A faithful reader, Dienne, posted the following comment:
“I used to work at a residential facility for kids we called “severely emotionally disturbed” (I don’t know what the proper terminology is now; I’d call them traumatized). Many of them were DCFS wards who had experienced horrific abuse and/or deprivation, but that’s not the reason they came to us. They came to us because no one else (besides locked psychiatric facilities) could handle them – they were too aggressive and disruptive.
“My experience was that they were as aggressive and disruptive as they were because they were so traumatized. They were in constant survival mode, they didn’t trust anyone, their traumatic experiences had left lasting damage to their nervous system, so they had extreme difficulty interpreting social situations and controlling their impulses. The only thing that worked with them was to keep the environment strictly controlled to instill a sense of safety and predictability so that they could eventually learn to trust. None of those kids would have had the capacity to apologize, sincerely or otherwise, and certainly not publicly.
“I don’t think the majority of kids in public schools are anywhere near that level, but there are certainly strains of that, especially among kids who live in high poverty situations where they are exposed to abuse, deprivation and trauma. If schools are actually going to help these kids, then the same types of interventions are needed. A secure, safe environment where their needs are understood and addressed.
“I understand that’s (allegedly) where the “no excuses” idea comes from – to maintain order and predictability. But where they go wrong is trying to control the child rather than the environment. No one reacts well to being controlled, least of all traumatized children who live in constant survival mode.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In my book I write about “no excuses” practices at KIPP and Success, including this anecdote. Like Dienne, I worked with traumatized children:
“Several years later I began work at a home for emotionally disturbed children. I dislike the term “emotionally disturbed” because it was invariably the families of these sad kids who were more emotionally disturbed than the kids. It was a residential campus with separate cottages for each 10 to 12 kids. My cottage consisted of boys ranging in age from 12 to18.
My very first shift was from 3-11 p.m. To my surprise and chagrin, the person with whom I was scheduled to work had called in sick. The day shift staffers barely said “hello” and “goodbye” before walking out the door. Some orientation! If you have any awareness of “emotionally disturbed” teenagers, you might imagine my dismay. I didn’t know the kids, I didn’t know the rules, and skittish teenagers don’t respond comfortably to complete strangers.
The boys were nowhere to be seen. For the first few minutes they ignored me entirely. After a while, an occasional face would lean around a doorframe for a quick glimpse before disappearing. Finally, a seemingly well-composed boy stood in full sight for a few seconds. I gestured him over to the chair I’d taken in the cottage living room. I asked his name. “Louis,” he replied. “Louis,” I said, “I need a favor. Would you please ask all the guys to come down to the living room for a few minutes? I’m new and I’d like to meet everyone.” Louis, thank goodness, shrugged, said “ok,” and went to collect the crew.
When this odd bunch of wary teens had gathered, I tried my Miami Larry technique. “Hi guys. I’m Steve. I’m new and I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. It’s my first day. I don’t know you. I don’t know the rules. I’m alone. So, here’s the deal, I’m going to sit here in the living room. Since I don’t know what you’re supposed to do – or not do – I’ll just trust you to do whatever you should. If anyone wants to come and talk with me for a minute, I’d like that. But you don’t have to. I only have one request. Please don’t run away. If you feel like running away, wait until tomorrow. I’d probably lose my job if someone ran away on my very first day. So, nice to meet you!”
The most remarkable thing happened. The boys drifted off and I began hearing snippets of conversation like, “It’s your night for setting the table. C’mon, just do it.” Every one of them came by, at least for a minute or two, and talked with me. At dinnertime, they seemed like a finely tuned machine – serving, cleaning up, sweeping the dining room and settling into evening routines. They enforced the “lights out at 10” rule even though I didn’t know it existed.
Again, I don’t mean to romanticize. I worked there for 3½ years and never had a night quite that easy again! Louis was deeply troubled. Kenny ran away frequently. Steve had a hair trigger temper. Scott was admitted at age 17 after successfully running a small medical practice for a few months before he was caught. There were rare instances when some level of strict control or discipline was necessary – for safety. But the work, even with these challenging boys, was always most successful when they felt trusted and loved. Not when they were made to wear “MISCREANT” signs or be shunned by adults and peers as a consequence for the slightest infraction. It should not be just places like Summerhill where children can be loved and trusted.”
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Beautiful.
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Incidentally, your story about being alone on your first shift makes me physically ill. I’m impressed that you handled it at all, let alone as well as you did. I might have passed out cold for the duration of the shift.
I was fortunate in that our facility always had “coverage” staff available who were very present and attuned with what was going on at any given time. You never felt alone with the kids, even if you were the only one on duty with a particular group. Also, I worked in the classroom, so most of the time I was with an experienced teacher – I was only alone with them during breaks,gym, recess, every other lunch (the teacher and I alternated) and one month during the summer when the teacher was on vacation (and I also got a month vacation each summer).
At night our kids were housed in dormitories all in the same building, not cottages. It was intentionally made to feel “institutional”, not in a Charles Dickens sort of way, but as a clear break from a family situation. Since our kids were almost all DCFS, they had been removed from their family of origin and had also gone through a number of foster placements and group homes. The philosophy was that the kids felt like they had “failed” in their various family situations, so it didn’t make sense to keep re-creating a family-type structure, especially because staff come and go so often, it’s kind of laughable to pretend to be a “family”.. The idea was to create a sense of permanence in the structure of the institution itself.. It worked very well until we got new leadership who practically rolled up the ground we stood on and, well, so much for permanence of the structure of the institution.
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This is an inspring anecdote, & brings back memories. In my 20’s, my [first] husband & I were foster parents to 3 emotionally-disturbed kids for a couple pf yrs. They were hisch age; I worked full-time & partner was in law school. We had previously been high school teachers for two years.
The program was the [70’s] brainchild of the local social agency, which was experimenting with the concept of a nuclear-family-like unit as a bridge between group-home & aging out to independence.
We were in MI. We started w/ (1)a Ky kid whose parents moved north for automotive work & bounced him out for repeated delinquency. It took us a couple of months to grasp that he was threatening the others nightly w/a knife [he was moved back to group home]. (2) a native american kid from a nearby city who’d been removed from his original parents due to leaving him repeatedly as an infant in an unheated cabin while they went drinking; he’d been in 14 foster placements by the age of 16, was a nightly bedwetter & displayed signs of sociopathy including adopting a stray kitten then maiming it w/a brick. (3)a local kid who’d literally rescued his Mom from suicide 3 times since age 12 and — (4)replacing the Ky knife-wielder, another local, whose single Mom [a paraplegiac] decided to declare her four teen children incorrigible & gavethem up to the state. [He was the only one of them who had a chance– because he had a sibling support group.]
What a disaster. We tried very hard for 2 yrs then resigned.
The home you describe seems far more appropriate. Structure is what is required! & full-time staff w/ backup. Who hires working 20-somethings w/a smidgeon of teaching experience as foster parents to 3 emotionally-disturbed [male] teens? W/ no parenting experience outside modeling their parents’ suburban experience? And the only criterion seemed to be that the kid did not appear to be violent– totally ignoring severe, even crippling [tho perhaps apparently non-violent] psychological issues which require immediate & ongoing expert intervention?!
We had monthly meetings w/the social worker. She was a very tough & competent person. I remember thinking, she’s the kind of person these kids need…
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Thanks for promoting, Diane!
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I have worked with suspended students and in the jail. We need more caring adults like you!
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The majority of disruptive kids at my middle school are not victims of trauma (though some are). Most of them are ordinary kids who’d rather socialize or derail class because they find these activities more amusing than doing academics. A few of them are sociopaths/psychopaths with decent parents who have no idea what to do with a kid who is genetically hard-wired to be malevolent.
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Your disdain for your students (other than the obedient ones) is palpable. Maybe you should re-consider why you’re in teaching.
No one is genetically hard-wired to be malevolent. And even kids who might not seem like they’ve experienced trauma may have. Being raised by a narcissist parent is itself traumatizing, for instance. At my institution, for instance, we had a handful of private-pay, non-DCFS kids. You’d think these kids all had it made in the shade, living in the lap of luxury. Their only problem was that they were “spoiled rotten”. But as you got to know them, their families and their lives, you’d realize how empty they were. Their only function in life was to serve as a prop for their parents – an extension of the parents’ ego. They were at the facility because they rebelled against kind of empty life (albeit, unconsciously). Their acting out and being “disruptive” was actually a very health sign of trying to assert their own individuality, their own personhood. They were, admittedly, the most difficult to deal with because they could be very cunning and “malevolent”. But all they really wanted was for someone to really see them.
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For the last 15 yrs I’ve been teaching ages 2.5-6, who are so much easier. They are still at the age where simply acknowledging them as people and extending kindness overcomes pretty much anything.
My first yrs of teaching were w/9th-12th, but classes were small (15-18), so it was much easier to spend some quiet time w/a disruptor & find away to deal.
How do you deal with the ones you say are “ordinary kids who’d rather socialize or derail class because they find these activities more amusing than doing academics”?
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How do you deal with the ones you say are “ordinary kids who’d rather socialize or derail class because they find these activities more amusing than doing academics”?
This isn’t easy without cooperation from the administration, and/or the parents and/or guardians.
And what is an “ordinary kid” when it comes to a child that’s willing to make an effort to resist learning and even disrupt it?
For 3 of the 30 years, I was a public school teacher in California, I worked at a middle school where the principal said his door and the office was closed to teachers who couldn’t control their classes. He told us if students refused to cooperate and disrupted the class, it was the teacher’s fault.
I hated that principal and so did most of the teachers. In his first year, he lost half of the staff. Many of us transferred to other schools in the district, left to teach in another district, or some retired early. I transferred to the roughest high school in that district and stayed there for 16 years until I retired.
How did the teachers survive this idiot of a principal who said if students failed our classes, it was our fault, if they didn’t do well on state tests, it was our fault, etc – to him everything was the teacher’s fault? We teamed up. If a student misbehaved in my class, I sent him or her to the English teacher I teamed with, and I made an effort to demonize her as really mean while she did the same for me so our students feared being sent to that other English teacher’s classroom. It worked. Many children fear the unknown and feared what that horrible teacher might do to them. Most of the kids that were acting out settled down when I said they would have to go to Ms. D’s class.
The high school I transferred to was tough. It was on the other side of the freeway and railroad in a barrio with multi generation street gangs and it was so violent in those communities around the high school, the local police wouldn’t patrol off of the main avenues. The staff was tough and administration supportive, for the most part. There was even an in-house suspension center where we sent disruptive kids to get them out of the classroom so the teacher could teach and other children learn. That room was called BIC, Behavior Improvement Center.
I think it is gone now. One of the tactics of the privatizers of everything public is to make it almost impossible to do your job in the public sector. For instance, if a teacher or school or district finds a way to deal with challenging children, the privateers of everything public pass legislation that makes that illegal or add lots of paperwork even if the method was a humane method. The privatizers of everything public use the media to turn what was a humane, soft method of gaining cooperation from challenging children and they demonize it and make it look like it is torture and criminal until teachers have been stripped of every method that works making their jobs difficult to impossible when working with a large populaiton of children that live in poverty.
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Among the students I taught, almost all of those in serious trouble with school officials had been traumatized by members of the extended family and events in their neighborhoods. Some students had learned how to avoid more trauma by not telling anyone or seeking help. A code of silence prevailed, painful but protective. Some were cutters. They hid those wounds. One of my 8th grade students who had uncommon ability in visual art committed suicide while in high school. He jumped off a bridge into the river. He was also being inducted into prostitution.
Almost all teachers who stay on the job are forever haunted by such losses.
But there are also many, many unexpected call-backs–expressions of gratitude from students that you influenced in ways that you were unaware of.
Pundits who think you can measure teacher “effectiveness” by the performance of students on standardized tests have a greater love for numbers than for students who are not yet fully developed and for teachers, who are caring and also fallible–not nearly as perfect as the data points and the metrics designed to judge them and their students.
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“Pundits who think you can measure teacher “effectiveness” by the performance of students on standardized tests have a greater love for numbers than for students who are not yet fully developed and for teachers, who are caring and also fallible–not nearly as perfect as the data points and the metrics designed to judge them and their students.”
……
I love this comment. Well stated.
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AMEN, carolmalaysia.
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yes.
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I seem to have missed the point of this post because I see charter schools as not real public schools that have to take on all students including the traumatized student. Most KIPP type charters reportedly can, and do, reject (counsel out) students that “are not a good fit”.
No excuse charter school means the student has to adapt to the demands of the environment not the school environment having to adapt to the demands of the student that has been traumatized.
Trouble with making privately managed charter schools, a separate, competitive system to the real publicly managed public schools is, that the privately manged competitive system, is organized around making high test scores outcome as the mission and priority.
“MISCREANT” sign hung on the student in such a system is a means of quality control making the traumatized student an outcast at a NO EXCUSES charter school.
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Charter schools are not public schools. Not subject to same rules, laws, standards.
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The kind of teaching emphasizing obedience prepares students for a dictatorship..
That may be over simplification but is true nonetheless.
I firmly believe in discipline. I could have taught FAR more had we had had less disruptive students. Students do indeed need to learn that there are consequences for acts which impinge on the abilities of others to learn but the kind of thing being practiced as identified above now goes beyond all reason.
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AMEN, Gordon. I do believe charters, standards, and ridiculous testting were created not only because of $$$$$$ for the FEW, but also to CONTROL US totally. It’s just ALL SO SICK.
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I have worked with several traumatized ESL students through the years, and each one is different. One young man from Haiti had been passed around from relative to relative because this young man was difficult, and his mother was working in America. One of his fingers was bent because it had been broken because he touched something that he should not have touched. He also had some whipping scars on his legs from having been beaten.
This young man was smart, but disinterested in learning. He often got into fights with other boys at lunch or on the bus. He was placed with a no excuses type teacher that had taught in the south Bronx. He was in my class for English most of the morning. His stint with the no excuses teaching didn’t last. Neither of them would give an inch, and it was a bad situation for all. He was moved to a teacher that was firm, but caring, and it was a much better fit. He continued to be disruptive in my class, but at least he didn’t hurt anyone. He adored the computer so I made a behavior mod deal with him. If he tried in my class, he could come in during his recess and play a game on the computer as long as he didn’t disturb the group I was teaching at the time. The playground TAs were delighted because this oppositional defiant young man got into lots of conflicts with others outside. He did learn English well. When he moved up to middle school, he said to me,” You’re OK for a white devil.” I even considered this statement a victory. I thanked him and wished him well in the middle school where he continued to be combative.
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No excuse charters fail is understanding that you are educating the whole child. Bloom’s taxonomy addresses teaching cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills. For some students teaching the affective skills can be more important than the cognitive skills.
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I totally agree. I always considered the troubled students like a puzzle that needed to be solved. The most important element is the relationship the teacher develops with the student. This is even more important for the troubled ones that don’t respond to rules and enforcement. It is the foundation on which our work begins. Some troubled students require a greater investment of time and an all important sense of humor.
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Reading all these comments as a non-teacher convinces me of one thing:
Children are different. It takes time and experience to figure out why a child is acting out or hurting himself or seemingly uninterested in learning. And even with experience, recognizing the traumas and what might alleviate bad behavior isn’t easy.
But there are no short cuts. No Excuses is based on a lie – it is used by charters that absolve themselves of responsibility for every child for whom “no excuses” doesn’t work. It is guaranteed 100% successful as long as you can rid yourself of all children for whom it doesn’t work. And that is why the one time a No Excuses charter tried to take over an ENTIRE school system they failed miserably.
No Excuses is beloved of right wing billionaires because if your charter uses “no excuses” to get rid of children, they can be run cheaply while getting the manipulated results that allow politicians to cut funding to public schools and lower taxes on the wealthy.
There is no evidence that the children who do well under “no excuses” discipline would not do just as well under a different system in which humiliation and punishment was not a regular technique. That is why the one thing that the no-excuses disciples refuse to examine closely is how many entering children in no excuses primary grade remain in the school over many years. They don’t want to know the answer.
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Well stated, NYC public school parent!
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Your 2nd para applies to humans of any age. Respect is a two-way street. I imagine no-excuses pedagogy was hatched as a means to provide structure and instill self-respect. But in the hands of amateurs– which many charter teachers are– it becomes petty tyranny, just as likely to produce rebellious & self-destructive behavior off-campus.
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School Discipline: It’s Complicated
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It’s made far more complicated by the lies of the reform movement. It will remain complicated as long as reformers continue to lie.
It was enlightening to read the NAACP report that called for a moratorium. One dad who testified about his own son being unceremoniously shown the door at Success Academy said when he was called the first day of Kindergarten about his son’s behavior he was happy they were strict. What he didn’t realize is the strictness is just a method to punish children you want out of your school. He learned very fast.
No excuses is the fraudulent way to get rid of children whose parents CHOSE a strict school. Because in no excuses the charter chooses the child.
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What concerns me most about this blog is the absence of mention of lack of acknowledgement and resources for mental health of our society and the contributions to poor mental health that the “no excuses” philosophy has imposed upon children. These also are huge impacts on increased need for residential treatment facilities for children.
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Teachers are often the first to notice that students have emotional problems, but there are scant resources and supports within buildings to address these needs. Today everyone wants miracles without addressing the underlying issues that interfere with academic progress. No excuses philosophy refuses to accept the fact that poverty along with all the accompanying dysfunction is an obstacle that needs to be addressed.
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Merry, I hope that you continue to advocate for mental healthcare. It is a huge and gaping need in our society. I had a son afflicted with both physical and mental illness. The mental issues made it almost impossible for him to benefit from treatment for the physical illness. Yet I found in every hospital that the two forms of medicine operated in separate wings, didn’t work together, in fact had built-in bureaucratic barriers to working together. After he died, in trying to locate a charity to support, I found that in our whole country, there are only two places that research the interconnection between body & mind, & put research into clinical practice (they are Howard Hughes & Johns Hopkins– & in both places, this effort is underfunded & research in infancy.)
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You always post great stuff, Dienne, but this gave us a little more insight to you as a person. Thank you, and keep contributing here.
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Mea culpability, Diane: I neglected to thank you for passing this along. Please excuse the oversight.
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These children have PTSD, and PTSD does eventually damage the brain. It isn’t easy for even adults to learn how to manage PTSD and even then it is a constant battle to keep it from managing you to spiral into drugs, anger issues, always alert for trouble, alcohol, etc.
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From Max Bean in 2010, a slice of life:
More on Mensch Prep: “Shave and a Haircut” Like You’ve Never Seen It Before
http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-september-27-th-i-posted-description.html
(including the comments section)
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