By The Times/Ledger
With all the fanfare that one might expect in a highly charged political season, Gov. Pataki signed a law designed to rid the state's public schools of disruptive students. Like much that comes from Albany, this new law is a smoke screen that fails to address the serious discipline problem in our city schools.
The law, titled Project SAVE, for Safe Schools Against Violence in Education, gives teachers the right to kick “disruptive” students out of their classrooms. The United Federation of Teachers praised the legislation, which gives teachers a power that until now belonged exclusively to principals.
While we strongly agree with the rationale that children have the right to attend school in a safe environment, we are troubled by Project SAVE. Is it really a good thing that teachers now have the right to decide who can sit in their classrooms and who cannot? Bear in mind that while teachers now have the right to boot students, principals still do not have the right to boot incompetent and lazy teachers. Unless a tenured teacher is convicted of a felony or commits a major breach of Board of Education policy, there is little that school administrators can do to remove that teacher.
Of course, teachers have always had the option of sending a student to the principal's office. However, the UFT claims that, in a “revolving door syndrome,” principals often send the unruly child back to the classroom. If this is the case, it is the principal that must be changed, not the system. The principal is in a position to take the larger view. This rather irresponsible law allows teachers to kick kids out of their classrooms without making them responsible for dealing with the consequences of their actions. Teachers may now be free to wash their hands of disruptive children; the Board of Education is not.
If Albany and the UFT were serious about dealing with the problem of disruptive children, they would long ago have addressed the shortage of guidance counselors who are the first line of defense in dealing with the troubled student. Many schools do not have even one full-time counselor. Guidance counselors are often shared between two or more schools. They will be the first to tell you that this is a prescription for disaster.
It is all too easy to say that teachers should be free to teach students who are truly there to learn. That's lovely for the honor role students who come from supportive homes, but what about the children who live with dysfunctional families and come to the classroom with incredible emotional baggage? The law does not explain what principals will do with these problem kids? Nor does the law require the teacher to meet with the parent or guardian of the child who they are preparing to jettison.
Project SAVE also requires all schools to adopt a “code of conduct” and file it with the state. More brain candy. The New York City Board of Education already has a toughly worded code of conduct and we suspect that is true for most, if not all, school districts in the state.
Despite the good intentions behind Project SAVE, we believe it is a mistake to put the power to permanently remove students from a classroom in the hands of teachers. Discipline is a job for the administration. If the principal is not doing the job well, teachers should and do have avenues for appeal. To give this power to teachers unchecked puts children at risk and will do little to make our schools safer and more effective.
