Category Archives: Discipline and Disorder

Source: Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), “Pandemic Impact on Public K-12 Education.” Click for more legible image.

by James A. Bacon

In what will come as no surprise to Bacon’s Rebellion readers (other than the reality-denying ankle biters frequenting our comments section), Virginia public school staff cite poor student behavior as their most serious challenge, found a study of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC).

More than 56% of respondents to a JLARC survey said student behavior was a “very serious” problem, and another 24% said it was a “serious” problem. It exceeded other issues such as teacher compensation, student academic progress, lack of respect from parents, and concerns about mental health.

What’s more, concluded JLARC, student behavior appears to be worse than before the pandemic: “85 percent of school staff believed the number of student behavioral issues had either greatly or somewhat increased.” Teachers and other school staff shared the sentiment. Continue reading →

Albemarle High School. Photo credit: The Crozet Gazette.

by James A. Bacon

Albemarle High School opened the 2021-22 school year in a state of chaos after a year of COVID closings, and it never recovered, according to The Crozet Gazette.

To ease students back into the rigors of a regular school day, the school stopped imposing penalties on students for skipping or being late to class. With no mandatory attendance, kids took to drifting around the school. Bathrooms became lawless zones for drugs, sex, violence, and the filing of TikTok videos. Rules against the use of cell phones during class were not properly enforced. Brawls became routine. One teacher trying to break up a fight wound up with 14 stitches in his hand; a female teacher was knocked unconscious. Students addressed teachers with rudeness and profanity. And new, lax grading policies, mandated by the school division, resulted in many students doing no homework.

“Last year there were school shooting threats, violence, smoking, vaping, truancy, trespassing, and drug use, and the list continues,” student Kayden Wright told the Albemarle County School Board this past July. “Please don’t be complacent. How can you expect teachers or students to be successful in a learning environment if they are not safe?”

None of this will come as any surprise to readers of Bacon’s Rebellion. We have chronicled how adults lost control in many schools, leading to a collapse of order and educational outcomes. Virginia’s legacy media have totally ignored the meltdown in the classrooms. It comes as no surprise that the exposé of Albemarle High School comes from a community monthly, The Crozet Gazette, rather than Charlottesville’s daily newspaper, The Daily Progress. Kudos to The Gazette’s Lisa Martin for telling the story that literally no one (outside of Bacon’s Rebellion) has been willing to tell. Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon

The American Institutes for Research has published a review of the Fairfax County Public Schools special-education programs for students with disabilities. Here’s the lead paragraph of The Washington Post: “Students with disabilities in Fairfax County Public Schools are more likely than their peers without disabilities to be suspended and to fail state tests, a new report has found.”

While the study praised Fairfax schools for its commitment to teaching children with disabilities, the Post reported, “In the time period studied, students with disabilities were 3.1 times more likely to receive an in-school suspension and 4.4 times more likely to receive an out-of-school suspension than their peers who do not have disabilities.”

The article didn’t engage in the overt editorializing we often see from WaPo reporters. But my spidey senses tingle whenever the angle of a story highlights disparities that can be used to argue that someone somewhere is being discriminated against. I like to dig deeper and look for missing context. So, I actually perused the report. And, lo and behold, I found plenty of missing context.

The long and short of it: there are many types of disabilities, from deafness, blindness, and orthopedic impairment to autism and emotional disturbance. The study does not distinguish between different types of disability in its analysis of in- and out-of-school suspensions. If blind kids and kids with stutters are getting suspended at four times the rate of other kids, that would tell you one thing. If kids classified as having “emotional disturbance” are getting suspended, well, that says something quite different. Continue reading →