Classrooms are out of control, teachers and students are suffering
Analysis: Madison school district's lenient discipline policy is a dismal failure
By Dave Daley
As he got ready for his job as the student behavior expert at Madison’s Whitehorse Middle School in February 2019, Rob Mueller-Owens couldn’t have predicted that by 9 a.m. he’d be sprawled on the floor, entangled with an 11-year-old student following a violent confrontation.
Mueller-Owens was a 30-year veteran educator and leading voice on new approaches to school discipline who was known to many of his students as just “Mr. Rob.”
As director of culture and climate in theMadison Metropolitan School District, he helped promote a new district discipline policy pushed by then-Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham.
The approach aimed to reduce the alarming rate at which black students were suspended compared with white students — a 3-1 ratio. Instead of punishing misbehavior in traditional ways, teachers and administrators like Mueller-Owens were supposed to attempt to keep disruptive students in the classroom, where they’d at least theoretically have a chance to learn.
In reality, the new approach worked a little differently that Wednesday morning.
Analysis: Teaching intolerance in the guise of promoting tolerance
By Robert L. Woodson, Sr.
A middle-school teacher in suburban Virginia confided in a friend about a troubling incident that was causing her nightmares. She had touched a student's sleeve when telling him to quiet down, and he told her: “Take your F--- hands off me, old woman, or I'll smash your face through a window.” She said she wouldn't bring the incident to the principal's attention because he was under pressure to reduce suspensions in the school and that a book called "Don't Kick Them Out" was required reading for his teachers.
As in all other school districts throughout the nation, the school where she taught had received a mandate from the Department of Education under the Obama Administration to reduce the racial disparity in suspension rates, which were three times higher for black students than for whites. In response, throughout the country, the method to do this was not to address and change the violent and antisocial behavior of students, but to target the presumed bigotry and discrimination on the part of the teachers.
This methodology was in sync with the dominant narrative of the powerful race-grievance industry that any racial disparity was evidence of racism. This conviction is held in abeyance only in the sports arena, where the fact that black males, who make up 6 percent of the population yet account for more than 70% of the players of the NBA and NFL, is a disparity that is attributed to their skill and talent.
“Don’t Kick Them Out” was amateurish, lacked logical structure and was riddled with grammatical errors and pretentious language. Its key merit was that it took to task the all-purpose villains of white privilege and institutional racism. Included in its guidance were comments such as this: “If a student uses profanity, why would we suspend him? He has proven that he has a limited vocabulary.” Others have held that penalizing youths for swearing is “linguistic racism.”
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