Student Behaviour and Inclusion: How well are “Coke Bottle Kids” being served in total inclusion classrooms?*

New Brunswick disabilities advocate Heather Chandler, the mother of a hearing-challenged daughter, is no fan of the what she describes as the “illusion of inclusion.” On an April 2023 CBC NB radio panel of parents, she described what it’s really like for her daughter Alison and far too many other children in New Brunswick’s one-classroom-for-all model.

Social isolation, anxieties and frustrations are an everyday school experience for many children. That’s what vocal N.B. parents such as Chandler are saying publicly, some for the first time. It all surfaced during the tension-filled consultations over the aborted French language reforms threatening the French immersion program

Chandler is far from alone in speaking out about how it’s adversely affecting her own daughter and children with disabilities of all kinds. “She’s holding it in,” Chandler says, while others are “blowing up in class” causing disruptions. It all comes out when she gets home. “For deaf kids, it’s actually exclusion.” In short, “it’s not working.”

Chandler’s daughter displays the classic behaviour of what are known as “Coke bottle kids.” That term, coined by American education observer Jay Elizabeth Brownlee, originally used to describe neurodivergent children, has far wider application. It helps to explain why teachers say school kids are “fine” or “had a good day” yet the second they get home (or before they leave the school parking lot), they simply “blow up in your face.”

Chandler and that CBC NB panel, including Moncton parent Clinton Davis and French immersion parent Weh-Ming Cho, identified, in considerable detail, how challenging it can be trying to cope in today’s classrooms. Each of them, to varying degrees, supported structural changes building-in more “fluidity” for kids, including a broader range of options to ensure meaningful inclusion for most, if not all kids, right across the spectrum.

Student behaviour and the remarkably rigid N.B. inclusion model are intimately connected. Investing some $30-million more may provide some temporary relief, but it’s not getting to the root of the matter. Without some fluidity in movement, it can be, in Chandler’s words, “an isolating experience.”

Listening to his children, Moncton’s Clinton Davis got a good sense of what’s actually going on in different schools. His kids simply don’t feel like the regular teachers know how to support students with disabilities nor do they have the resources to manage students with behavioural problems. Some unruly students, he pointed out, do not have diagnosed disabilities and are simply ‘acting up’ and disrupting classes.

While French immersion classes run more smoothly, Cho thinks they too might benefit from some variation in delivery models, including enrichment opportunities. Allowing students to periodically interact with “new faces” might provide some relief as long as it’s not perceived as punishment of any kind. Being stuck with the same people all day, whatever your age, he added, could become a “hellscape” for anyone.

The latest provincial plan to address student behaviour challenges, announced in late July by NBTA Executive Director Ardith Shirley and Assistant Deputy Education Minister Tiffany Bastin, came up considerably short. Hiring “behaviour mentors” and adding contract supply teachers was presented as a “near-term” response. It looks far more like a band-aid to patch-up the existing model and quell rising parent and teacher concerns.

Education Minister Bill Hogan’s statement supporting the latest plan sounded like it was simply a matter of providing more classroom supports.  The behaviour intervention mentors, he said, were aimed at helping students “learn to self-regulate” and helping staff to “co-regulate” guiding students on a “more positive path” and “reduce interruptions that happen in class.” Assigning supply teachers to specific schools, Hogan added, provided more predictability for teachers and consistency for learning-challenged children.

A year ago, former N.B. Education Minister Dominic Cardy was preparing to revamp thar province’s rather rigid inclusion model to address the incidence of behavioural disruptions. The policy change, he wrote, was aimed at “making it clear that we defined inclusion as being inclusion within the school, not the classroom.” That meant all students would be included in the class unless and until the behaviour of a single student disrupted the entire class. In such cases, that student would be provided with an alternative placement with resource support.

Sarah Wagner, executive director of Inclusion N.B., strongly objected to any plan deviating from Policy 322 on Inclusive Education, claiming that inclusion should continue to mean every student, all the time, without exception. “The right of the child is to be with their peers and within the classroom,” she told CBC News. “The way we need to look at it is — what supports are required to make that successful.”

The interim report issued by in June 2023 by Shirley and Bastin backs away from that inclusion reform commitment.  It tilts more in the direction of maintaining the status quo, in line with the position of Inclusion NB, formerly known as the Association for Community Living.

New Brunswick’s “Coke bottle kids” are not really integrated into those classrooms and some are disruptive because teachers are overwhelmed and unable to cope with the frequency of class disruptions.  When disruptions occur, teachers simply keep the lid on or evacuate everyone except the student acting out and causing a disturbance.

Legitimate parent concerns about disruptive students and the social isolation of kids with disabilities in regular classes are not really being addressed. New Brunswick has settled for What Cardy described as “ rhetorical inclusion” and it’s not only an “absurd situation” but not sustainable for much longer.  Let’s hope this isn’t widespread in our provincial school systems.

• Extracted and adapted from an Education Beat column, Telegraph-Journal, September 23, 2023. 

What is “meaningful inclusion for so-called “Coke-Bottle Kids”? Why are today’s teachers so overwhelmed by students with complex needs and struggling to maintain safe, calm and mutually cooperative class environments? Is adding “behaviour mentors” going to make much of a difference? How many adults can a regular classroom teacher manage along with a class of kids? Where might policy-makers look to find a school system where severely challenged kids are identified, supported and integrated back into the mainstream classroom? 

 

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Schools Out of Control and in Chaos: Where’s the Leadership and Why the Paralysis?

An open letter with shocking revelations of student misbehaviour has dominated Canadian public education discussion for the past month or more.  Written by a deeply concerned teacher, the explosive letter surfaced on May 23, 2023 at Tomken Road Middle School in the Applewood Heights neighbourhood of Peel Region west of Toronto. It revealed, in stark detail, a litany of hair-raising examples of student violence and misconduct in a school said to be in a ‘deplorable’ state with students acting completely out-of-control.  

            Months if not years of registering concerns with the Middle School principal and Peel Region administration went nowhere and finally, out of sheer desperation, the teacher decided to go to the media with the inside story.  Appearing on CTV News and CBC-TV News in silhouette form with a disguised voice, the teacher whistleblower provided a compelling description of the ‘uncontrollable violence’ and complete disorder reigning in the Grade 6 to 8 school with some 900 students.

            “Every morning I wake up and I’m scared to go to work,” the teacher told CTV News. “I fear to go walking down the hallways and possibly put myself in a position where have to have a dangerous interaction with a student.”  The teacher’s greatest fear was “for the safety of the students” and there were “many days I’ve just cried because I’m so sad for the kids.” 

            The accompanying letter identified some twenty separate examples of glaring acts of misbehaviour, open defiance, and complete disrespect shown toward teachers as well as student peers.  What began during the 2021-22 school year, has only escalated since September 2022.  Students were reported to be routinely verbally abusing one another, threatening fellow students and staff with physical violence, writing hateful speech on walls targeting teachers’ ethnicities, uttering homophobic slurs, defecating on the bathroom floor, spreading feces on the wall, along with filming and distributing fights taking place before, after and during school hours.

            Confronting the very lurid and horrifying revelations, the school principal and board officials went to ground, at first trying to deny some of the claims, then attempting to discredit the teacher and her staff allies. Claiming that the allegations were “not accurate” did not work, nor did the usual line of defense that the board put its faith in “progressive discipline” and “restorative approaches” to student behaviour.

The Peel administration’s response speaks volumes about how school systems practice damage control and seek to silence teachers speaking out of school.  Teaching staff members tried unsuccessfully to get through to Principal Nicholas Berardi for help to improve conditions from September 2022 until mid-May 2023.

After months of “inaction,” at least 51 per cent of staff asked for a meeting with Peel Superintendent. Dahlia Battick. According to the teacher, Battick agreed to meet for two hours over two days, but simply didn’t show up for the first meeting. When a meeting was finally held, a senior teacher outlining the serious occurrences was cut-off in mid-sentence, voices were raised, and nothing much was accomplished.

The Tomken Road teacher’s letter went beyond identifying regular and recurrent acts of misbehaviour to provide a clear, coherent and common sense policy prescription: “As a staff we are looking to reinstate some type of structure at our school. We want to ban cell phones. We want students to take responsibility for their actions. We need higher expectations and we need standards. We are also desperately seeking consequences for misbehaviour.”

Instead of changing course and addressing the serious problem of student misbehaviour, the Peel Board has doubled down and, according to a recent National Post investigation, is attempting to pin the blame on the whistleblower and concerned teachers in the school. While the principal has been removed and a board team parachuted-in, there’s plenty of evidence of a cover -up operation. The publishing of an anonymous letter was initially treated as a violation of privacy and the author subjected to unwarranted scrutiny. 

            The official Peel Board response smacks of duplicity.  While the board is putting a positive spin on existing student behaviour policy and its response, the misbehaviour continues unabated.  In private, the administration is still focusing on dealing with the teachers who went public, accusing them of spreading “lies,’ “abandoning students,” and even “doing a lot of harm to the community.”

            Below the surface, racial politics is a factor, especially in Peel, a Toronto region board with an already tarnished reputation. Some students engaging in the disruptive behaviour are Black, but not all of those causing the disruptions. It’s a sensitive matter because, even after all the revelations, teachers are still being advised to respond to student questions by ‘affirming the students’ feelings’ and responding in ways “aligned with the board’s responses.”

            Today, as the school year nears its end, teachers are counting the days and some staff were reportedly close to walking out, taking sick leave. The crisis has rocked the Peel Board of Education, but the two sides remain at odds and teachers are still upset that somehow, they became the problem.  A tough situation got worse because of incredibly weak administrative leadership, totally ineffective student behaviour policy, and an unwillingness to confront in-school realities.

Why is student behaviour out-of-control in educational settings like Tomken Road Middle School?  How much of the problem stems from ‘progressive discipline’ administered with no consequences?  What’s happened to school leadership? What explains the paralysis?

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Trauma-Informed Education: Where’s the Research Evidence TIP Works as a Whole-of-School Approach?

Trauma-informed education spread rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s now ascendant in Canadian K-12 education. Its origins go back more than two decades and were identified by British sociologist Frank Furedi in his powerful book, Therapy Culture, better known in the UK than here in North America.  Widely viewed as “an unambiguously positive development,” the therapeutic ethos and its offshoot “trauma-informed practice” (TIP) have, according to American policy analyst Robert Pondiscio, extended the reach of education into students’ lives and expanded the role of teachers.  While it’s recognized and openly debated in the United Kingdom and the United States, the phenomenon remains largely unexamined in Canada’s disaggregated provincial school systems.

One of the most trenchant critiques of contemporary social trends, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s 2019 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, tackled the contradictions inherent in education at all levels from pre-school to the universities. What the authors clearly identified was the “coddling of the mind” and the desire to weave a protective web of “safetyism” around today’s generation of students. Fierce critics of the rise of therapy culture in education like Furedi go much further, claiming that therapy culture draws sustenance from “trauma-informed” approaches, implants a culture of fear, and gives credence to claims that most students are vulnerable and need protection.

There’s mounting evidence to support the claim that education is now enveloped in social therapy culture. Over the past five years or more, public concerns about the effects of trauma—especially relative to school-aged students—have increased exponentially.  Fueling much of the discussion is a screening tool that was developed in the mid-1990s, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) scale. It’s adoption as an early years intervention is a prime example of the priority now assigned to diagnosing and treating “trauma” affected children and introducing elementary school programs incorporating “mindfulness,” “self-regulation,” and suicide prevention.  Few of these initiatives or programs have been properly evaluated and validated as effective in the field of teen mental health, and mass application in congregate settings carries certain identified risks

Overdiagnosis of children and teens with broadly-defined “mental health issues’ may well be an unrecognized problem. More than two-thirds of American students, according to Health and Human Services survey data, reportedly suffer one traumatic event before their sixteenth birthday. In the case of Canada, leading experts like Rosalynn M. Record-Lemon and Maria J. Buchanan, routinely claim that statistics show 76.1% of Canadians will experience at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. Many and perhaps most children and adults, before COVID-19, were said to be facing “psychological trauma” and life situations that “overwhelm the individual’s capacity to cope.” Maltreatment, family violence, bullying, natural disasters, illnesses and personal loss were linked to “pervasive psychological, physical and developments impacts.” All of this is commonly used as a rationale for the widespread adoption of Trauma-Informed Practice (TIP) in publicly-funded schools.

Two recent metadata reviews of trauma-informed approach in schools have damaged its claim to be evidence-based practice. The best-known study, conducted by St. Louis University social work professor Brandy R. Maynard and her research team, under the auspices of Campbell Reviews, examined some 9,102 potential research articles, and identified only 67 of the articles were independent research studies. None of the 67 articles met evidence-based research criteria:  49 articles did not use random controlled trials or quasi-experimental design methods; 12 did not examine the effects of a trauma-informed approach; and the remaining five examined only one aspect of a trauma-informed approach. These authors reached a rather stark conclusion:  no school-based, trauma-informed research studies over the past ten years that were conducted using sound research methodologies such that the programs investigated could be objectively determined to be effective in addressing the trauma-related needs of school-aged students.

An authoritative research March 2019 article in Review of Research in Education reached similar conclusions. When three Kentucky researchers, M. Shelley Thomas, Shantel Crosby and Judi Vanderhaar, studied trauma-informed practices in schools over two decades, they found plenty of initiatives dedicated to reforming teaching practices, school climate, teacher training and ongoing professional development. “Empirical work” was “less established,” little of it came from education researchers, and, again, there was a lack of evidence demonstrating “the effectiveness of school-based supports” or their consistent application in schools.

The theoretical gaps, research deficiencies and questionable effectiveness of social-justice-centred trauma-informed school programs has also been exposed in a literature review in the 2021 International Journal of School Social Work. The three New Mexico University researchers, favourably disposed to such approaches, concluded that “the current theory of impact linking trauma-informed work and social justice work is not supported by evidence.” What was missing was “a socio-ecological model of trauma’ (SAMHSA 2014)” integrating psychological strategies into a broader initiative demonstrating an “understanding of families and staff as well as students.”

The Pandemic education crisis was accompanied by a profound catharsis transforming school systems, over two school years, for months on end, into protective spaces adhering to COVID-19 public health directives, and focused on providing a semblance of rough equity and support for students from disadvantaged or marginalized communities. In Ontario, it’s even spawned a new educational administration venture into “trauma-sensitive school leadership.”

What comes next? As families and schools gradually recover from “learning loss” and the collateral psycho-social effects, the almost exclusive emphasis on trauma-informed practice will likely subside. When it does, let’s hope that we see a revival of the effective schools movement holding out the promise of more focused, meaningful, purposeful and effective teaching and learning.

What explains the proliferation and staying power of “Trauma-Informed Education” in Canada’s provincial school systems?  Will it survive the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? Where is the evidence-based research in support of school-wide “trauma-informed” approaches? Should we be targeting such interventions where they will make a difference?

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Violence in Schools: Why is the “Culture of Silence” Breaking Down in Canadian Education? *

Fists and knives have re-appeared in Canada’s high schools in the wake of the pandemic shutdowns. Back in June of 2022, Ottawa parent Sarah Murray went public after Nepean High School officials left her in the dark, then hushed-up a washroom beating administered to her son by local bullies. What really upset her was the school’s policy of keeping quiet about “traumatic experiences.”

Nor is it safe to be milling around in front of some high schools. A 15-year-old Grade 10 boy made national headlines in February 2023 when he was shot during lunchtime outside Toronto’s Weston Collegiate, ran inside and was comforted by teachers, before being rushed to the nearest trauma centre. Such incidents are no longer isolated events.

While school shootings are still rare, regular and ongoing violence in and around schools is getting worse. Ontario’s  high school teachers’ union president Karen Littlewood finally blew the whistle, calling for help from provincial and local authorities to help insure that schools, and classrooms are safe.

As the advocate for 55,000 educators in hundreds of high schools, Littlewood expressed alarm, not just for the well-being of students, but for the safety of teachers, mental health support personnel, child and youth workers.  While GTA disturbances attract the most attention, she reported that its now widespread in the wake of the COVID-19 school disruptions. “These incidents were happening across the province, she said, and it’s now reached “a crisis level.”

 The Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest school district, is – as usual- ground zero and the most graphic illustration of how dangerous today’s schools have become for students, teachers, and education support workers.

There’s “no easy fix” to the problem of school violence, according to the hard pressed TDSB communications point man, Ryan Byrd.  That’s likely because, as a TDSB committee heard in December 2022, the prevalence of violence is alarming. School shootings attract cameras, but some 622 young people between the ages of 12 and 29 were reportedly victims of stabbings between January of 2021 and November 2022.

Classroom teachers are alarmed enough to be speaking up out-of-school. A particularly effective, well-articulated Thomas B. Fordham Institute commentary, written by Daniel Buck, a young American teacher with 7-years’ experience, touched a nerve, attracting thousands of Twitter views and retweets. Many of the retweets were sparked by “Teachers Unite,” an outspoken voice for teacher advocacy in Canada.

“Soft-on-consequences discipline” was a critical factor contributing to unruly “student behaviour” diving fellow teachers to quit the classroom and proving to be “terrible for teachers.” “While most discussion about student behaviour…focuses on its impact upon students,” he wrote, “too often the effects on teachers are simply overlooked. They’re collateral damage that rarely gets a mention.”

Amid fears of a national U.S. teacher shortage, the National Education Association now claims that half of all American teachers have reported considering or actively planning to quit because of deteriorating school climate and safety.  So far, it has not reached that crisis point in Canada’s provincial school systems.

Workplace violence is a growing problem in Canada’s schools, judging from a series of credible reports from province-to-province. “Biting, kicking and verbal abuse” are so prevalent in Manitoba schools that the provincial Workplace Safety and Health Department recently classified schools as one of the “high-risk industries” along with foundries, sawmills and demolition sites. CUPE Manitoba president Gina McKay, representing 6,000 school support workers identified the scope of the problem. “We’ve known systemic issues,” she told CTV News Winnipeg, “and they’re building.”

Teachers in British Columbia have also been alerted to the extent of time lost through injuries incurred in school workplaces. A 2021 Work Safe BC online report, entitled “Time-loss claims in public school districts,” documented 16,812 claims registered by teachers, teaching assistants, and administrators between 2011 and 2020. It’s recently emerged as an issue raised by the BCTF in its representations and contract negotiations.

A Nova Scotia Freedom of Information request tore the lid of the hidden problem in that province’s schools. The resulting January 2022 story in the Halifax Chronicle Herald revealed that some 11,240 violent incidents were reported during the 2020-21 school year, at a time when school was closed for several weeks as a result of COVID-19 health measures.

Nova Scotia Education Minister Becky Druhan claimed that the 2020-21 incident numbers were on a par with other years, but that’s not entirely accurate. Violent incidents were twice as common in the aftermath of the spring 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, and most of the incidents affected grades 5 to 9, not primary to grade 6, as reported in the FOIPOP release.

After the initial information leak, Nova Scotia Education has kept school violence rates and student behaviour data under wraps. Bullying incidents are reported as a matter of provincial policy and, over two years, 2020-21 and 2021-22, some 2,072 incidents were recorded from primary to grade 9, confirming that 67 per cent happened in grades 6 to 9, at the junior high level. Violent acts, sexual assaults, sexual harassment, and verbal abuse are not reported to the public.  

In Nova Scotia, as in Manitoba, the education sector accounts for an alarming proportion of workers compensation claims. While the overall number of workplace violence claims in Nova Scotia is highest in the “Health/Social Services” sector, the “Education Services” sector is second highest. Over the past decade, the Workers Compensation Board of Nova Scotia (WCBNS), reported that the “Educational Services” sector had the highest per cent rate of claims due to violence. The 10-year average of violent claims was 11.28 per cent of its employees, peaking at 16.32 per cent in 2019.  

Violence is now commonplace in today’s classrooms, hallways, fields, and parking lots. Regular disturbances, low-level disruptions, and verbal abuse tends to go unreported, in most case out of fear of reprisals or because there are so few disciplinary consequences.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Nova Scotia, a middling province widely regarded as a bell weather for national education trends. A recent blog report posted by Nova Scotia Parents for Public Education (January 25, 2023) rings true. “School staff report being discouraged from documenting incidents of violence,” the advocacy group claimed. When recording cannot be avoided, the post continued “the process is difficult and the mechanism for reporting, featuring drop-down menus, limits a full and accurate reporting of incidents.”

The Nova Scotia violent incident reporting system is also full of holes when it comes to accountability and tracking at the school or system level.  Privacy protocols are strictly upheld and prevent victims from being named in perpetrator’s reports, precluding long-term tracing of patterns incidents over time. Most troubling of all, educators report (off-the-record) that there is no established reporting standard to ensure the consistency of teacher documentation.

Reporting protocols and data collection practices in Nova Scotia are widely varying from school district to school district, and even from school to school. Some school principals discourage teachers from reporting violent incidents (which might reflect badly on a school’s reputation); others insist on filling in the information for their teachers. Educational assistants and child support workers are often victims, but – in most cases — have to rely on regular teachers or administrators to report such incidents.

Hair-raising stories of school violence in schools, once contained and concealed by school principals and education districts, are now quickly and readily shared on social media. Local parent and teacher advocacy groups, such as Nova Scotia Parents for Public Education, provide a conduit for gathering and circulating intelligence gathered by parents and teachers at the school level. Candid student mobile phone photos and videos end up on Facebook and Twitter, some depicting troubling personal attacks, teachers’ verbal abuse, and mistreatment of kids with learning challenges.

 

Mental health experts and professors have now coalesced around a consistent position on the wisdom of keeping kids in school after the pandemic.  “Schools should be the first to open, and the last to close” is the predominant policy direction, especially since the August 2021 release of the Royal Society of Canada’s research report on “Children and Schools during COVID-19 and Beyond,” published by University of Ottawa education psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt and a team of leading researchers.

Many Canadian parents, health professionals and child psychologists harbour quiet doubts about how safe, secure and healthy schools really are in the wake of the COVID-19 disruption and its aftermath. “While acknowledging the important role that schools can play in students’ access to food and other needs,” NSPPE recently pointed out, “many parents and child experts objected strongly to the portrayal of schools” as ‘safe spaces.’

The recent rash of highly-publicized violent incidents provides us with a much needed reality check on the everyday realities of today’s school culture, especially in middle and senior grades, where violence, bullying, sexual harassment, racial incidents, and negative mental health experiences are far too common for students, teachers and education workers.

 Students do belong in school but not in unsafe and dangerous classrooms. Now that normalcy is slowly returning, it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that those schools and classrooms are safe for the pandemic generation of kids.*

*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The National Post, Saturday February 25, 2023. 

What’s behind the recent resurgence of violence in Canadian schools? Is it really new or just a return to the turbulent conditions pre-pandemic?  How much of the student-on-student and student-on-teacher violence is attributable to so-called “progressive’ school discipline?  Why is data on dangerous workplaces easier to access than regular reports of student violence and misconduct? Is it time to ask –Who’s running the schools?  

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Student Behaviour Dilemma: Will “Progressive Discipline” Survive Post-Pandemic School Disruptions?

A critical public debate over student behaviour policy and practice has recently surfaced in the Ontario city of London and surrounding region, sparked by a recent explosion of school violence the its public schools.  Two-and-a-half years into the pandemic disrupted schooling era, tension, turbulence and bullying can no longer be swept under the carpet. Violent incidents in the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB)’s 154 elementary schools more than doubled to 900 in October 2022, compared to some 400 in June of last year. That uptick in disruptions may not be an isolated phenomenon but rather a barometer of what’s actually happening inside and outside of classrooms.

What’s most troubling is that many episodes of student-on-student violence go unreported and it’s really a sign of turmoil that runs deeper in school culture. Whole classes are evacuated to isolate and subdue angry or frustrated students acting out in school. Elementary parents complain about rampant violence in younger grades and overwhelmed staff unable to curb the violence or provide support or protection for children.

The local teachers’ union and the odd brave teacher are speaking out-of-school.  One Grade 8 teacher, identified only as “Tom,” blamed a board discipline policy which is not only ‘unclear and confusing,’ but paves the way for students to reoffend. “There is zero accountability,” he told CBC News London Morning, hiding his identity out of fear for possible consequences.

Nor is it confined to elementary schools. For the past two years, a few London city high schools have been in near constant turmoil.  Local police reported making 28 calls to one London high school, Saunders Secondary School, from October 2021 to April 22 to break up fights, respond to mental health issues, or investigate assaults, property damage, thefts and other incidents. Two 16-year-old boys were stabbed in September near A.B. Lucas Secondary School and more recently, in late November, students described a frantic and bloody scene at H.B. Beal SS after a teen girl stabbed another over lunchtime in the cafeteria.

School districts like Ontario’s Thames Valley DSB were unprepared for the rising incidence of violence and the near constant problem of ‘low-level disruptions’ besetting classrooms.  The Ontario school board is typical of most of the 72 districts in the province.  Faced with repeated incidents and intense media scrutiny, TVDSB Director of Education Mark Fisher has declined comment or instructed senior school officials to either defend existing ‘’progressive discipline” policy or assign blame to “what’s happening in communities” following the pandemic.

After having implemented school-wide positive, preventive student behaviour policies over the past fifteen years or so, school principals and classroom teachers have been deprived of traditional deterrents – office reports, suspensions and, in some extreme cases, expulsions. Integrating most students with complex needs into regular classrooms, in the midst of the turmoil and with totally inadequate resource supports, have merely compounded the problems.

Current student behaviour policy dates back to April 2007 in Ontario when former Premier, then Education Minister, Kathleen Wynne (2006-2010), abandoned the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to curbing bullying. Heeding the advice and counsel of her Deputy Minister Ben Levin, Wynne sought to curtail the high incidence of suspensions which were, at that time, found to be disproportionately affecting students from marginalized or disadvantaged communities.

Positive Emotional Behaviour Supports (PEBS or SW-PBS) approaches, introduced since 2007 in Ontario and elsewhere across North America, have dramatically reduced the use of suspensions and resulted in the virtual elimination of expulsions, the last resort in school discipline. Curbing the use of sanctions has meant keeping students in school is now the priority, often through the expanded use of ‘time-out’ rooms, Individual Education Plans (IEPs), restorative justice remedies, and ‘social promotion’ to the next grade.

The official Ontario school suspension data tells the story across the system with some 2 million students. In 2007-08, 94,386 Ontario students were listed as “suspensions” (4.32 per cent of all students) and 996 were reported as “expulsions” (0.05 per cent). By 2019-20, the last year reported, total suspensions were down to 46,990 (2.21 per cent) and only 245 students were recorded as “expulsions” (0.01 per cent).

The reported data for TVDSB has suspensions dropping from 4,918 (5.86 per cent) to 3,275 (3.91 per cent) but looks totally unreliable for “expulsions.” The board reported less than 10 expulsions a year from 2007-08 to 2016-17, then slowly rising each year to 15 in 2019-20 before the pandemic. Those figures for expulsions need to be audited for accuracy.

Speaking truth to power in K-12 education can be exceedingly frustrating because it’s usually met with a wall of silence. TVDSB Grade 8 teacher “Tom” is a brave soul who speaks for many frontline teachers with their heads down, toughing it out and left to deal with the problem on their own, day-in-and day-out, in post-pandemic school closure times.

Progressive student behaviour approaches are now unequal to the challenge, according to classroom teachers and engaged parents. Violent, disruptive and disrespectful students are free, in far too many schools, to do erode learning and sustain the turmoil with impunity.

Local Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (EFTO) president in the TVDSB Craig Smith has lifted the veil. “We have moved from one pendulum of zero tolerance to now one of almost complete latitude,” he says, surveying the current student behaviour landscape. The current approach is anything but ‘progressive’ if it’s scaring schoolchildren and allowing violence and low-level disruptions to flourish in elementary and secondary schools.

How representative is the turmoil besetting Ontario’s Thames Valley regional school district educating the vast majority of London’s public school children and teens? Was adopting “positive behaviour supports” policy and completely abandoning “zero tolerance” for violence a wise decision? Is the current PBIS approach working for students, teachers and families?  Will it survive the current wave of post-pandemic school disruptions?

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Near Future Classrooms: What if ‘Keeping Your Distance’ Becomes the New Normal?*

Shaking hands is, for now, socially unacceptable and ‘keeping your distance’ is the new normal in all public settings. Following the strict advice of our Chief Medial Officers of Health, the vast majority of citizens, groups and organizations are complying with ‘physical distancing’ to contain the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus.  If the new public health conventions become ingrained and persist beyond the immediate crisis, the fundamental change in social norms outside the household sphere will profoundly alter life in public settings, particularly in K-12 schools and classrooms.

Seeing images of public schools in Taipei, Taiwan, in full operation during the COVID-19 heath crisis, is jarring, if not downright shocking. Based upon hard lessons gleaned from the 2003 SARS pandemic, Taiwanese authorities, including school heads, were quick to recognize the crisis and activated stringent emergency health management plans to keep schools running instead of simply closing them down.

School life during COVID-19 was transformed into a virtual health protection zone. Students at Daija Elementary School in Taipei were asked to disinfect their hands and shoes before entering the school building, while a security guard took their temperature, and, once in class, the children were seated in separated rows wearing masks.  What set that school apart, and drew international attention, was the sight of elementary children eating their own lunches while sitting behind bright yellow dividers on their desks.

With the frightening pandemic upon us, education planners and policy-makers need to look beyond the immediate crisis and start making plans for the resumption of in-person schooling, likely months from now.  A whole generation of students, parents and families, having survived the ravages of the virus, may be not only more receptive to online learning, but expecting, a different kind of K-12 day school education.

School practices intended to promote social distancing may well be an unintended legacy of the current crisis.  If and when influenza pandemic control measures become higher priorities, social distancing conventions that increase space between people and reduce the frequency of contacts may well overturn progressive teaching methodologies and spell the end, in real time, of clustered seating, learning centres, and interactive small group learning.

Today’s student-centred, interactive classroom based upon ‘hands-on’ learning was, it is becoming clear, greatly advanced by the widespread adoption of vaccines and school-based vaccination and related health programs. The emergency health risk posed by COVID-19 is more reminiscent of the scourge of childhood diseases, unchecked by vaccines, up until the 1960s. While class sizes were larger then, the traditional classroom exemplified social distancing  because children were seated in individual desks, spaced apart, lined-up before moving from place to place, and taught personal hygiene in elementary classes.

Classroom design and seating since the 1970s has tended to focus on creating settings that supported ‘active learning’ and reputedly ‘progressive’ teaching methods, such as learning circles, cooperative learning, and project-based groupings.  Scanning the North American physical classroom environment research, it’s striking how may action-research projects were undertaken to demonstrate that teaching children sitting in rows was detrimental to student engagement, widely considered an end in and of itself.

Neglected research on physical proximity and anxieties about crowding will get a much closer look in the post-COVID-19 era of education. Coming out of household quarantine and re-entering school, students, parents and teachers will be far more conscious of infectious diseases and the physical conditions contributing to its transmission. Ministries of education, school districts and principals will likely give a much higher priority to providing face-to-face teaching and learning in classrooms meeting stricter health protection standards.

Academic studies of “peers in proximity” and the few analyzing the “mixing patterns of students in school environments” do provide us with signposts for deeper dives.  One 2015 Dutch study of interpersonal processes in the classroom, conducted by Yvonne Van den Berg, demonstrates how  “a careful management of physical distance between classmates” can improve classroom climate, but it focuses almost exclusively on rectifying identified imbalances in social status in classes where students choose their own seats.

The role of children in the community spread of respiratory diseases such as H1N1 and COVID-19 identified by medical health authorities has attracted relatively little attention from education researchers based in graduate schools of education. One Canadian health policy study, produced in 2013 by University of Toronto researcher Laena Maunula may have compounded the problem. It claimed that public health messages were “dangerous” because they reinforce “bio power” and “governmentality” (i.e., a coercive state reducing citizens to ‘trained subjectivities.’)

For more promising disease prevention studies, we have to look to Europe and the pioneering work of two research teams, led by Marcel Salathé of the Salathe Lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Juliette Stehlé of Marseille, working with the University of Lyon-based National Influenza Centre. Utilizing wireless sensor network technology, they have studied the social networks in both primary and secondary schools which facilitate infectious disease transmission. Logging the data for CPIs (close proximity interactions), the researchers honed-in on the problem presented by schools as high potential sites for pandemic spread. Follow-up studies by American health researchers applied this research and concluded that extensive alternative school-based interventions regulating free student movement, as an alternative to school closure, can significantly reduce contacts and potential exposure to infectious diseases.

A more recent 2018 Rand Corporation study, building upon the close proximity studies findings, examined American school influenza pandemic policies and practices. It found that, while strictly limiting student interactions in hallways and classrooms reduced transmission rates, only four of 50 U.S. states ( Georgia, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia) had firm policies authorizing the full range of social distancing regulations. Ontario’s 2013 Health Plan for an Influenza Epidemic, much like those south of the border, relied upon school closures and made no provision for resumption of school after a pandemic outbreak.

Near future schools reopening after the hiatus will not look or feel the same, given the prospects for a second wave.  Taiwanese schools during the current pandemic might represent an extreme akin to a dystopian village, but post-COVID-19 K-12 public schools will in all likelihood incorporate some of those rigid protocols, at least until student, parent and teacher anxieties subside in the coming years.

*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The National Post, March 26, 2020.

What will classrooms look like following the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic?  Will the heightened awareness of the threat of epidemic diseases impact upon attendance monitoring, classroom design and layout, and teaching methodologies?  Will the post-COVID-19 classrooms look more like those in Taiwan during the pandemic?  How much e-learning will survive when face-to-face, in-person teaching resumes in the coming months? 

 

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Education Policy Outlook 2020: What’s Happened over the Past Decade?

“All that glitters is not gold” is a famous proverb plucked from William Shakespeare‘s play The Merchant of Venice that may well apply to recent international appraisals of K-12 education in Canada. Such rosy assessments tend to put a shiny lustre on what is essentially a sound and ‘pretty good’ school system that has lost ground to competing nations over the past decade.

Five years ago, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD) produced a rather rosy Education Policy Outlook for Canada as part of a series of reports offering comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across the world’s developed countries. Canada’s overall performance, aggregated from widely varied provincial assessment data, looked good, in comparison with the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Most significantly, the OECD assessors brushed aside concerns about “plateaued student achievement” on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) tests and the decline in the proportion of top performing students.

Emerging concerns were most clearly expressed in Dr. Paul Cappon’s final 2010 report for the Canadian Council on Learning. Student scores on the 2009 PISA test had revealed that Canadian 15-year-olds demonstrated relatively strong sets of skills in reading, math and science, but they were already slipping relative to high performing Asian countries and in some cases in absolute terms. “What I’m hoping,” Cappon said at the outset of his final cross-Canada tour, “is that when people realize that Canada is slipping down the international learning curve we’re not going to be able to compete in the future unless we get our act together.”

OECD Education Policy Outlook assessments and Country reports are based upon templates that tend to favour diverse and well-funded school systems like that of Canada. The six identified policy levers in 2015 were: 1) equity and quality of education; 2) preparing students for the future; 3) school improvement; 4) evaluation and assessment; 5) governance; and 6) funding.  Such public policy forecasts, based upon conventional criteria and historic trends, also tend to demonstrate “path dependency” which limits the capacity to capture radical shifts in context or dynamic changes in educational direction.

Fifteen-year-old students in Canada, based upon triennial PISA tests from 2000 to 2018, continue to perform above the OECD average in reading, mathematics and science. Our most economically and socially disadvantaged students, in aggregate, do relatively better than those in competing countries, demonstrating more equity than in most other countries.  A considerably higher proportion of Canadian K-12 students proceed to post-secondary education in universities and colleges. That much has not changed across time.

Three significant changes can be identified from the accumulating OECD student assessment and survey data and they deserve far more critical scrutiny:

Downward Trend in Student Performance:  The performance trends for Canadian fifteen-year-olds are consistently downward from 2000 to 2018 in READING,  from 2003 to 2018 in MATHEMATICS, and from 2006 to 2018 in SCIENCE.  While the OECD average scores are also in decline as more countries are included in PISA, the descent is more pronounced among students from Canada. Students in Canada’s top performing provinces of Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec (Mathematics) tend to buoy-up the lagging results produced by students from New Brunswick, Newfoundland/Labrador, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Deteriorating Classroom Disciplinary Climate:

The 2015 Education Policy Outlook for Canada flagged one measure, based upon student survey responses, where Canada simply met the OECD standard – the index of classrooms conducive to learning (Figure 5, OECD Canada, 2015).  That largely undiagnosed problem has worsened over the past three years.  Canada ranked 60th out of 77 participating nations and educational districts in the OECD’s 2018 index of disciplinary climate, released on December 4, 2019.  According to a global student survey conducted in the spring of 2018, one in five students, 15 years-of-age, report that learning time is lost to noise, distractions, and disorder, so much so that it detracts from learning in class. A relatively high proportion of Canadian students say the teacher is not listened to and it takes a long time for the class to settle down. In addition, students regularly skip school and report late to class.

High Incidence of Fear of Failure:

Personal anxieties may also run higher among Canadian students when they confront writing standardized tests and experience a fear of failing the test. In Canada, the OECD 2019 Education GPS report states, “15-year-old students have a strong fear of failure”ranking 6th among 77 national student groups participating in the survey.  Fear of failure runs highest among students in Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Macau, Japan, and Germany, but is less pronounced in high performing countries such as Korea. Estonia, and Finland.  Such fears are present to the same degree among students in the United Kingdom, but less so in the United States.  No analysis whatsoever is offered to explain why fears run so comparatively high among teens in Canada.

The initial report on the Canadian Results of the OECD PISA 2018 Study, released by the Council of Ministers of Education (CMEC) in early December 2019, are of little help in evaluating these rather striking trends.  Like previous reports in the CMEC series, the report puts a positive spin on the aggregate results by casting them within a broad, global context, lumping together countries with radically different commitments to education in terms of spending and resources. It is possible to ferret out anomalies and to conduct province-by-province comparisons, but only with time, effort, and attention to detail. That is sufficient to keep it either buried or accessible only to education assessment specialists.

Does the Canadian Education Policy Outlook ventured in 2015 stand up under close analysis. five years on?  What’s missing from the OECD and CMEC assessment reports for Canada over the past decade?  Should the Canadian public be concerned about the downward trend in the demonstration of core skills in reading, mathematics and science?  Is disciplinary climate now a real concern in Canadian classrooms? And why are Canadian students so afraid of failing in our schools when grade promotion and graduation rates are at record levels?

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Noisy and Disrupted Classrooms: What Does PISA 2018 Reveal About Student Behaviour?

Canadian classrooms may well have an undiagnosed problem with students’ time-on-task. According to a global student survey conducted in the spring of 2018, one in five students, 15 years-of-age, report that learning time is lost to noise, distractions, and disorder, so much so that it detracts from learning in class. It’s also a problem that has worsened since the previous survey three years ago.

Canada ranked 60th out of 77 participating nations and educational districts in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s 2018 index of disciplinary climate, released on December 4, 2019.  The index is based on an international survey of 600,000 15-year-old students’ views about the state of student discipline in their classes. A relatively high proportion of Canadian students say the teacher is not listened to and it takes a long time for the class to settle down. In addition, students regularly skip school and report late to class.

While most mainstream media and education commentators focus on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 test student achievement rankings in reading, mathematics and science, critically important survey data on the lived experience of students tends to get overlooked. Most Canadian educators are so totally wedded to current positive progressive discipline principles that there’s a blind spot when it comes to connecting deteriorating class climate with the stalling of student achievement.

Noise and disruptions are relatively common in Canadian language of instruction classes, and well above the average among the 77 jurisdictions completing the survey.  This is significant because students who report being unable to work well because of such distractions in most or every class scored 25 points lower in reading on the 2018 PISA test.

For most countries, classroom discipline improved between 2009 and 2018, the OECD report said.  Comparing student behaviour in 2015 in science classes with 2018 behaviour in English classes, student discipline has deteriorated with more students reporting that the teacher has to wait a long time for students to settle down, that students cannot work well, and don’t start learning until long after the beginning of the lesson.

Students are best behaved in school systems focused more on providing orderly, purposeful teaching, such as Korea, Japan and China, and other authoritarian countries. Classroom unruliness is far worse than in Canada in Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Spain, the Philippines, Belgium and Australia.  Concerns run so high in Australia that it’s been publicly described as an “entrenched behaviour crisis.”

A total of 38.9 per cent of Canadian students reported there was noise or disorder in most or all of their classes, compared with 31.5 per cent across the OECD participating states. That’s far higher than in Korea (7.9 per cent), Japan (9.7 per cent), and top European performer, Estonia (23.6 per cent). It’s also more prevalent than in the United Kingdom ( 33.7 per cent) and the United States (28.2 per cent).

Student bullying among Canadian 15-year-olds is also reportedly higher than in the United States school system. One out of five students (19.2 per cent) report “being hit or pushed around by other students.” Only 2 per cent of Korean students report being bullied, and some school systems’ classrooms are downright dangerous places. In the Philippines, for example, three out of five students (60.2 per cent) claim to have been roughed-up during the course of a year.

Skipping school and arriving late to class are more common in Canada than in either the U.K. or the U.S. In the two weeks prior to the PISA test, some 23 per cent of Canadian students skipped between from 1 to 5 or more school days. One out of three skipped some classes and over half (52.3 per cent) arrived late for school from 1 to 5 or more times.

Speading ‘nasty rumours’ is an unpleasant aspect of student life. One out of four Canadian students (27.5 per cent) report being on the receiving end of such psycho-harassment by other students, similar to the situation in  U.S, schools.  It’s far more prevalent in both U.K. and Australia schools and relatively rare in Korea, where only 9.6 per cent report being the victim of personally damaging rumours.

Connecting changes in school disciplinary climate with students’ academic achievement challenges is long overdue in Canadian K-12 education. Struggling students in noisy and regularly disrupted classes, according to the OECD, do pay a price in terms of their scores in reading and presumably in other core subject areas.

School-wide Positive Behaviour Intervention Systems (SW-PBIS) have eclipsed other approaches to student behaviour management in Canada and in many of the countries where students report poor disciplinary climate.  It’s exemplified in schools with regular noise, distractions, and disorder where students skip school and regularly miss classes.

Whether you favour SW-PBIS programs or not, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s a breakdown in effective classroom management. Far more attention has to be paid to responding to “behavourial violations” (where positive praise does not work) with planned and systematic strategies, including “brief, concise” correctives,  ‘planned ignoring,’ and the appropriate use of explicit reprimands.

Why do we focus so much on PISA student achievement rankings and tend to ignore the contextual analysis explaining the contributing factors?  Should we pay more attention to the OECD PISA survey data on student experiences?  How big a factor is “disciplinary climate” in creating optimum conditions for student learning and achievement?  Is it time to look at alternatives to school-wide positive behaviour supports and associated programs? 

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Vaping and Teen E-Cigarette Addiction: Will Conventional Harm Reduction Programs Work?

The prevalence and use of electronic cigarettes has increased rapidly over the past decade, particularly among youth.  The extraordinary growth of e-cigarettes has also raised significant public health concerns about the emergence of a new generation of teens with nicotine dependency.  Changes in the design and marketing of vaporizers with the introduction in 2015 of more stylish, sleekly-designed, discreet high-tech devices, known as JUUL, have proven irresistible to teens and become the latest ‘nightmare’ for today’s high school principals and teachers.

School authorities in Canada as well as the United States are coming rather late to the challenge of combating vaping and its associated health risks.  Advance promotion of e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation device may have contributed to the initial ambivalent, almost helter-skelter, response.  A May 2019 Ontario Tobacco Research Unit report confirms that schools were caught off-guard by the surge of vaping among never-smokers and responded with interventions once used to combat smoking or imported from the United States, where the craze is far more advanced among youth.

Five years after the arrival of JUUL, public concern has reached a panic stage with the spread of fear over a recent spate of lung-disease cases involving teen users of e-cigarettes. Breathing in flavoured aerosol that contains nicotine was already a worry of doctors, parents and schools.  Over the past few months, some 380 people in 36 different American states have been struck by a mysterious lung infection linked to chemicals inhaled through e-cigarettes, and seven of those affected died.  Shortly after Health Canada issued a September 6, 2019 advisory, a London, Ontario, hospital disclosed that a local high school student suffering from vaping-related illness had been placed on life support before recovering and being sent home. It could become worse in mid-December 2019 when the sale of vaping liquids containing cannabis compounds becomes legal in Canada.

Schools are on the front lines of the current teen health scare. Since entering the Canadian retail market in 2009, e-cigarettes have morphed from a smoking-cessation aid to a full-blown health concern among today’s youth. Ten years ago, Health Canada greeted e-cigarettes with an advisory warning of the dangers of the new nicotine delivery devices, expressing concern over the lack of scientific research to support claims that they were safe for adults and teens. More recently, Canadian health authorities monitoring the spread of e-cigarette use have been echoing the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine research finding that ” e-cigarettes are not without biological effects on humans” and, rather than aiding in cessation, can lead to further dependency.

Vaping devices and products containing nicotine are now flooding the Canadian market and readily available in local convenience stores and gas stations. Since September 1918, JUUL, the San Francisco-based company that controls over 50 per cent of the market, has been selling its sleek devices that look like a computer flash drive and are re-chargable at a USB port. They have proven more popular that the Imperial Tobacco brand Vype, released Canada in the Spring of 2018, and Japan Tobacco‘s Logic brand released in early 2019.

First introduced by Juul Labs in mid-2015 as a smoking-cessation device, JUUL became the so-called “iPhone of e-cigarettes.” The extraordinary sales growth of the product was driven by a variety of effective, wide-ranging and engaging campaigns reaching youth through social media, particularly on You Tube, Twitter, and Instagram. Five million Canadians, mostly aged 15 to 34, had tried e-cigarettes by 2017 and 300,000 reported using it every day. One more recent study, published in the British Medical Journal, reported that the proportion of Canadian teens (aged 16 to 19) vaping rose from 8.4 per cent in 2017 to 14.8 per cent in 2018, a 74 per cent increase. 

The Ontario Tobacco Research Unit conducted an environmental scan of current harm reduction programs and quickly recognized that there were, as of the Spring of 2019, no studies of the effectiveness of such interventions. Most intervention programs were public education and school-based efforts, typically aimed at teaching children and youth about the dangers of vaping in the hope of reducing or eliminating the practice. Three of the programs reviewed were E-Cigarettes: What You Need to Know (Grades 6 -12, Scholastic), CATCH My Breath (Ages 11-18, CATCH), and School E-Cigarette Toolkit (Grades 6-12, Minnesota Department of Health).  The report also examined interventions outside of schools, including community-based initiatives, public health efforts, health-care programs, and public policy strategies such as advertising and promotion restrictions, age restrictions, labelling and health warnings, flavouring restrictions, and safety requirements.

Most of the actual school-based interventions were embedded in existing tobacco control programs and sought to counter the marketing messages of companies claiming it is a safe, smoking cessation activity. The Ontario Tobacco Research Unit recognized the scattered approach being taken and recommended considering interventions that proved successful at reducing rates of regular cigarette smoking among youth. They also identified the need for a more coordinated and planned anti-vaping strategy.

Vaping has overtaken smoking as the favoured health-risk behaviour of high school students.  Some 15.8 per cent of Ontario Grade 9 students vaped in 2017, and only 6.2 per cent smoked cigarettes. As many as one out of every three high schoolers may now be regular users of vaporizers with nicotine-laced fluids. The recent health scares may have jolted users and curbed the growth in usage, but it remains the biggest, mostly unaddressed health issue in our high schools.

Why have health agencies and school authorities been so slow off-the-mark in combating the spread of vaping among adolescents? What more can be done to regulate and curtail the marketing of e-cigarettes among the youth market segment?  Where are the research initiatives aimed at identifying the real health risks for teens of vaping nicotine and cannabis products?  Should vaping cessation programs simply mimic smoking control strategies and programs?  What can be done to develop more effective student-centered vaping cessation programs? 

 

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Violence and Student Behaviour: What’s Compounding the Rising Incidence of Violence against Educators?

Biting, kicking, spitting, scratching, punching, throwing objects, and threatening harm are on the rise in Canadian elementary classrooms from coast to coast. More and more educators are not only reporting the violent incidents, but being hurt on the job in our classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds. Whole classrooms are being evacuated to allow disruptive children to calm down. That escalating crisis was recently highlighted in a fine September 7, 2019 piece of investigative journalism by The Globe and Mail’s national education reporter Caroline Alphonso.

Her investigation of how school districts are actually managing children with behavioural challenges and complex needs is eye-opening for those unfamiliar with teaching on today’s frontlines. Periodic surveys of teachers and education assistants have identified an escalating crisis, but — until now–provincial school authorities and local school districts have been slow to collect the data and most reluctant to share violent incident report information with parents or the public. Indeed, Alphonso and her Globe team found it impossible to secure the data from some provinces and major metropolitan school districts.

The facts are gradually emerging and harassment and violence against educators is becoming commonplace.  One September 2019 study, conducted by University of Ottawa researchers Darcy A. Santor, Chris Bruckert, and Kyle McBride, showed a sharp spike in the level of violence teachers face in Ontario elementary schools. In a December 2018 online survey of 1,600 educators, they found a seven-fold increase in reported incidents over the past 12 years. While only 7 per cent of Ontario elementary teachers reported experiencing bullying in 2005, some 54 per cent now report encountering violence perpetrated mostly by students, but also by parents, and administrators. Furthermore, some 72 per cent reported experiencing explicit verbal insults, putdowns, or obscene gestures from a student during 2017-18.

Out of ten provincial ministries of education, only Nova Scotia provided Alphonso and the Globe and Mail with comprehensive data.  In the 2014-15, school year, there were 631 recorded incidents of violence against an educator by a student, and the following year, 2015-16, there were 683, the vast majority of which occurred in the elementary schools. The Ontario government turned down the Globe and Mail Freedom of Information request and other provinces either claimed not to have data or unable to access it without going through school boards or other government agencies.

Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union (NSTU) president Paul Wozney expressed concern over the problem and provided what amounted to a worst case scenario. In Nova Scotia, one classroom was evacuated 12 times in a month — and students were forced to find sanctuary in another room until the disruptive child calmed down. He also reported that Nova Scotia educators, like their New Brunswick counterparts, were now wearing bite-resistant sleeves and Kevlar vests in certain high risk classrooms.

What can be done to address the problem? Most teacher union surveys and research reports, including the University of Ottawa study, are stronger on diagnosis than on prescription. The most common policy solutions, investing in more classroom resources, more teaching assistants, or more specialized professional development, are predictably in every set of recommendations and strongly favoured by school districts, teachers’ unions, and parent education funding lobby groups.

Two of the detailed University of Ottawa study findings got short shrift and deserve closer scrutiny.  Workplace violence is likely being under-reported because of fears of blame (from administration) and reprisal ( from students) in “an organizational culture” which is “ill-equipped to deal with the issue.” More importantly, in school boards which espouse “progressive discipline” under provincial mandates, there are “few consequences for students’ harassing or violent behaviour” (p. 34).

Digging deeper, it’s clear that two fundamental components of prevailing student behaviour philosophy and practice need to be seriously re-examined and likely replaced with more effective strategies: the cure-all of Positive Behaviour Supports Programs (PEBIS) and the misapplication of school restorative justice. From province-to-province, right across Canada, few educators seem to be either aware of, or attuned to, growing evidence that positive, progressive discipline has unanticipated negative long-term consequences for school principals and frontline teachers in classrooms.

Clamouring for more resources, increased staff levels, or better training has not worked, to date, so it’s surely not the ultimate answer. It’s time to adopt a completely new strategy, more in tune with the latest research on student behaviour and effective school management.  School leaders and principals need significant training in creating a culture of respect and responsibility and it’s time to look at alternatives to progressive, positive discipline and its step-child, restorative justice. It’s captured nicely in one of the University of Ottawa study recommendations calling for the “consistent application” and “implementation of student consequences that are appropriate and effective”(p. 35).

Why are teachers and education assistants facing increased violence in elementary schools?  How much of the increased student violence is the result of the rising incidence of students with severe learning challenges and complex needs? Will investing more in the prevailing student behavour programs make any real difference?  Is it time to rethink school leadership and to properly equip principals and teachers with strategies and programs that are research-proven and far more effective in ensuring safe, secure and purposeful learning for everyone? 

 

 

 

 

 

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