Begin with the End in Mind: It’s about Root Causes and Intervention—Not About Policies or Positions
Dear Colleagues,
Introduction
Over the past year (at least), I have been writing somewhat independently about a number of issues that I am going to integrate in today’s Blog message: Equity, School Safety and Discipline, Disproportionality, and Seclusions and Restraints.
In some of these past writings, I have relatedly made numerous statements about how the U.S. Department of Education (especially) has maintained a failed, decades-long agenda of promoting frameworks and programs that are not field-tested and that have not produced sustained results.
Some of these frameworks and programs include PBIS, MTSS, Restorative Justice, and (coming to a new federally-funded Technical Assistance Center near you) . . . SEL.
My critiques of the above have been research-based and outcome-driven, and they have exposed both scientific flaws and “magical” thinking.
But more important: I have not just critiqued. I have recommended psychoeducationally-sound, evidence-based, and field-tested alternatives.
In today’s Blog, I want to discuss a new U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report just published. . . but I want to (as usual) bring the conversation down to what individual schools and districts need to do with individual students who are “behaving badly.”
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New National Report on School Discipline, Suspensions, Disproportionality, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Last week on July 23, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a 224-page Report,
Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline For Students of Color with Disabilities
which detailed extensive analyses of past and present national survey and incident data, research, and commentary—especially from two panels of experts who testified before the Commission on December 8, 2017.
[CLICK HERE for a Copy of the Commission’s Report]
While I will briefly summarize the Report’s stated findings below, most of my discussion will focus on (a) the importance of reading the two dissenting Commission members’ statements (at the very end of the Report— starting on Page 177); (b) how some Report recommendations simply endorse the flawed (as above) approaches long-advocated by the U.S. Department of Education; and (c) what schools and districts need to pragmatically understand and do to provide the best services, supports, strategies, and interventions to students exhibiting significant behavioral challenges.
Rather than re-publish the content from all of the past research-based Blog discussions that I have written in the areas of Equity, School Safety and Discipline, Disproportionality, and Seclusions and Restraints to expand on the critical points below. . . at times during this Blog, I will simply provide links to those Blogs.
But the “theme” here—in digesting the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report—is that we need to:
Begin with the End in Mind.
That is, we need to read the two Commissioners’ dissenting statements at the end of the Report immediately after reading the Executive Summary.
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A Brief Report Summary
There does not appear to be any substantive disagreement over the fact that students of color and students with disabilities are disproportionately sent to the Principal’s Office and suspended and expelled more than white students.
Indeed, the Commission’s Executive Summary began as follows:
Nationwide, more than 2.7 million K–12 public school students received one or more out-of-school suspensions in the 2015–2016 academic year. The use of suspensions increased steadily from the late 1980s and early 1990s through the 2011–12 school year and then dropped precipitously, by approximately 20 percent between the 2011–12 and 2013–14 academic years. Some of the increase through 2011 was the result of teachers and administrators punishing minor behavioral infractions (e.g., profanity, dress code violations) that in the past would have landed a student in detention, but later had led to harsher punishments such as suspensions, expulsions, or even arrests. Researchers have found that school-level factors, such as a principal’s perspective on discipline, significantly impact disparities in out-of-school suspension rates for students of color and students of color with disabilities. Data also suggest that school discipline policies may not be impacting all students equally. Moreover, data have consistently shown that the overrepresentation of students of color in school discipline rates is not due to higher rates of misbehavior by these students, but instead is driven by structural and systemic factors that this report will address.
Exclusionary discipline practices place students at risk for experiencing a wide range of correlated educational, economic, and social problems, including school avoidance, increased likelihood of dropping out, and involvement with the juvenile justice system. Additionally, in recent years, some federal officials and school reform advocates have started examining how the education system may be systematically failing certain groups of students (e.g., students of color, students with disabilities, LGBT students) who are:
Disproportionately over- or incorrectly categorized in special education, are disciplined more harshly, including referral to law enforcement for minimal misbehavior, achieve at lower levels, and eventually drop or are pushed out of school, often into juvenile justice facilities and prisons—a pattern now commonly referred to as the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
While one of the dissenting Commissioners disagrees with the statement above that “the over-representation of school discipline rates is not due to higher rates of misbehavior by these students,” the main body of the Report:
- Provides limited student-specific psychoeducational analyses regarding why students demonstrate inappropriate behavior and how they can more consistently demonstrate appropriate behavior; or
- How to link these analyses to specific multi-tiered services, supports, strategies, and/or interventions that will change inappropriate student behavior into appropriate behavior.
In fact, the words “multi-tiered systems of support” appeared once in the entire 224-page Report where it stated that, “Georgia H.B.740 require(s) local school systems to employ multi-tiered systems of supports and reviews prior to suspending or expelling children up to third grade for five or more days each year.”
- Practical District and School Take-Away I: While I understand that most educators are not going to read any 224-page document. . . much less this one, the first Take-Away here is that educators need to be careful to not accept a “popular press” summary of any major state or federal policy document, or the “sound bites” that emanate from those who are not dedicated to describing the nuances of a complex issue and document.
Related to this point is the need to understand that policy statements often influence the depth and breadth of recommended practices.
In addition, it is important to recognize the practices that are missing in any policy document (i.e., the psychoeducational analyses and multi-tiered services noted immediately above), why they are missing, and the implications to students and staff because of their absence.
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Critiquing the “Interventions” Recommended in the Report
The Federal Advocacy and Misrepresentation of PBIS Continues
In many ways, and given its federal funding, the Commission’s Report appears to be—inadvertently—a “walking advertisement” for the Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) framework funded by the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) since 1997 and developed by the National PBIS Technical Assistance Center.
This is not surprising as OSEP continues to dominate and unduly influence the national school discipline narrative (and the information politically received by the Commission) by ensuring that only the positive aspects of the PBIS framework are prominently highlighted in federal reports (such as this one). As I have documented in the past, over the past 15 years or more, when testimony is taken at federal and Congressional hearings, OSEP ensures that PBIS and its “framers” have a prominent “seat at the table.”
This influence and advocacy, indeed, continues to spread a major PBIS misrepresentation—one that, once again, is institutionalized in this Commission Report.
Specifically, in Chapter 1: School Discipline Policies and their Effects of the Report (Page 84), the Commission published the following incorrect statement about the term and framework of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS):
Since 1997, IDEA has explicitly required schools to consider PBIS methods when considering disciplinary actions for both special and regular educational settings. Federal legislation urges educators to consider “positive behavioral interventions, strategies, and supports” and “positive academic and social learning opportunities” to contend with student behavior when it “impedes his or her learning or that of others.”
I have continually discussed, over the years, the fact that the term “positive behavioral interventions and supports” always appears in IDEA (and ESEA, in fact) in lower case words, and that the capital-letter PBIS acronym never appears in the IDEA (or ESEA) legislation.
Thus, as above, IDEA does not require the PBIS framework or its methods. IDEA requires strategies that are generically related to positive behavioral supports, and that have been developed by thousands of educators.
The Problem? The appearance of this statement in the Commission Report will (again) be interpreted by hundreds of thousands of educators across the country as a validation of the PBIS framework. And yet, this validation is (and has always been) on shaky grounds.
Indeed, in Chapter 3: Evaluation of Federal Government Policies, the Commission Report (Page 142) states the following:
At the Commission’s briefing, Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued that the shift from exclusionary discipline practices that the ED guidance recommended has not had positive effects on schools. He argued that only a small percentage of schools have rolled out district-supported and district-funded positive behavioral support programs and there are not rigorous studies to either confirm or deny their success.
Eden testified that a teacher’s ability to use suspensions as a disciplinary tool was taken away across the board, and a replacement tool [i.e., positive behavioral intervention and supports] is given to “ten percent or fewer schools within that district. And we do not have great studies on what happens in those schools. [But][a] study in Philadelphia that just came out a few weeks ago does not paint a nice picture.”
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The Philadelphia study reaffirms what we have known for over 15 years—based on an independent study of PBIS commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education itself.
I summarized this study and other salient PBIS realities in my March 30, 2019 Blog:
The Art of Doubling Down: How the U.S. Department of Education Creates Grant Programs to Fund and Validate its Own Frameworks. Call Congress: The Tainting of RtI, PBIS, MTSS, and SEL
[CLICK HERE to read this Blog]
The study concluded [with my commentary]:
- PBIS is a framework and not a sequential model. Thus, schools can choose whatever PBIS activities to implement that they want—in whatever sequence, place, or student group that they want.
[This means that cross-school comparisons of PBIS’s efficacy is virtually impossible, and one cannot generalize the (positive or negative) results from one PBIS school (or study) to another.]
- Regardless of the thousands of schools “implementing” PBIS, the National Directors believed that approximately half of the schools might be implementing with “a reasonable level of integrity.”
[The issue here is that the number of schools implementing PBIS is not what is important, it is the objective, demonstrable, and sustainable student-centered PBIS results that are important.]
- PBIS has traditionally used decreases in Office Discipline Referrals (ODRs) and school suspensions or expulsions as the primary outcome “validating” its framework. ODRs have been methodologically demonstrated to be horribly unreliable.
[This was recognized in the Report as one expert was quoted to say that “office discipline referral (ODR) data is helpful but should not be the only source of student behavior measurement. Teacher ratings provide another source for student behavior data. Also, teacher ratings of behavior are most reliable for younger students as opposed to student self-report surveys.”]
- Most PBIS schools focus predominantly on behavior in the Common Areas of the school (i.e., the hallways, bathrooms, cafeteria, etc.) and not in the classroom where students spend 85% of their time.
- The PBIS Triangle has never been validated. The Tier I (80%—All), Tier II (15%—Some), and Tier III (5%—Few) convention was made up by the National PBIS Directors for community-based epidemiological research that does not apply to education.
- PBIS recommends that challenging students sequentially receive Tier I to Tier II to Tier III services, and that record reviews and functional assessments of individual student behavior be delayed until Tier III.
[There is no research to support this practice, and it has resulted in (a) individual student interventions and supports being delayed to some students; (b) an increase in student resistance to intervention (because initial interventions were inappropriate and unsuccessful as they were implemented without reviewing students’ background information and histories); and (c) the need for more intensive interventions—even within Tier III—because student problems have gotten worse or more complicated because of the delays and the previous inappropriate interventions.]
- PBIS recommends universal social, emotional, and behavioral screening of all students in a school without describing the scientifically-appropriate multiple-gated procedures needed to do this accurately and effectively.
[This has resulted in schools using unscientifically founded emotional screening procedures that have actually increased the disproportionate (and false-positive) identification of some students.]
- Most PBIS schools were found to be implementing PBIS framework activities only at the Tier I level. . . with many schools unable to sustain even this level of PBIS practices for more than three years.
- The PBIS framework is largely implemented by a PBIS team that comes from each implementing school. This team receives large-group training (with other teams) in off-site settings that are off of school grounds.
[Said differently, virtually no PBIS training occurs by trained national or state PBIS leaders at each school site. Moreover, there is little or no on-site and direct PBIS consultation or technical assistance provided to implementing schools by experienced and expert PBIS Trainers or Facilitators. Thus, most PBIS schools are being led by school personnel who have received generic training, no direct supervision or coaching, and who may not have the prerequisite skills to be successful.]
- In some states, a state-level PBIS team annually evaluates the PBIS implementation of its schools. This evaluation and its “Gold,” “Silver,” and “Bronze” awards are largely based on the implementation of activities, and not students’ social, emotional, or behavioral outcomes.
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In summary (and back to where we started), the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ Beyond Suspensions Report has not only (inadvertently) misrepresented federal law relative to PBIS, but it has recommended a framework that—since the inception and federal funding of the National PBIS Technical Assistance in 1997—has not demonstrated any sustained, large-scale, appreciable success in addressing the disproportionate disciplinary actions taken against students of color or with disabilities.
Moreover, the Commission Report, by not attending to Max Eden’s testimony and data, missed the opportunity to “set the record straight”—failing to acknowledge the many research-based interventions (see below) that have helped many school districts nationally to increase students’ social, emotional, and behavioral self-management skills, while decreasing student misbehavior when present.
- Practical District and School Take-Away II: I understand that many districts and schools have been encouraged and/or trained in the PBIS framework by their state departments of education (remember, I worked for the Arkansas Department of Education for 13 years). Moreover, I understand that all of us want to trust that our state department of education colleagues are recommending effective practices—even while some also feel that there will be consequences for not acceding to these recommendations.
But, please understand (because I experienced it first-hand) that many state department of education staff (a) are feeling the same pressure that you are feeling from them—but they are feeling it from the U.S. Department of Education; and (b) some of them either do not know the “deep” research flaws in the PBIS framework, or they do not want to acknowledge them.
Indeed, some of this latter group are just being good “foot soldiers”—doing what they are told to do.
The point is: If your district or school is currently implementing the PBIS framework, it may be time to evaluate your work—and, especially, your outcomes—using ten PBIS realities described above. If, based on the objective data that represent the social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes of all of your students (including those who are most challenging), you are obtaining sound, sustained, and successful results. . . then, “keep on keeping on.”
However, if you are not getting the outcomes that you desire and need—even though you may be frustrated about the implementation time already lost, it may be time to invest some quality time to determine why you are not attaining your outcomes.
Don’t “double down” on your poor outcomes. . . throwing bad time at already lost time. Either modify what you are doing. . . or, if you conclude (as suggested above) that the PBIS framework has fatal flaws, throw it away and find an evidence-based model that will work.
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For more information on PBIS and its limitations—especially in the context of multi-tiered systems of support and seclusions and restraints (also addressed in the Commission’s Report), please read the following recent Blog messages:
February 16, 2019. Redesigning Multi-Tiered Services in Schools: Redefining the Tiers and the Difference between Services and Interventions
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March 2, 2019. Congress Take Note: How to Really Address the School Seclusion and Restraint Epidemic. The U.S. Department of Education Keeps Pushing PBIS, but PBIS Ain’t Got Nothing to Give (Part I)
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March 16, 2019. States Take Note: How to Really Address the School Seclusion and Restraint Epidemic. What State Departments of Education Need to Learn If Using PBIS to “Solve” This Problem (Part II)
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Restorative (Justice) Practices
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report also spent a lot of time singing the “praises” of restorative (justice) practice programs. Once again, this is not surprising as these programs have become more “public,” especially over the past five-plus years, due to the U.S. Department of Education’s funding of the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments.
I have analyzed and discussed the significant limitations of restorative practices in a number of past Blogs. The most recent one was published on January 26, 2019:
New Rand Corporation Study Finds Restorative Practices Produce Mixed and Underwhelming Results: But Some Publications are “Spinning” the Outcomes and Twisting these Results
[CLICK HERE for entire Blog Message]
Critically, aside from the fact that this “movement” is based more on personal testimony than objective science, one of the biggest issues with restorative practices is that (a) they are literally a collection of practices that have not been integrated, researched, and field-tested to determine which collection or sequence of practices actually produce changes in student behavior; and (b) they have become the foundation of a “cottage industry” where anyone who thinks that they can “do” restorative practices are establishing home-grown “National Centers” and professional development programs.
This past June, I presented at a national invitational conference in Chicago, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, on “Reducing Suspensions and Expulsions of Students with Disabilities: Linking Research, Law, Policy, and Practice.”
At the beginning of the three-day conference—and as a complete surprise to me, it became immediately apparent that a conscious “Restorative Practices” under-current was going to guide the conference. While I “kept my peace” for the first two days, when we began to formalize the conference’s recommendations on Day Three, I publicly commented that I hoped that the recommendations were not going to be unduly influenced by the Restorative Practices under-current.
At that point, the conference facilitator asked me what my definition of “restorative practices” was.
My response was, “Whatever the restorative practices proponent says that they are.”
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Back to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report: Max Eden (see the PBIS quote and section above) expressed concerns about both PBIS and restorative practices in his testimony to the Commission.
For example, Page 89 of the Report states:
Some critics of reforming discipline policies and limiting the use of exclusionary discipline argue that methods such as PBIS and restorative justice may have an adverse effect on the school environment. For instance, Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contends that his analysis of student surveys from several large school districts suggests that students have a very low sense of safety while at school. He testified that truancy in cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, and Philadelphia has risen by 16 percent because students are afraid to come to school. He believes that this is because violent students are no longer getting suspended, due to the Education Department’s guidance instructing schools to re-evaluate their usage of exclusionary discipline. Furthermore, Eden stated that he was not aware of any district that had administered consistent school climate surveys and implemented the Education Department’s reforms that had not experienced “a deterioration in student safety or respect.”
The Report goes on (Pages 141-142) to discuss a situation in the Washington, D.C. Public Schools where the published “success” of their restorative justice practices were grossly overstated—as documented by a Washington Post investigation that found (quoting from the Commission Report). . . that
at least seven of the city’s 18 high schools had removed disruptive students from schools, but not recorded it as a suspension. In several cases, students who had been barred from entering the school were marked as present, others were marked as attending an “in-school activity,” or absent without an excuse. Dunbar High School had the most underreported suspensions compared to any other high school in January 2017, according to Washington Post investigators. In data obtained by reporters, only 7 percent of the days that students were kept out of school for misbehavior were actually correctly reported as suspensions.
If this was not damning enough, the most significant comments on the data-based “efficacy” of Restorative Practices can be found at the end of the Commission Report (starting on Page 192) in the comments of Peter N. Kirsanow, one of the two Commissioners who filed a Dissenting Statement.
By way of background, Mr. Kirsanow is a lawyer and a Partner with the Cleveland, OH law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan, & Arnoff. According to his U.S. Civil Rights Commission biography, he is a Republican (if this makes a difference) who “frequently testifies before and advises members of the U.S. Congress on various civil rights and labor related issues, appearing most recently before the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the nominations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the United States Supreme Court.”
In his Dissenting Statement, Mr. Kirsanow made the following statements (Page 199) about Restorative Practices:
“Restorative practices, as they are typically called in a school or community setting, include many specific program types and do not have one specific definition in the literature; they are broadly seen as a nonpunitive approach to handling conflict (Fronius et al., 2016).” When we talk about “restorative justice,” as we see here, we are not talking about a clearly defined set of practices. We are talking about fuzzy muffles. Telling children to reflect upon the harm they have caused to others may be effective for children who are predisposed to empathize with others or to care about disappointing their teachers. But not all children care about the effects of their actions on others, or indeed, may be pleased that the harm they caused had its intended effect.
Kirsanow went on to describe the concerns publicized in the methodologically-sound Rand Corporation study of Restorative Practices in the Pittsburgh Public Schools (see the link above to my Blog message discussing these concerns). He also cited similar concerns regarding the use of Restorative Practices in (a) the Baltimore City School District (Page 203 of the Commission Report); and (b) Minneapolis (Page 205).
Kirsanow concluded his dissenting statement by saying:
The best that can be said for “restorative practices” and reducing suspensions is that in some school districts, students who would otherwise have been suspended are in school for more days. This is a paltry return for the price of increased classroom violence and disrupting the education of students who are there to learn.
[CLICK HERE for other Kirsanow comments on the Report from his July 25, 2019 National Review article, “Racial Disparities and School Discipline”]
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Summary. Amazingly, despite the Restorative Practices concerns documented in the Commission Report (as above), the Commission Report still recommended the following in Chapter 4: Findings and Recommendations:
Use of positive behavior intervention supports, restorative justice principles, and similar disciplinary practices that support alternatives to exclusionary school discipline generally result in improved student and staff perceptions of school safety, as reflected in school climate surveys. When teachers receive training and supports to implement these practices effectively, the use of these alternatives generally result in effective classroom management. Congress has required consideration of these supports and principles for students with disabilities since the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) reauthorization of 1997.
Quite honestly, from my perspective and in the face of the research, this recommendation is simply irresponsible.
But this paragraph also suggests (once again, as discussed earlier in this Blog) that the consideration of Restorative Practices appears in and is required by IDEA 1997.
The fact of the matter is: This is simply not true. In fact, “restorative practices”—or any variation of this term, does not appear anywhere in IDEA 1997. . . much less IDEA 2004.
- Practical District and School Take-Away III: As with my PBIS District and School Take-Away II, it may be time to evaluate your work—and, especially, your outcomes— if your district or school is currently implementing a Restorative Practices program. You may also want to assess how much time the program is taking, and whether you are getting a high “return on investment.”
Relative to this point, a May 6, 2019 article in The Hechinger Report, “The Promise of ‘Restorative Justice’ Starts to Falter under Rigorous Research,”
describes another Rand Corporation study of restorative justice implemented in randomly-selected schools in Maine. Supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and published on-line in the March, 2019 Journal of Youth and Adolescence, the study:
. . . found no difference in school climate between middle schools that tried restorative justice and those that didn’t. It didn’t look at suspension rates or academic outcomes. But the fact that bullying and other school climate measures didn’t budge is another sign that restorative justice programs aren’t a slam dunk solution to addressing student misbehavior.
The biggest insight from the Maine study was how hard it is for schools to implement restorative justice even after days of teacher training, monthly consultations and visits by coaches. Students’ survey answers revealed that they didn’t experience very much restorative justice in their day-to-day classrooms even after two years of effort. Restorative justice also requires a high degree of student buy-in. Students cannot be forced to talk about their grievances face-to-face with their classroom enemies. It’s a voluntary process and not every kid wants to talk.
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Differentiating the Data by Type of Disability
If we are ever going to get closer to a full understanding of the disproportionality problem for students with disabilities, the data must be disaggregated across the thirteen different disabilities referenced in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).
I have discussed this recommendation in a number of past Blog messages. The most recent discussion analyzed three years of state seclusion and restraint data by disability category. . . finding that students with disabilities directly related to social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health issues had the highest increasing number of seclusion and restraint incidents.
I connected these numbers not just to the challenges faced by these students, but also to the fact that most districts and schools have not had the training and do not have the personnel required to implement the multi-tiered services, supports, strategies, and interventions needed by these students.
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In this same vein, Commissioner Gail Heriot filed her Dissenting Statement (beginning on Page 177 of the Commission Report). Currently a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, Heriot is a former civil rights counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and a former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at George Mason University Law School.
According to her U.S. Civil Rights Commission biography, she is politically an Independent (again, if this makes a difference) whose “areas of expertise are civil rights, employment law, product liability, remedies and torts. Her work has appeared in legal journals like the Michigan Law Review, the Virginia Law Review and the Harvard Journal on Legislation. She also frequently writes for popular newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune.”
In her Dissenting Statement, Professor Heriot made the following points regarding the disproportionate discipline experienced by students with disabilities:
Here’s the problem: We are not talking (relative to disproportionality and student misbehavior) about students who are blind, wheelchair-bound, or deaf.
As Max Eden testified at our briefing, those students generally have lower than average discipline rates (though for reasons I cannot fathom, this significant clarification didn’t make it into the Commission’s findings). Instead, it is students with behavioral disorders who have higher than average discipline rates.
If that surprises anyone, it shouldn’t. It is essentially by definition that students with behavioral disorders engage in misbehavior at school more often than other students. The diagnostic criteria established under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (“DSM 5”) for them often includes findings that the individual has engaged in some sort of misbehavior.
For example, one of the criteria used to diagnose Oppositional Defiant Disorder is “often actively defies or refuses to comply with requests from authority figures or with rules.” Similarly, the diagnostic criteria for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) note that a person with the disorder “often interrupts or intrudes on others (e.g. butts into conversations, games, or activities); may start using other people’s things without asking or receiving permission; for adolescents or adults, may intrude into or take over what others are doing.” “Recurrent behavioral outbursts representing a failure to control aggressive impulses” is likewise a criterion for diagnosing Intermittent Explosive Disorder, and the essential feature of Conduct Disorder is “A repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or major age-appropriate social norms or rules are violated.”
What the Commission has found is that students who misbehave a lot get disciplined a lot. That should not be news.
Professor Heriot concluded her dissenting statement with:
One of my earliest heroes – Daniel Patrick Moynihan – famously said that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” A taxpayer-funded federal commission should be especially careful to avoid making these kinds of errors. Yet for all the reasons I discuss above, I fear that the Commission failed to do so with this report. The policymakers we advise and the public who fund us deserve better.
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- Practical District and School Take-Away IV: Districts and schools routinely collect student data by differentiating between student gender, race/culture, socio-economic status, and disability. This differentiation is often required by the U.S. Department of Education through ESEA or IDEA, or their state department of education.
Relative to students with disabilities, while not statutorily required for many outcome measures, districts and schools need to collect and analyze all of their academic, behavioral, and other data by differentiating these students by disability. Given the wide variety of service, support, strategy, and intervention needs of students in the thirteen different disability areas, these analyses may elucidate critical process and outcome trends.
Beyond this, the differentiation between a “discipline problem,” and a “social, emotional, or behavioral problem” still seems lost on many schools, districts, states, and the U.S. Department of Education. I have talked about this differentiation many times before.
Not to over-simplify, but students who are “discipline problems” most often have the skills to make “good behavioral choices” in their lives, but choose not to do so. For virtually all of these students, restorative practices will not work unless they change the “root cause”—the motivation underlying the antisocial act.
It is assumed that the “ultimate” goal of restorative practices is to change targeted students’ future interpersonal behavior. Given this, if restorative practices (e.g., an apology, discussion circle, or restorative consequence) do not change the motivation underlying a student’s antisocial behavior, these students will continue to choose to (for example) bully, taunt, or harass others.
In contrast, students with social, emotional, or behavioral problems are not motivated to make “bad behavioral choices,” they most often have not learned, mastered, or cannot (as opposed to “will not”) apply the specific interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution, or emotional control and coping skills that they need.
For some of these students, these “skill deficits” are compounded by biological/physiological issues (e.g., attention deficits, hypersensitive emotional activating systems in the amygdala due to trauma, biochemical imbalances, neurological events) that require medical or intensive cognitive-behavioral attention.
The point here is that—after a behavioral upset—a disciplinary action (like an office referral, a suspension, an expulsion) is not going to change the root cause of these students’ problems.
Moreover, and similarly, a restorative practice here will not change future behavior. As I have stated before, “You can't motivate a student out of a skill deficit.”
So. . . what is needed?
In order to discriminate between a “discipline problem” student and a “social, emotional, behavioral problem” student (and some individual students have elements of both problems), schools need to psychoeducationally assess these students. This may start with a threat analysis and/or move to a psychological assessment.
From here, the assessment results should be linked to the services, supports, strategies (including disciplinary strategies), and (medical and clinical) interventions needed by the student.
But ultimately, if the goal—after a student demonstrates frequent, unresponsive inappropriate behaviors, or even one serious behavioral event—is to decrease or eliminate future events, multi-tiered assessment and intervention approaches are needed.
The problem is that schools and districts need to have the personnel with the assessment and intervention expertise and the time to “get the job done.”
And, hence, our last discussion point.
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Where’s the Beef?
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report has 1,080 footnotes. While I appreciate the extensive research and document review and analysis, we still need to ask the question:
Does this Report have a high potential of functionally impacting policy and practice in this country such that students demonstrate more consistent interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution, and emotional control and coping skills in their schools . . .
While simultaneously decreasing or eliminating the disproportionate disciplinary “attention” received by students of color and with disabilities?
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With all due respect to the Commission, and based on Chapter 4: Findings and Recommendations, the answer is, “No.”
While extensive, the Report largely “admire the problem,” while making recommendations for interventions (e.g., PBIS and restorative practices) that have already had the time and money to help solve this multi-faceted problem.
But these interventions, especially in the words of the two dissenting Commissioners, have failed.
They do not need a make-over. We (educators across the country) need to take-over.
And the “take-over” needs to embody one of the points made earlier in this Blog. . . that the main body of the Commission Report:
- Provides limited student-specific psychoeducational analyses regarding why students demonstrate inappropriate behavior and how they can more consistently demonstrate appropriate behavior; or
- How to link these analyses to specific multi-tiered services, supports, strategies, and/or interventions that will change inappropriate student behavior into appropriate behavior.
Critically, while more is needed, we do have specific research-based assessment and intervention practices (NOT programs) to help schools answer the question (immediately above) that the Commission did not answer.
- Practical District and School Take-Away V: In order to facilitate the “take-over” discussed above, districts and schools need to look at their current “molecular” assessment and intervention practices.
Specifically, are they assessing students with social, emotional, and behavioral issues to determine the “root causes,” or to label and place these students?
And, are they linking their root cause assessments to high-probability-of-success interventions, or do they believe that a setting (e.g., an alternative program or special education classroom) or a person (a social worker or psychologist) is the intervention?
To provide examples of the molecular assessment and intervention needed (so that readers do not have to link to yet another Blog message), I am going to adapt and reprint a section (below) from my last Blog message on seclusions and restraints.
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The “High-Hit” Root Causes for Students’ Challenging Behavior
Relative to assessing the root causes of students’ challenging behavior, three initial principles are crucial:
- Principle 1. The assessment and intervention focus for all students is on their specific social, emotional, and behavioral self-management skills.
Even though some students need interventions that decrease or eliminate inappropriate or maladaptive social-emotional behaviors, a comprehensive intervention program concurrently plans for prosocial, emotional control, and replacement behaviors.
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- Principle 2. Given #1, assessments should not result simply in diagnostically labeling a student. Even if this occurs, the correlation between a label and the needed interventions is limited.
By way of example: If a school was developing individual intervention plans for five autistic students, they would need to know (a) what specific social, emotional, and behavioral deficits the five students exhibit; (b) what replacement behaviors are warranted; (c) the root causes of the self-management gaps; and (d) which individual interventions—in the context of the root causes and from a science-to-practice perspective—will help the students close their gaps and develop or reinforce their needed replacement behaviors.
These will differ for each of the students (regardless of the “common” label). . . hence, the reason for the individual root cause analyses and intervention plans.
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- Principle 3. A formal Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) is not always appropriate as the “root” of the root cause analysis.
FBAs should be conducted only when they can validly answer the specific diagnostic questions that are present for a case. FBAs typically answer questions that relate to a student’s motivation in choosing to demonstrate an inappropriate behavior. That is why FBAs ask, “What is the function of the behavior for this student?”
In order for a behavior to have “function” (e.g., to satisfy a student’s need for attention, control, power, or escape), the student needs to be motivated to attain this goal.
If the student does not have the skills to demonstrate the desired, appropriate behavior, an FBA will not be accurate.
Moreover, if the student’s behavior is biologically-based (e.g., the student cannot control his or her emotions, attention, impulsivity, or motor behavior), the FBA also will not accurately identify this.
I see far too many FBAs conducted with autistic students when some (sometimes, most) of their behavior is biologically-based. When behavior is biologically-based, there typically is no motivational function to the behavior. Thus, once again, most FBA “results” here are often inaccurate, and there has been no productive “return” on the time invested in completing the FBA.
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Beyond these Principles, some of the primary reasons why students demonstrate social, emotional, or behavioral problems in the classroom include:
- There are (known or undiagnosed) biological, physiological, biochemical, neurological, or other physically- or medically-related conditions or factors that are unknown, undiagnosed, untreated, or unaccounted for.
- They do not have positive relationships with teachers and/or peers in the school, and/or the school or classroom climate is so negative (or negative for them) that it is toxic.
- They are either academically frustrated (thus, they emotionally act out) or academically unsuccessful (thus, they are behaviorally motivated to escape further failure and frustration).
- Their teachers do not have effective classroom management skills, and/or the teachers at their grade or instructional levels do not have consistent classroom management approaches.
- They have not learned how to demonstrate and apply effective interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution, and/or emotional coping skills to specific (school-based or home-based) situations in their lives.
- They do not have the skills or motivation to work with peers—for example, in the cooperative or project-based learning groups that are more prevalent in today’s classrooms.
- Meaningful incentives (to motivate appropriate behavior) or consequences (to discourage future inappropriate behavior) are not (consistently) present.
- They are not held accountable for appropriate behavior by, for example, requiring them (a) to apologize for and correct the results of their inappropriate behavior; and (b) role play, practice, or demonstrate the appropriate behavior that they should have done originally.
- Their behavior is due to past inconsistency-- across people, settings, situations, or other circumstances. For example, when teachers’ classroom management is inconsistent, some students will manipulate different situations to see how much they can "get away with." Or, when peers reinforce inappropriate student behavior while the adults are reinforcing appropriate behavior, students will often behave inappropriately because they value their peers more than the adults in the school.
- They are experiencing extenuating, traumatic, or crisis-related circumstances outside of school, and they need emotional support (sometimes including mental health) to cope with these situations and be more successful at school.
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Critically, if we do not know and understand these root causes, we will likely never identify and implement the right interventions or solutions.
For students whose behavior escalates to the point that schools use suspensions or expulsions, a big part of the root cause analysis should also focus on their emotional control and coping skills, and the situations that trigger the behavioral escalation. These assessments must be ecological in nature. They need to look not just at the student, but at how other people, task and situational demands, settings, and interactions are related to problem at-hand.
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What Strategic or Intensive Interventions Do Students with Social, Emotional, or Behavioral Problems Need?
From my perspective—and given my continuous consulting with schools across the country—I believe that many districts and schools lack “Tier II and Tier III” intervention training and expertise.
In addition, there also is not enough real, continuous, and collaborative coordination between districts’ related services and intervention professionals, and the community-based clinicians (e.g., psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers) who are available or are working with specific students.
In the former areas, many students with significant social, emotional, behavioral, and/or mental health needs (again, based on accurate functional assessments) often need one or more of the following clinical interventions:
Emotional Control and Coping Interventions/Therapies
Progressive Muscle Relaxation Therapy and Stress Management
Emotional Self-Management (Self-awareness, Self-instruction, Self-monitoring, Self-evaluation, and Self-reinforcement) Training
Emotional/Anger Control and Management Therapy
Self-Talk and Attribution (Re)Training
Thought Stopping approaches
Systematic Desensitization
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools (CBITS)
Structured Psychotherapy for Adolescents Responding to Chronic Stress (SPARCS)
Trauma Systems Therapy (TST)
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Motivational Interventions
Positive Reinforcement, Schedules of Reinforcement, and Fading Techniques
Differential Reinforcement of Alternative, Other, Low Rates, and Incompatible Behaviors
Extinction/Planned Ignoring
Response Cost/Bonus Response Cost
Positive Practice and Restitutional Overcorrection
Group Contingency (Independent, Dependent, Interdependent) Interventions
Behavioral Contracting
Educative Time-Out
The Good Behavior Game
Check-In/Check-Out
Check and Connect
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Skill Instruction Interventions
Intensive Social Skills Training (Interpersonal, Social Problem-Solving, Conflict Prevention and Resolution, and Emotional Control and Coping skills)
Cueing, Prompting, and Stimulus Control
Attention-Control Training
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At the same time, in the latter area, many of these students need additional interventions that include medication, intensive community-based individual and family therapy, and specialized school settings—so that the right interventions can be implemented in the right ways.
This is why an ecological treatment approach is needed for some students, and why the integration of school, family, and community services is essential.
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At the same time, because of my ongoing work in schools with high-needs students, I know that some students present with such significant, diverse, and historical needs that there are no silver bullets. However, in the absence of schools having the skills, resources, and capacity to select and implement many of the interventions above, we really do not know the levels of success that we might have with these students.
So. . . let’s put the “horse before the cart.” Let’s get these interventions into the hands of the right school professionals, and let’s see what happens. We need to empower our colleagues with the tools to get the job done.
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Summary
Before summarizing, we need to recognize the broader social-political context of equity and privilege, race and history, and socio-economic status and funding that education “lives” within. This is not just about individual students, or even groups of students, who are or are perceived to be behaving badly. There is a complex, multi-faceted ecology acting here.
But part of that context does get played out in how different schools are funded. . . as well as their differential levels of resources, staff experience, staff stability, and community support and involvement. Indeed, we must recognize the interdependent correlation between these factors and student engagement, behavior, and achievement.
This issue was recently quantified in a February, 2019 report from EdBuild, a non-profit organization that analyzes school funding issues.
[CLICK HERE for Report]
The EdBuild Report publicized the significant funding gaps that approximately 12.8 million of our nation’s students experience because they are enrolled in “racially concentrated” districts with student bodies where 75% of the students are non-white.
More specifically, the Report stated that racially concentrated non-white districts receive, on average, only $11,682 of funding per student each year, while racially concentrated white districts receive $13,908 per student each year. As 27% of our nation’s students live in racially concentrated non-white districts, and 26% of our nation’s students live in racially concentrated white districts, this translates to a $23 billion funding gap per year that favors white over non-white districts. . . despite them serving approximately the same number of students.
And so, if more funds are needed to facilitate and fund the “take-over” recommended above, here is a good place to start.
I have discussed the issue of equity in two recent Blogs that I hope will be of interest if you missed them:
April 27, 2019. Solving Student Crises in the Context of School Inequity: The Case for “Core-Plus District Funding” (Part I). When Schools Struggle with Struggling Students: “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
[CLICK HERE for Blog Message]
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May 20, 2019. The Journey toward Real School Equity: Students’ Needs Should Drive Student Services … and Funding (Part II). The Beginning of the Next School Year Starts Now: The “Get-Go Process”
[CLICK HERE for Blog Message]
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Meanwhile, while prompted by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s recent report (Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline For Students of Color with Disabilities), and especially by the Dissenting Statements of two of its eight Commissioners, the following district and school recommendations were generated:
- Practical District and School Take-Away I. Educators need to be careful to not accept a “popular press” summary of any major state or federal policy document, or the “sound bites” that emanate from those who are not dedicated to describing the nuances of a complex issue and document.
Educators need to understand that policy statements often influence the depth and breadth of recommended practices. Thus, they need to read, for themselves, policy reports in areas that may directly influence their work as practitioners.
In completing this reading, it is important to recognize the practices that are missing in any policy document, why they are missing, and the implications to students and staff because of their absence.
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- Practical District and School Take-Away II. For districts or schools that are currently implementing the PBIS framework, it may be time to evaluate your work—and, especially, your outcomes—using ten PBIS realities described in this Blog. If, based on the objective data that represent the social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes of all of your students (including those who are most challenging), you are obtaining sound, sustained, and successful results. . . then, “keep on keeping on.”
However, if you are not getting the outcomes that you desire and need—even though you may be frustrated about the implementation time already lost, it may be time to invest some quality time to determine why you are not attaining your outcomes, and change course are necessary.
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- Practical District and School Take-Away III. Similarly, for districts and schools that are currently implementing restorative (justice) practices, it may be time to evaluate your work—and, especially, your outcomes as in Take-Away II above. Here, you may also want to assess how much time the program or practices are taking, and whether you are getting a high “return on investment.”
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- Practical District and School Take-Away IV. Districts and schools need to collect and analyze all of their academic, behavioral, and other data for students with disabilities by differentiating these students by their disability area. Given the wide variety of service, support, strategy, and intervention needs of students in the thirteen different disability areas, these analyses may elucidate critical process and outcome trends.
Beyond this, districts and schools need to differentiate between students who are “discipline problems,” and those who have a “social, emotional, or behavioral problem.”
In order to discriminate between these two types of students, districts and schools need to psychoeducationally assess these students, and then link the assessment results to the strategic or intensive multi-tiered services, supports, strategies (including disciplinary strategies), and (medical and clinical) interventions needed by the student.
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- Practical District and School Take-Away V. In order to facilitate the “take-over” discussed above, districts and schools need to look at their current “molecular” assessment and intervention practices.
Specifically, are they assessing students with social, emotional, and behavioral issues to determine the “root causes,” or to label and place these students?
And, are they linking their root cause assessments to high-probability-of-success interventions, or do they believe that a setting (e.g., an alternative program or special education classroom) or a person (a social worker or psychologist) is the intervention?
To this end, we provided examples of the molecular assessments and interventions needed.
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Despite the complexity of this problem, we need to stop “admiring the problem,” and get down to the molecular assessments and interventions that actually are available. . . but are being masked by recommendations of frameworks and programs that have not objectively or empirically demonstrated their efficacy.
While policy sometimes drives practice, there are no educational policies in this country that require specific frameworks or programs (as long as you truly read, understand, and know the law).
Let’s “begin with the end in mind.” Relative to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report, that means: Let’s begin with the Dissenting Statements and work backwards.
For our students, that means: Let’s look at our students’ interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict prevention and resolution, and emotional control and coping skills. . . and work backwards.
As always, I look forward to your thoughts and comments. I am always available to provide a free hour of telephone consultation to those who want to discuss their own students, school, or district needs. Feel free to contact me at any time if there is anything that I can do to support your work. . . now, and as you enter this new school year.
Best,
