The UD Alumni Relations Blog agrees that children are to be seen and not heard. In fact, it’s even better when they are not seen. We keep our student workers chained to their desks in the basement of our office – it’s good preparation for life in the real world 
So you can imagine how our world was rocked when a University of Delaware professor stated in a recently published book that we need to listen to kids more and lay off the draconian punishments when disciplining them, particularly in school. In Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear, Aaron Kupchik, associate professor in the UD Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, found that disciplinarians followed what he calls excessive and counterproductive strategies for dealing with students’ misbehavior, one of the worst of which is the popular notion of zero tolerance.
While zero tolerance results in treating students equally, it is irrational in reality. Kupchik cites cases of students receiving suspensions and even jail time for infractions such as wearing a certain T-shirt or pushing a hall monitor. On this point the UD Alumni Relations Blog is in complete accord. How we loathed the hall monitor in high school. It was always some uber-brownnose or sadistic teacher who handed out detention slips
Kupchik’s book outlines suggested strategies, based on data, for making schools safer. Among them: mandatory tutoring rather than suspension and involving students in rule creation. Not among them: dunce caps and shoving bamboo chutes up the fingernails of poorly behaved students.
School security tactics too aggressive , prof says [udel.edu/udaily]
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | brick in the wall, dunce cap, education, education policy, hall monitor, kids
