Broadway. I did even though he was on the sidewalk walking his patrol.
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Pretty much describes the household I grew up in.
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With regard to this kind of schooling, look what it did to the German citizenry and how it got them to support Hitler, without which the atrocities may well never have happened.
First you beat them down. Then you systemically dumb them down. Then you gain their trust because they are not educated enough to question. Then they support you in your meteoric rise to power. Then they support your crimes. And if they don’t, you get to beat them down again.
Is that the trajectory of the USA, ending up in the Hunger Games?
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Dienne, when you resort to name-calling and abuse: it shows who you are! ANTI-DISCIPLINE MOVEMENT IS THE NEW FORM OF SLAVERY IN AMERICA!!! Why do you people want to keep on destroying our children? WHY???
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Respecting authority is fine as long as you can equally question it and fight it when it becomes abusive.
Please do not conflate rspecting authoritarianism with authoritativeness, the latter of which all children need, but they need it grow up to become intellectuals, artisans, and critical thinkers.
What has happened to our black unarmed youth reflects a lack of critical thinking on the power structure’s behalf. You know as well as I do that it is not acceptable. Would you not agree?
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Authoritarian—-represented by the corporate public education demolition derby
>>>>Children are expected to follow the strict rules established by the parents. Failure to follow such rules usually results in punishment. Authoritarian parents fail to explain the reasoning behind these rules. If asked to explain, the parent might simply reply, “Because I said so.” These parents have high demands, but are not responsive to their children. According to Baumrind, these parents “are obedience- and status-oriented, and expect their orders to be obeyed without explanation”
Authoritative—modeled by the best teachers and parents—-but not by the actions and goals of the Bill Gates Cabal, Eva Moskowitz and Michelle Rhee whose styles fit the Authoritarian model of blind obedience or face the rod.
>>>>Like authoritarian parents, those with an authoritative parenting style establish rules and guidelines that their children are expected to follow. However, this parenting style is much more democratic. Authoritative parents are responsive to their children and willing to listen to questions. When children fail to meet the expectations, these parents are more nurturing and forgiving rather than punishing. Baumrind suggests that these parents “monitor and impart clear standards for their children’s conduct. They are assertive, but not intrusive and restrictive. Their disciplinary methods are supportive, rather than punitive. They want their children to be assertive as well as socially responsible, and self-regulated as well as cooperative”
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All I ask is for ALL those against my point of view do is: REFLECT. That is is the minimum you can do as educators, education policy makers, parents or education lovers! That is what the sage, SOCRATES, would demand of ALL of you. I cannot be cowered by the multitude of opposing voices or of those who choose to be indecent in their choice of words. I am more livid than any of you as far as the discourse and your points of view are: but my education demands that I be civil.
REFLECT on the facts on the ground here in America. Don’t go too far extrapolating and drawing disputable conclusions about World War I or II or even Nazi German education.
Is it wrong to educate our children to have respect for authority? Would there be any need to call in a police into a classroom, if students obey simple instructions? It is unimaginable and a HUGE shame that we should have police officers coming into classrooms in the first place. Not to talk of an unprofessional white male police officer dragging a black female student like a dog in the classroom as shown to the whole world on TV screens.
Who draws the line between authoritativeness and authoritarianism? Is it the student? LET’S STOP SETTING OUR KIDS (ESPECIALLY BLACK KIDS) UP FOR FAILURE.
LET’S REFLECT!
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I don’t think Socrates is the right person. What we can be sure about Socrates was that he was remarkable for living the life he preached. Taking no fees, Socrates started and dominated an argument wherever the young and intelligent would listen, and people asked his advice on matters of practical conduct and educational problems.
Socrates has been described as a gadfly — a first-class pain. The reason why this charge is somewhat justified is that he challenged his students to think for themselves – to use their minds to answer questions. He did not reveal answers. He did not reveal truth. Many of his questions were, on the surface, quite simple: what is courage? what is virtue? what is duty? But what Socrates discovered, and what he taught his students to discover, was that most people could not answer these fundamental questions to his satisfaction, yet all of them claimed to be courageous, virtuous and dutiful. So, what Socrates knew, was that he knew nothing, upon this sole fact lay the source of his wisdom. Socrates was not necessarily an intelligent man – but he was a wise man. And there is a difference between the two.
What about Plato?
Plato realized that the Athenian state, and along with it, Athenian direct democracy, had failed to realize its lofty ideals. Instead, the citizens sent Socrates to his death and direct democracy had failed. The purpose of The Republic was something of a warning to all Athenians that without respect for law, leadership and a sound education for the young, their city would continue to decay. Plato wanted to rescue Athens from degeneration by reviving that sense of community that had at one time made the polis great. The only way to do this, Plato argued, was to give control over to the Philosopher-Kings, men who had philosophical knowledge, and to give little more than “noble lies” to everyone else. The problem as Plato saw it was that power and wisdom had traveled divergent paths — his solution was to unite them in the guise of the Philosopher-King.
Aristotle?
As a scientist, Aristotle’s epistemology is perhaps closer to our own. For Aristotle did not agree with Plato that there is an essence or Form or Absolute behind every object in the phenomenal world. I suppose you could argue that Aristotle came from the Jack Webb school of epistemology – “nothing but the facts, Mam.” Or, as one historian has put it: “The point is, that an elephant, when present, is noticed.” In other words, whereas Plato suggested that man was born with knowledge, Aristotle argued that knowledge comes from experience.
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Lloyd, don’t set a bad example for the kids.
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LOL
I think Socrates already did that a couple of millennia ago.
“Socrates started and dominated an argument wherever the young and intelligent would listen”
You can’t dominate every argument unless you are a member of the corporate public school demolition derby. After all, aren’t they always right. If you never accept another persons argument and never give up, the odds favor you will win. Corporations do this all the time to wear customers down so the give up complaining about bad products or services.
My impression of Socrates is starting to change. If he never wrote anything down, how can we trust second hand information more than two thousand years later.
What is it with these guys? I’ve read that Christ, Buddha, Muhammad (he was illiterate) and Confucius never wrote anything down. Whatever we have came from their students or it was dictated to someone else. Have you ever experimented with your students to find out what they think you meant?
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Olukayode Banmeke, it appears you have failed to make an important distinction.
“Respect for people and the learning process” is a different concept than “mindless obedience to authority.” The former is virtuous; the latter causes massive social and individual problems (as implied by this blog post).
There is a huge difference between “educated” and “trained.”
The school to prison pipeline exists because some students do not bend to the mindless obedience that is expected of them. You have a list of rules like in the original blog post, and when they are not followed, the students are “disciplined.” That is the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline would not exist without a list of rules like in the original blog post, and the will to enforce them so strictly. This kind of zero tolerance discipline is the problem, it is not a virtue that will save black kids.
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Slavery was all about respecting authority and doing what you were told. Not that that ever kept slaves from getting whipped anyway.
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For the record, by the way, my husband and children are black. The idea that any of them have to be completely obedient to authority in order to earn the right not to get beaten or shot is absolutely abhorrent, worthy of the worst, most racist right-wing white supremacist. The fact that this idea is being spouted by an allegedly black person is even more disturbing.
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Dienne,
I agree!
Robert
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Robert Rendo, Lloyd Lofthouse, Ed Detective and Dienne: thank you for your comments.
Again, a rheephormster [above and below] that projects his own feelings of contempt and ill-will onto others but claims that they are bad and uncivil when they object to being mischaracterized and insulted. Just another example of the sneer, jeer and smear from the corporate education reform playbook.
Literally doesn’t understand what so many of the SpecEd students I worked with got: you give respect to get respect.
And, in the spirt of keeping things real, and not Rheeal…
The young woman [recently orphaned and just placed in foster care] in a South Carolina classroom that was so inappropriately and badly mistreated by a police officer is simply an example of the sorts of practices edubullies are so fond of: mindless respect for authority and wildly excessive punishment for not obeying it, no matter how abusive and ill-considered and impractical the demands and mandates.
Lastly, when a rheephormster comes down on the side of “dog-house obedience” that’s not opposed to but just another name for “perpetual slavery”—and is literally, not figuratively, a sign that one is a part of, not opposed to, the education establishment and status quo.
But it made my day:
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Charlie Chaplin]
Such extreme word salad and cognitive dissonance: this day was, definitely, not wasted.
😎
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I like that. You have to give respect to get respect. True. I went through a full time, year long residency and my master teacher taught me to always speak softly and seldom if ever shout. And if you don’t want your students to use profanity, the teacher also must never uses profanity.
Whenever I had a student dropped the “F” word, I’d remind them that the “F” word was unacceptable in my classroom. In fact, all profanity was not allowed.
The kid would almost always rely that everyone used the “F” word all the time. There was some truth to that. All anyone had to do was get out in the hallway during the passing period when it was full of kids and almsot every other word you heard was an “F” bomb.
I told my students that I didn’t use the Marine Corps profanity I’d learned—when I served our country—-in the classroom and I didn’t’ expect them to. Treat the learning environment with respect and I think teachers must model that first.
And you are right. The RheeFormsters will use every bad example to further their agenda—no matter how rare compared to the whole. If there are thousand of CPOs in our public school who never throw a student to the ground and then drag them by the hair across the floor and out of the class, the RheeFormrsters will never, never let us know the exact ratio of proper conduct to improper.
There are more than 12,000 local police departments operating in the United States who employ more than 1 million person on a full time basis in addition to more than 15,000 public school districts with about 100,000 public schools. How many times have we heard about the local police or public school CPOs abusing their authority like the few examples the media has reported to the country?
According to copblock.org, from April 2009 to June 2010, there were 5,986 reports of misconduct recorded and 382 fatalities inked to that misconduct, and 64% of the police who were charged were convicted and received a prison sentence.
http://www.copblock.org/2841/police-brutality-statistics/
According to the copblock graphic, 0.012 percent of our nations law enforcement officers were even reported on misconduct, let alone found guilty of it.
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FLERP, Lloyd’s sentiments are right, copied or not, and you are a distraction to the real issue at hand here. Stay on topic.
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And what did this blind, obedient discipline cause?
World War I had a profound human cost, both on servicemen and civilians. Conservative estimates put war casualties at 12 million dead and 20 million severely wounded, though in reality both figures should probably be much higher.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
After people like Trump (who is more ignorant and stupid than even Sarah Palin), the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad and Bill Gates take over American and get rid of its republic and democracy, will they be responsibly for starting World War III after the succeed with the destruction o the public schools and replace them with Corporate, no nonsense suspension academies that will churn out blind, obedience children?
The end of civilization as we know it—I think the answer is yes. The shadows of the second dark ages linger just over the horizon.
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Thanks for the lecture: yet, I still stick with Socrates as the rightful sage to summon in this particular discourse. Why so? For the obvious reason, which you also alluded to: he was a gadfly who questioned the status quo and demanded that his discussant reflect.
The plea for reflection and persistent questioning made him an irritant. They called him a gadfly because they were annoyed with his questions. And some on this very thread have called me names…
What on earth would warrant a police officer to be called into a classroom in the first place? All over the country, you will find police officers being called into classrooms to remove disruptive students; why? is that assertiveness on the part of students?
Authoritarianism or Authoritativeness? Who makes the distinction: the students? How should a student respond to an authoritarian teacher? What skill sets will help the such student survive or avoid white male police brutality?
Is it shoplifting? Possession of Marjuana or other prohibited drugs? Is it confrontation with Law Enforcement officers?
The plea is: let’s stop seetiing up blacks kids for destruction by instilling defiance of authority in them! LET’S STOP IT!!! WE’VE LOST TOO MANY OF OUR KIDS TO INSURBODINATION: does that are not killed by police cannot even keep a job!!!
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Have you ever taught a class where a student disturbed the learning environment and refused to stop or cooperate?
I HAVE, and the campus police officers (CPOs) who came to my class to removed those students who refused to stop disrupting the learning environment, never used abuse or excessive force. In thirty years in the classrooms where I taught about 6,000 students I never witnessed or heard that one of our CPO’s ever threw a student to the floor and dragged them out of the room.
How often do CPOs use excessive force? What is the ratio of excessive force compared to every incident where a teacher called a CPO to their classroom to remove a student that refused to cooperate or stop disrupting the learning environment?
The CPOs in the public school district where I taught were not armed with stun guns or pistols. When they came into the room, they always talked softly and told disruptive students to come with them. Then the CPOs escorted those students to the office to their counselors room.
It was well known and documented in that school district that the majority of children who fit in this category would climb the fence and leave the campus if they were sent out of the room to walk on their own to see their counselor for causing a disruption in a classroom.
I taught in schools where the childhood poverty rate ranged from 70% to 100%. The streets around those schools were ruled by violent street gangs. Even the local police hesitated to patrol those streets at night.
I had students threaten me every year.
I knew teachers who were physically attacked and some that were knocked out.
I witnessed a drive by shooting from one of my classroom doorways as school was letting out.
On another night, I was working late in my classroom with the editors of the student newspaper when a teen gang member and student of that high school was shot in the gut with a shotgun right outside of that classroom and killed by a rival gang.
Early in my career as a teacher, I had a female student arrive twenty minutes late to my classroom. She didn’t have a tardy slip. I asked her to go to the office to get one. She stopped in front of me, raised one leg high and farted loudly in my face in front of a class of more than 30 students—that destroyed the learning environment for that class period.
She then sat down and threw her legs over the the top of her desk and started to trim her fingernails. I asked her to leave and go to the office. She refused suing insulting and fowl language. I called the CPO and he came and escorted her out of the room. That same girl had just returned from a five day school detention. The reason she was on that five day dentition is because she started a fist fight with another girl in one of her other classes and when the female teacher attempted to intervene. she knocked that teacher out cold and continued the fight with the other girl.
Or how about the boy who loved to disrupt the classroom to get attention and laughs. One day when a lesson was going great and he was going nothign as usual, he suddenly says, “I wonder what it would be like to have sex with an elephant.” Guess what happened. He refused to leave the room and kept up his unacceptable behavior. I called the CPOs and when they came and told him to leave with them in their soft voices, he went without an act of defiance. He was back in my class the next school day still doing nothing.
On another night when I was workign late, I had to leave my classroom to visit the bathroom. As I left the student reporters who were working on their assignments for the school paper and stepped outside, a group of four boys wearing the usual gang attire was walking by my room. I didn’t recognize any of them and all of their heads were shaved bald. One of them stopped and looked at me with his blurry eyes. “Hey, aren’t you the trucking asshole who gave me an F?”
I replied, “I don’t know you. When were you a student in my classroom?”
“Summer school,” he said. “I was kicked out of your class and earned an F when i was trying to make up the F I was given by my Englsh teacher the year before. You are a fucking asshole.”
“What was the reason you were dropped from the class?” I asked.
“I missed too many days in class.”
“So you were dropped by the office for absences. I didn’t do that. In summer school, if you miss three days it’s an automatic drop with an F.”
“You’re still an asshole,” the gang banger said.
“It takes one to know one,” I replied, “And I won’t call you an asshole.” His friends laughed, and he looked confused. One of the other boys took him by the arm and led him away.
I taught a few shooters too. A kid who is a shooter is someone who has murdered rival gang members. This kid was 14 and he had a price tag on his head from that rival gang.
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Thanks for your contribution Ed Detective: PLEASE show me a school in present day America where you will find those set of rules, as posted in this blog. The point is that we look for far away examples to burtress our points when we have vivid examples here at home to show the destructiveness of our educational practices.
The school-to-prison pipeline is seen in students’ violation of basic rational rules like: respect for individuals (self, peers, teachers) respect for school property. We allow our children to game the system instead of instilling in them VIRTUE that would make them life-long learners and effective participants in a democracy.
These are basic expectations for an educated citizenry. WHY do we have Police Officers coming into classrooms to remove students? I s it because the teacher was being authoritarian?
These go on daily in public school classrooms all across America, especially in urban settings with black children. Our children deserve BETTER.
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“PLEASE show me a school in present day America where you will find those set of rules, as posted in this blog.”
Success Academy. Please go back and read Diane’s many postings on Eva’s “school” and tell me it doesn’t sound just like this list of rules that German kids had to unquestioningly obey.
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Mr Banmeke, the system of public education is not responsible for single-handedly civilizing and instilling a system of moral values in its students. Nor is that remotely possible in the absence of family support. Significant social support in the neighborhood (health, recreation)– and in the school (free food & school supplies, nurses, counsellors) can help.
The idea that student disruption and violence in the classroom is created by an ed system that encourages defiance– or that attention and academic striving can be created by sending all urban black kids from K up to zero-tolerance authoritarian schools (preferably using CCSS curriculum) is patently absurd. In fact, the school-to-prison pipeline was created precisely by the combination of the war on drugs with zero-tolerance policies (I.e. frequent, lengthy out-of-school suspensions).
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“Mr Banmeke, the system of public education is not responsible for single-handedly civilizing and instilling a system of moral values in its students.”
This is true. It is the parent and/or guardian’s responsibly to do this—-not the schools. If anything, all the schools do is support and reinforce parents.
As for children who act out and are disruptive, the public school did not cause this unacceptable behavior, and the facts I know about support what I just wrote.
When I was teaching at Nogales High school in La Puente, California (1989 to 2005 – I taught for thirty years but not all at the same school), there was one classroom where students suspended from any class were sent for an in house suspension and the teacher/administrator in charge kept records. He also reported several times over the years that the staff (100 teachers) wrote an average of 20,000 referrals a year and sent disruptive students to BIC, and he said that 5% of the students earned 90% of the 20,000 referrals. Some of those kids would end up in BIC for every class every day. These kids were well know to the counselors, VPs and principal.
How can anyone place blame on the public schools for the 5% who act out repeatedly and disrupt the learning environment without giving the public schools credit for the 95% of students who do not act out and repeatedly end up in suspension? I’ll tell you who—a member of the corporate pbulic education demolition derby.
Oh, and each HS counselor had a student case load of almost 1,000 students. They were spread really thin with more duties than just counseling students, so they didn’t have time to work with the 5% on a daily basis in an attempt to correct their unacceptable behavior. If the parents/guardians are not supportive, there is very little the schools can do.
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“Obeying directions is not demeaning.” Yes, this is what the knee-jerk anti-discipline folks need to reflect upon. Socrates showed that all have opinions, but few have true knowledge. Mr. Banmeke, you are a breath of fresh air!
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Those German rules sound like the ones at that Nashville Prep school I was reading about on this blog a few weeks ago.
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I found the following fun fact
“In the United Kingdom, corporal punishment was banned in all schools in 1999. In America only 27 states have laws banning the use of corporal punishment.”
This is from http://www.ehow.com/info_8173636_punishment-boarding-schools-early-1900s.html
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And of course the issue is, as with all punishments, that kids with disabilities receive it more often than others
https://www.aclu.org/impairing-education-corporal-punishment-students-disabilities-us-public-schools-html
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“As of 2009-MAY, the only European countries to allow corporal punishment in both the home and school are the Czech Republic and France”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/spankin2.htm
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Thank you all for your various comments. Very few writers seem to be interested in teaching every child. The comments have strayed from how the one per-centers have it great; how dumb President Bush was; how we cannot blame the public schools because it is the parents fault; all the Germans who sat up straight in school learned to be Nazis; and on and on. The very few who spoke about teaching each child, particularly the black child often came from overseas and Mr. Banmeke was particularly eloquent.
What I do not understand is that all the people who tell us that it is the parents fault that their child is flunking or acting up in school — demand that the child go to a public school. They do not take the responsibility for teaching every child but they do not want to allow an alternative school. Thankfully in North Carolina the legislature has allowed more charter schools and started giving out vouchers for the child to attend the school that will teach the child.
If you insist that every child go to a public school take the responsibility to teach each child. If you don’t want that responsibility let the child go to the school that will teach that child.
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I will be the first to argue that Ethics should be a part of the public school curriculum. Please show me a charter school that does this. I highly doubt you will find any more charter schools than public schools that do this. Discipline does not mean ethics, sometimes it means nearly the opposite (do what you’re told without understanding why)
I believe in teaching every child. That’s why I believe in improving public education, not creating a further divide between the haves and have-nots with charters and vouchers.
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Actually I didn’t read a single comment implying that people here aren’t that interested in teaching every child. In fact a number of teachers with broad experience in teaching in poverty-stricken neighborhoods went into the details of how they personally and various administrations attempt to handle the serious disruptions caused repeatedly by a few which can make it impossible to teach everyone else if not addressed. None of those measures excluded those few repeat offenders from being taught.
There was also little to support your claim that parents are blamed for all problems. Mr Banmeke took the position that U.S. teachers and admins encourage defiant student behavior and are to blame for fracases where cops are called into school, contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline.
Some noted in response that unarmed school resource officers trained in supporting admin can be very helpful in defusing confrontations, shepherding disrupters to small supervised-study areas. This is surely superior to my ps days (’50’s-’60’s), when such students were suspended out-of-school, & after a minimum no of such suspensions, remanded to juvenile reformatories.
Back in my rural upstate days, those were mostly white kids, & that was definitely a school-to-prison pipeline. Cops in schools– if properly trained in school-community policing– could be a be a better alternative to expulsion & juvenile retention facilities…
But the process can be misused, as it obviously was in the recent SC incident & its viral video, perpetrated by an armed & untrained SRO, in a zero-tolerance school where teachers & admins clearly had no training in classroom mgt, simply referring every difficult situation to in-school cops– definitely a system such as described by Mr Banmeke, reflecting poorly on SC ed policy, where SRO training is supposedly available, yet hardly used.
Others including myself pointed out that a school system cannot all by itself turn around recalcitrant disruptive (even violent) behavior without strong parental support, but that in its absence, strong social supports in the community and at school can help. The point being that such supports need to be funded & available which increasingly today they are not.
It may be that regressive behavior-control labs systems such as KIPP charters are useful and helpful to motivated, supportive parents in a negative urban environment. We will not know long-range outcomes for a while; it’s experimental. But let’s not pretend there are enough seats at KIPP for all such kids, nor that converting inner-city ps to KIPP-type methods will correct all social ills.
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“Some noted in response that unarmed school resource officers trained in supporting admin can be very helpful in defusing confrontations, shepherding disrupters to small supervised-study areas. This is surely superior to my ps days (’50’s-’60’s), when such students were suspended out-of-school, & after a minimum no of such suspensions, remanded to juvenile reformatories.
Back in my rural upstate days, those were mostly white kids, & that was definitely a school-to-prison pipeline. Cops in schools– if properly trained in school-community policing– could be a be a better alternative to expulsion & juvenile retention facilities…”
REALLY!!! Dear bethree5, please compare the school-to-prison pipeline of your days (’50s-’60s) to what is going on today! How truly superior is having POLICE OFFICERS deal with learners than having well-trained teachers with the support of school administration handle classroom/ learning space disruption? When you make our kids have to relate or interact with Law Enforcement (no matter how superbly-trained they), you are further entrenching the school-prison pipeline! It is a mindset thing.
The problem is that the generation of Americans who were taught in schools without these so-called WELL-TRAINED POLICE OFFICERS are the very ones demanding and supporting the placements of UNARMED (HUGE LIE FROM THE PITS OF HELL, rather they are well-harmed) police officers in our schools. Yet they turned out very well without police officers in schools intheir days; but they must insist on NO CONSEQUENCE for students’ disruption, or worse still abdicate their responsibilities to Police Officers.
How is that the teaching of all students? When you have already battered the mind of the learner with presence of the Police Officer which he or she BELIEVES (howbeit erroneously) hates/ terrorizes is neighborhood!
LET’S REFLECT! Socrates still pleads that we do!
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@Olukalayode Bsnmede: you have not understood me. I am trying to express that there has been some positive evolution in U.S. from the ’50’s-,60’s. At that time we didn’t need officers of the law to immediately banish those who couldn’t conform to pubsch rules of behavior to the school-to-prison pipeline.
All such students needed was a minimum number of out-of-school expulsions promulgated on the mere word of a teacher; after a certain number of such expulsions they were mandated to juvenile reformatory. Many of those ended in prison in short order. And I do not even speak of no doubt far worse that was happening to black kids in the ghettoes of those days; this was just run-of-the-mill procedure for upstate-NY rural while kids.
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What I have not heard is what are we as a public to do? There are definitely children who cannot be reached. So why do we continue to believe they should be in school period.
Does anyone know what to do about the young woman who farted at Lloyd? Should the public school put up with her? In L. A. we have schools for such people, but a student would have to destroy at least an hour of class (and often much more) before being sent to one.
Gang-bangers are the principal reason my friend’s charter middle-school exists. Parents want their kids away from the violence that the larger urban school has to deal with. Interestingly the charter school has students from several gangs. However, it is small and my friend manages the interactions.
High school will be another issue for these students. The charters may be where the gangs are integrated as the students travel to attend them. It is all very complicated socially.
I think when one talks about educating all children, they are not talking about the deeply disturbed and alienated. Generally, one means that charters should not talk about their test scores unless they want to include all special education categories and second-language learners and that the public should be willing to provide very special schools for the most disruptive. As was pointed out, the most out-of-control probably should be in special schools such as LAUSD’s community day schools or in some cases special education schools for behavioral issues.
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West Coast Teacher, the reason Al Shanker supported charter schools in 1988 was that he wanted them to take on the kids who were unable to learn in a regular classroom. They would fill up with drop-outs and gang-bangers and troublemakers.
But in 1993, he turned against charters because he realized they had turned into a privatization strategy no different from vouchers and that they would skim the best students, leaving the public schools worse off.
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The district where I taught had and still had an alternative high school. When I was still teaching, the only way a student could get into that school was by a referral from one of the other schools in the district. It wasn’t called a charter school It was called an alternative school.
Here’s a link to that school. I see on their website that it is called a “California Model Continuation high school”.
Here’s How to Enroll info from the site:
Alternative Instructional Programs in Rowland Unified are available through Santana High School.
How to Enroll:
Student must be between 16-18 years old.
Student must be referred by the school of residence.
Student and parent MUST attend an orientation.
Submit: transcript(s) from previous high school, updated immunizations, and proof of residence.
http://www.santanahs.org/about/mission.jsp
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