Perhaps the clearest distinction in attitudes toward “reform” come from whether an educator begins the school year with two or three or four chronically disruptive students per class, or whether they typically face six or eight or ten students per class with a long history of class disruptions.

The problems for the second group go up geometrically for a lot of reasons. Chances are, the class next door also has six to ten disruptive students, so chaos becomes normative. Those students have typically been disruptive for years so neither they, their classmates, or their teachers know anything different. Throughout the year, students who are acting out their pain are transferring in and out of troubled neighborhood schools, so educators have to start all over and re-socialize newcomers. Administrators have virtually no options when there is a critical mass of troubled students. Even if Long Term Suspension was a good solution, rarely would a central office allow a principal to employ that tool enough to restore order. So, priority #1 is keeping the chaos out of the news.

I said “begins the school year” for a couple of reasons. In high school, despite our best efforts, most of our most troubled students are gone by the spring, meaning that our willingness to “define deviance down” did not work. That is one reason why I have never had a junior or senior class with a critical mass of disruptive students. But I rarely have a class of freshmen or sophomores that do not require a huge effort to socialize. I love my younger students as much as my older survivors, and successes are even more rewarding. But the ratio of daily victories to defeats in the upper grades is so much better in the upper grades. Older kids are so much better at articulating the pain they have endured, thus seeking help.

Yes, some of us find ways to be effective with the toughest classes, but that does not entitle us to criticize conscientious teachers who can not control the extreme behavior that is so common.

P.S. Last spring I took over a class of 35 freshmen who could not be controlled by a veteran teacher. I knew it would be work, but I had never failed to turn around a tough class. I failed completely. It still bothers me.