Punishing Students and their Parents

When a child is consistently delinquent in or tardy for school, punishments in the past have ranged from failing the student to suspending or expelling them. Great idea, huh? Let’s take a juvenile delinquent and throw him or her, unskilled, out onto the streets! That’ll teach that school-hating minor who’s boss. Perhaps we should improve his/her shooting and drug-selling skills before he or she goes to make sure he uses his time well. Never ever understood why expelling a student, particularly in their teens, was anything other than a punishment of society for letting matters progress to such a disturbing level. Failing a student as punishment also seems like preparing him or her to drop out as soon as they can legally do so. Dropout rates in inner city high schools average around 50%!

There have been alternatives, and arresting a teen for truancy – very seldom done in a justice system that is overloaded with other criminal acts – and ordering them to a boot camp until they achieve a judge-mandated goal is a very disruptive and expensive solution to the problem. Yet serial and constant unexcused absences from school are pretty strong indicators of something wrong, often seriously wrong. Truancy could be to avoid embarrassment or physical danger or it could be because the student has “other things to do,” usually on the wrong side of the law. Nipping such issues earlier, rather than waiting for them to encumber the criminal justice system later, would actually seem to be a less expensive alternative. Bullying and humiliation scenarios are clearly a school district responsibility; detecting potential criminal behavior would seem to be a necessary inquiry as well.

Not all school districts have access to bona fide boot camps – total confined institutions run with military discipline and lots of personal monitoring – but for those that do, the technique, while expensive, tends to produce better (but not great) results than alternative punishments. For parents with funds, boot camp can be a private experience… much like sending junior to military school decades ago. On the “nice” side, there are also summer camps in academic subjects for concerned parents that hardly fall into the category of punitive educational institutions of last resort.

But there is a new wave of “punishments” for delinquency and truancy sweeping the country, this time focused on the parents. Teachers are tired of taking the blame for poor performance at difficult inner city schools. They want to shift responsibility to the caretakers of the student the rest of the time: the parents. Legislation has already passed or is on the dockets of dozens of state assemblies to impose requirements on parents – to attend parent-teacher conferences, to be responsible for their children’s showing up for school, generally to be responsible for their children’s actions while in school and even one proposal in Indiana to perform minimal “volunteer” services at their kids’ school (that didn’t get out of committee).

But the wave of legislation is here: “Alaska fines parents for a child’s truancy. In California, a misdemeanor charge can be brought against a parent if the truancy is flagrant enough. California is also the first state to allow judges to order parents to attend parenting classes if their child belongs to a gang. The goal, said the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Tony Mendoza, a Democrat, is to help parents navigate the minefield of adolescence. The new law took effect in January, and early reports indicate that attendance at the classes is sparse.

“That is not surprising, said Diane Ravitch, an education historian and the author of ‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System.’ Yes, parenting can be ‘taught’ Ms. Ravitch said, but not this way… ‘If we could just find the right person to punish,’ she said of the philosophy behind too many education reform plans. ‘Punish the teachers. Punish the parents. It’s Dickensian. What we should be doing instead is giving a helping hand.’…

“In the end, then, all these ‘punish the parents’ paradigms will probably take their historical place as just one more shift of the pendulum in the sweep that already includes contradictory certainties like ‘children are being allowed to grow up too quickly’ and ‘children are being infantilized too long.’ Like every other new way of thinking, it will eventually be looked on as a well-intentioned but flawed reflection of a moment in time.” New York Times, May 20^th. At a time when we are eviscerating school budgets, necessitating reducing the number of classes while also increasing average class size, the whole system is moving in the wrong direction. Education is a bout motivating, personalizing and tailoring educational programs to what works with the students themselves, each of whom comes from a different background. But we cannot rain our economic failures at the cost of depriving our children of their future. They didn’t ask to come into this world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and no society can prosper and grow in a modern world without solid and effective educational programs that embrace all young people.