Educators Grapple with Classroom Lawlessness as School Year Approaches

The Washington Stand | Dan Hart August 2, 2024

As a new school year approaches, teachers, school administrators, and students are continuing to grapple with an exponential rise in verbal harassment, classroom disruptions, and physical aggression since the broad return of in-person education after the school closures imposed in 2020-2021 amid the COVID pandemic. Experts say that policies that dispensed with punishments for classroom misbehavior in the name of “restorative justice” and racial “equity” are largely to blame for the rise in lawlessness in schools.

In a newly published report from former teacher and education policy expert Daniel Buck, he argues that “lawlessness in American schools post-pandemic is perhaps the most consequential story in education that receives little to no coverage.” In March, Buck reached out to almost 200 teachers across the country to ask them about their experiences with school discipline. He was inundated with descriptions of constant fights “with little consequence,” “persistent anxiety” as schools “teetered on the precipice of chaos,” and teachers being “cussed out, threatened, and disrespected every single day.”

One woman described the environment in her school building as a “spiraling, out-of-control situation” in which “students consider themselves to be the authority.” She further noted that she had been called “more names and gotten more threats this year” than in the previous 26 years of her teaching career.

Experts point to the Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter that threatened schools with legal action in response to racially disproportionate disciplinary measures as the beginning of the modern rise of behavioral problems in schools. As has been demonstrated, this “restorative justice” approach likely allowed Parkland high school shooter Nikolas Cruz to remain unpunished for numerous crimes and threats for years before he carried out the massacre of 17 students and staff in 2018. As noted by Buck, a subsequent “RAND report found that while restorative justice does indeed decrease disparities in suspensions, such ‘improvements’ come with an uptick in bullying and classroom disruptions.”

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and riots, the demand for restorative justice in schools was magnified, and schools across the country began implementing a hands-off approach to discipline. But recent studies have shown that severe behavioral issues have climbed precipitously as a result. Last month, the American Psychological Association reported findings showing that 80% of 15,000 surveyed teachers and school personnel reported verbal harassment (up from 65% from pre-pandemic levels), with 56% reporting acts of physical aggression directed at them.

As observed by Buck, “Other representative surveys confirm that rates of violence directed at both students and teachers have doubled from pre-pandemic levels. Student behavior regularly tops the list of teacher concerns — over and above teacher pay — even on internal union surveys.”

Still, some states are pushing back against the trend through legislation. Buck points to states like Alabama and Florida that have passed “Teachers Bill of Rights” laws that enhance the ability of teachers to remove disruptive students and require the allocation of consequences. In addition, “Louisiana passed two laws that compel teachers to remove disruptive students and requires expulsion for incidents involving knives and drugs as well as recurring suspensions,” Buck added.

“School discipline is a prerequisite for teaching and learning,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told The Washington Stand. “When class is disrupted by misbehaving students, it impacts the entire class’s ability to learn. The U.S. Department of Education has helped to create a stigma around student discipline that fed into a relaxing of standards in schools nationwide — to put it mildly. But the isolation experienced by students who were kept out of class during the COVID shutdown of schools, prolonged by the Biden-Harris administration, has compounded the problem.”

Kilgannon continued, “Efforts in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments in schools are a significant reminder to students, faculty, and staff that order and law come from God. Even so, consequences for students who disrupt others’ learning or disrespect teachers are a minimum standard that every school can adopt.”

“As Christians, we need to pray for our schools and all families,” she concluded. “At the root of this crisis of school violence is a crisis of the American family. We need to acknowledge that and do everything we can in our prayer life, in our community engagement, and with our vote to support healthy families so our children and our nation can thrive.”

Topics:Lawlessness, Education

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.