Is it students or schools that need discipline?

Scott Mitzner

Submitted photo/Scott Mitzner

OPINION — Howard Fischer recently reported that a school survey recommended more student discipline. I wonder, is it the students or the schools that need more discipline?

School boards and the teachers’ unions usually blame our kids, and every year the problems are the same. The public schools I attended in the 1950s and 1960s had parents involved every day, and there were few problems.

Private and religious schools have waiting lists of parents who want to be a room parent for a day. Skip the parent night overtime pay. No problems when parents are sitting in the room. Public schools do not want the children talking to parents and will fight it, in my opinion!

My generation didn’t have security at school doors. Schools don’t want local police doing security, because they don’t want children talking to police.

School boards must offer classes that the children and parents want, not classes that keep tenured union teachers in their jobs. Teacher aid assignments should be based on class size, student skill level and teacher aid training and ability. I have listened to immigrants complain for years that schools don’t hire teacher aids that speak the students’ language.

Special education assessments should be done by state school board professional employees, not people controlled by the local school districts. One special ed child can disrupt learning for the whole classroom.

The state school board and mental health officials must establish residential lock-down schools for children that are totally out of control. Usually, it’s the parents that are out of control.

Finally, every school psychologist and psychiatrist I have known over the past 50 years has said when parents and children stopped doing homework together at the kitchen table every night, and brought multiple telephone lines into the home, the American family declined. 

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