Getting serious about school discipline

Public Interest, Fall, 1998 by Jackson Toby

The national trend toward raising the age of compulsory attendance from 16 to 18 worsens rather than improves high-school education and inevitably contributes to discipline problems. A half dozen years ago, the District of Columbia raised the age from 16 to 18, after which its schools went downhill faster. Even if such legal requirements could guarantee the physical presence of alienated students in school, they cannot force students to learn. Unlike imprisonment, which can be imposed on the unwilling, education requires cooperation between teachers and learners.

What states should do to reawaken students' desire to earn the good opinion of their teachers, thereby improving their leverage over students, is to enact laws making attendance at public high schools voluntary, as it is in Japan, and then do everything possible to motivate students to attend in their own self-interest. This done, teachers will have more enthusiasm for teaching and will not be afraid to confront misbehaving students, thereby nipping everyday school violence in the bud.

What about junior high schools and intermediate schools? The higher academic and behavioral standards that voluntary enrollment will make possible in high schools will eventually have a beneficial effect on lower secondary schools. Once all high schools have become voluntary - and are thereby able to raise their academic and behavioral standards - junior-high-school students will face the problem of getting accepted at the high school of their choice (as they face it now in Japan). Teachers will be able to say to junior-high-school students, "If you do not learn what you are supposed to learn in junior high school, you will cut yourself off from later educational opportunities." This will decrease, although not eliminate, disciplinary problems from junior high schools. The Japanese experience is instructive. Although Japanese junior high schools are more violent than Japanese senior high schools, most Japanese junior-high-school students are too busy preparing for the examinations for high-school admission to engage in disciplinary infractions.

Of Big Macs and big brothers

If high-school attendance became voluntary in the United States, academic achievement would increase and discipline problems would decrease, but the improvement would be most marked in inner-city high schools. The argument against making high-school attendance voluntary in the United States is essentially that, until American society devises transitional institutions for moving uneducated dropouts into work roles, education is the only game in town. But this is not the case: Formal education is not the only path to responsible adulthood.

The much-maligned fast-food industry is a major trainer of the poorly educated, including minorities and recent immigrants, providing them with jobs that can lead eventually into the middle class. More than 20,000,000 members of the current American labor force have worked at one of McDonald's 8,000 restaurants, mostly at only slightly better than minimum-wage entry-level jobs. McDonald's does not think of itself as a training ground where egocentric teenagers, including dropouts, can learn the sorts of skills and values that will enable them to move on to better jobs; but it is more successful at doing so than most governmentally sponsored training programs. Unfortunately, Americans wax nostalgic over disappearing work experiences for children - e.g., paper routes and family farms - while they ignore the large fast-food chains that provide training in crucial work skills, like getting to work on time, being well groomed, working hard and fast.