Ep. 78 "Manage Your Classroom - How to Stay Sane, Eliminate Chaos, and Help Kids Succeed" - Guest Daniel Buck (Part 2 of 2)

Daniel Buck is back for part two of our conversation on classical education. This time, he speaks directly to teachers and parents: How can we bring the classroom back to a state of productivity? How are teachers supposed to deal with the chaos and ineffective discipline in public schools? Can parents better partner with teachers and schools to make sure their kids are getting a good education? And, most importantly, what are we doing to help children succeed in the real world?

Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Find Daniel Buck on Twitter, and check out his writing at National Review and Fordham Institute
• Pick up Daniel’s new book What’s Wrong With Our Schools? on Amazon
• Daniel recommends E.D. Hirsch’s books as a good introduction to traditional education

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Transcript

ADAMS: One of the huge problems in education today is…teachers are fleeing the industry. They're leaving in droves. Almost every district across the country has teacher shortages. 

There are lots of reasons for that, some we just talked about, but there are other things like matters of discipline. Let's talk a little bit about—I saw you had an article, “Soft On The Consequence Discipline.” What are the impacts of that in the classroom? 

Maybe you've seen that firsthand yourself. I certainly hear about it all the time. I've seen it myself. From the standpoint of policy, how can we help our teachers?

BUCK: Yeah, if you look at why teachers are leaving, the number one reason—there's a survey of over 1,000 teachers that I looked at just the other day, and they rated discipline even above pay. So you hear a lot of protests or strikes over teacher pay. 

But when it comes to why teachers are leaving the profession completely —the biggest strike that they can go on, leaving and never coming back—discipline. student discipline, student behavior…it makes teaching a miserable job. It does. 

ADAMS: And often they just don't feel safe.

BUCK: Oh, yeah.

ADAMS: Because when kids get out of control, as you know—sometimes little kids, but particularly in middle and high school.

I mean, you get somebody out of control in the classroom and you have no authority or no ability to bring discipline, you're not getting any support in the building…You know, when the inmates are running the institution, something's upside down.

So carry on. I'm sorry for the interruption.

BUCK: No, please interrupt anytime. You're probably going to offer far better insights than I do. 

I think about this past year. I'm six foot one—you can't tell on a computer screen, but I’m relatively well built. I'm above average, I'm a bigger person. But two students this year—another student who is six one, probably forty pounds heavier than me, another student who was six five, got into a fight on the basketball court. I had to jump in and help break that fight up. 

And again, I am not a giant by any means, but I’m bigger than most people. And that was the first time I was teaching where I was like, “I actually was unsafe in that situation.” I could have gotten hurt. I could have gotten something broken, gotten pushed over and chipped a tooth or broken my nose or something like that. 

I think about teachers who are smaller than me, who are weaker than me, who shouldn't have to be playing bouncer in their local school. Now, both of these boys were back the very next day, in my classroom, together. They were not suspended. They hardly even got a talking to from administration. They just kind of—it was the end of the days that kept them separate when they sent them home. Then they came back and were in my classroom the next day.

Because suspending kids is mean and oppressive apparently. Or giving them any kind of consequence or laying down the law and saying, “This is unacceptable. Do it again and you are gone.” That kind of thing. They were both in my room the next day and I myself, all that day was thinking, “If they break out into a fight, there are chairs everywhere. There are things that can be thrown. There are desks. There are other students.” 

Again, I'm a fully grown man, I was teaching middle school. These two boys happen to be giants, but most of their classmates are five foot two and skinny as can be and would get trampled if Godzilla and Mothra had gotten into a fight in the classroom. 

The soft on consequences approach to discipline is just that: it's almost a meme, a joke among teachers now that a student cusses them out. They call for administration help hoping this kid's going to get attention, hoping that they'll be taken out of the class for the day so that the other twenty-nine kids who are in there to learn, who want to do their work, who want to focus can actually do their work and focus. 

They call the admin, try and get some help with this kid that's acting the fool. Five minutes later, the kid is brought back with a bag of hot Cheetos and they give a fake apology back in the classroom and they just keep going. Now that teacher's authority is gone. Every kid in that room knows, “We can get away with whatever we want. Miss Penny is a chump and we don't have to listen to her.” 

At that moment, as a teacher, it's so defeating, deflating, and even terrifying and anxiety-inducing. Because now you have no control. A lot of students know you have no control, the adult in the room, the authority in the room. And it's, anything can happen, anything goes. 

ADAMS: So what I hear you say is the consequence was a break from the classroom, a bag of chips and a pat on the shoulder. “Hey, you can do this. You're going to be okay. Let's go and try to be a nice guy.” Instead of consequences, it was a reward, so guess what's going to happen next time?

So let's talk about solutions. How should things operate? Let's go back…do you have any experience in that? Or maybe you just have some suggestions.

BUCK: I take issue with the idea of solutions. And I think you're going to agree with this. This isn't something we're going to…it's like I'm really disagreeing with you. 

I get asked that all the time and I'm talking about behavior. Often from smug, smarmy people: “What are your solutions? You're just complaining, what are your solutions?” We can't solve human nature, and this goes back to the beginning of our discussion. I think people see the implementation of something like detentions or suspensions or expulsions. They say, “Well, we do these and the kids keep misbehaving. And I say, “Yep, kids are going to misbehave.”

We can improve behavior. We can create incentive structures that make it worse, but we're never going to get rid of Johnny shooting spitballs. We're never going to completely get rid of kids having fights. That's going to happen. It can happen more often. It can happen less often. But it's all a matter of, how do we respond to that misbehavior?

There are examples of what not to do. Great examples. The state of Illinois, city of Philadelphia, I'm pretty sure like all of California has gotten rid of suspensions for low-level disruptions. If a kid brings drugs or weapons to school, you can still kick them out for a few days. 

But for things like disrespecting a teacher, cussing out a teacher, or even constantly disrupting class in a minor way…you'll hear a kid say, “They kicked me out for talking.” And it’s like, “Well, you were talking, and then you were talking more, and then I gave you a detention, but then you kept talking. I called you mom, you kept talking, and now we need to up the ante a little bit.” That's what they mean by low level disruption.

In each case, behavior worsened, grades dropped, truancy increased. And ironically, time spent in suspensions increased because behavior got worse, so more kids were choosing to do things like smoke weed in the bathroom. Then, rather than getting a one day suspension for something small, they got a five day suspension for having drugs on school property, and more kids spent time out of school. 

An example of what can work…if anyone's listened to more than one podcast with me, they've probably heard this example before. I worked in one middle school that, for one month, functioned really well, because the “soft on consequences” assistant principal that was pushing all of this stuff had to go on family leave for a while. 

One of the district admin came in to fill in for a month and a half. This guy focused on attendance and tardies. We had fights in the bathroom. We had graffiti on the wall. We had all of this other stuff that he could focus on. He said, no, “We're going to do attendance.”

He implemented this very basic policy. When the bell rang, “Teachers, close the door, didn't let kids in late. Lock it, close it. Start teaching.” They swept the halls, any kid that was still in the hall, they would bring them to—we had a theater in the building—they brought them there. 

They checked them off. If it was one tardy a hall monitor would bring them to class and we let them in. No questions asked. Once they got to three, they had a one hour detention in the theater, spread out, took their phone, and had to sit there in silence. After that the consequences increased towards suspensions.

I don’t know if they would expel a kid for this, but…all sorts of interventions, get the parents involved, all this kind of stuff. Lo and behold, there were some kids who were still in the hall every single day, but we got all of those fence sitters. We got 85 % of the kids who were tardy, who were wandering the halls realize, “Ah, I don't wanna bother with all of this. I'll just go to class.”

They started rubbing shoulders with more academically-minded kids. Class routines ran more smoothly because teachers weren't getting interrupted three minutes into class, then five minutes into class, eight minutes into class as all of these kids wandered in late and they had to start from the top again.

These kids who were wandering the halls now developed relationships with their teachers and realized, “Oh, actually this book we're reading is actually kind of interesting.” All of a sudden, things in the school started running way more smoothly. Everything worked a little bit better because we focused on the small, seemingly petty inconsequential issue: getting to class on time and having a zero tolerance for tardiness, for wandering the halls.

Everything started working better. Undergirding that was a consequence system. “You're gonna have to sit silently in a theater. If you aren't willing to do that, just get out of the building for the day. We're gonna inconvenience your parents and now you're gonna have to have a conversation at home that you don't wanna have.” So, that's an example of a discipline structure that worked so well. 

ADAMS: Well, thanks for sharing that. I wasn't planning to go here, but I'm gonna share this little story, then we're gonna take a quick break. 

My experience is: there are always those kids that seem to be the disruptors in the class. A lot of times I think it's just because they are bored or other things…they're not engaged, they're not drawn in. It kind of goes back to this illustration we were talking about earlier where you sit there and you're supposed to be quiet and read a book.

Some kids, it's just like, “I don't wanna read a book. I'm bored.” Their mind's going here and going there and going somewhere else. Some of these things are the way instruction is taking place. Some of these things are about even grouping students. Some students have specific needs and cookie cutter classroom guidance doesn't always work.

We have to be innovative in how we do this. It's interesting because—and this is not an excuse or that we wanna encourage kids to be the disruptors—but the reality is this, as you watch kids through life…and I've been doing this long enough that I've seen several generations of students finish school and go out into life. 

Now you see them out in the real world. Often it's those B-C students who you thought, “Man, they're just not that good of a student.” They were always a little on the edge and the disruptors, but they're the ones that are running the big businesses. They're the ones that are bringing leadership in our communities. They're the ones that are creating and innovating, and they're leading society. 

The ones who are the straight-A students, who are quiet and timid, they're having an impact too—but they're in a laboratory somewhere where it's quiet and they're focused and they're zeroed in on something. I think, putting perspective into all that, sometimes I think we have to look at it—because it's not just as general…yes, there have to be policies. There are solutions, but solutions are never one size fits all.

Being creative and having those things that, again, come back to principles. Like this administrator that came in and said, okay, learning the discipline of being punctual, the discipline of not disrupting the teacher and the rest of the class because of your neglect—these kinds of things—put the focus on the right things that ultimately help improve situations.

I think those have many different applications. A lot of creativity has to take place, but at the end of the day, we have what we get when we go into the teaching field. Part of the challenge in any kind of a school setting is to take all of these kids and make it work for everybody so that everyone has the opportunity and ability to thrive. That's a very, very difficult task. 

We'll be right back.

ADAMS: Well, thank you for staying with us and I hope you're enjoying this podcast with Daniel Buck. So appreciate him sharing some of his insights with us. 
I want to just jump in with one more little thing here before we kind of break down and kind of go into some closing thoughts.

Let's talk about grading in schools. We talked about discipline and some of these issues, but, back in the day…Look, seventy was a failure when I went to school. If you got a seventy or a sixty-nine, you flunked, okay? Over the years, things have scaled down, scaled down, scaled down.

Now, instead of A, B, C, D, E, F, there are no Ds and Fs in most places and there are no zeros. I mean, you completely miss a test or whatever and that kind of stuff is not even added into your grade stuff. Kids are just kind of passed through the system. We see all kinds of consequences from that.

We have students graduating high school that can't read on a fourth grade level. So many things. A lot of times it's because of assessment and the grading system. That is a fundamental problem, and again, it kind of goes back to: “Well, we’ve got to get them out of here and get them through here.” But is that really the goal? Because if that is what we do, we are failing our kids.

Let's talk about that and some of your thoughts.

BUCK: This is a discussion where I am open to the idea of innovations. There are other approaches to grading other than the traditional A to F scale. And the A to F scale is more effective than people I think sometimes give it credit. The high school GPA is a pretty darn good predictor of college success and even, like, lifetime earnings.

There's a lot of valuable knowledge that is passed along of a student's GPA, of their academic quality, of—I don't wanna say behavior quality, but there are certain habits that are going to make you more likely to succeed or not succeed in life. You talked about B-C students. Some of them become the people who lead our society, but that's a small percentage of these B-C students.

My students always like to be like, “Well, Abraham Lincoln didn't finish school.” Like, what are the chances that you're gonna be Abraham Lincoln, though? 1 % of the B, C, D, F students go on to become great entrepreneurs. All the rest of them don't. “Are you one of those? Are you one of those 1 %? You're gonna take that gamble?” 

It's kind of aggressive, but I don't know. Sometimes kids need a dose of truth in their life and the truth isn't always fun to hear.

Anyways, A to F scale: it's pretty effective, but there are other approaches that people are floating out there. Mastery or standards-based grading, where you set this curricular goal, and if the kids get a good grade when they meet it. You want them to explain what the Holocaust is in a paragraph, they did it, great, you get the grade for it. 

Or comparative grading, kind of grading on a curve. If I get a stack of essays, rather than going off of a rubric, you read it and you say, this is the top third, this is the middle third, and here’s the third that just didn't seem to try at all. You can tell the difference between the kids who tried really hard and just didn't do so well, and the kids who just didn't put any effort in. You know the difference as a teacher.

You kind of put them in three different stacks and then grade them according to that, trying to give some objective, “Well, here's the 78%, and here's where you get a 78% and not a 77%. 

I'm open to these other approaches. But what a lot of districts, and even a lot of once-very demanding charter schools, exacting charter schools, are doing, are they're just setting the floor at 50%. So if a kid doesn't hand anything in, they get 50%. That's the lowest grade a teacher can give.

Even if the teacher—again, this is where the teachers are often being forced into these things that they don’t want to do. They’ll put it into the system as a zero and the system rounds it up to a 50%. The software keeps them from doing this. My school in Green Bay did this. I remember when we saw that that happened, the teachers’ reaction was like, “This is going to be a disaster.”

So I’m open to these other approaches. We can maybe use the analogy of a bridge. We got this old stone arch bridge that's kind of falling apart. It still works a lot better than people give it credit, but maybe it's one lane across the river and there's some traffic back up and we want to replace it with, with two lanes on each side—suspension, a cantilever bridge, or whatever…this analogy is going on too far. 

Rather than tearing it down and replacing it with something completely new, a lot of districts are blowing up the bridge halfway and calling the problem fixed. It's just the worst of all the options. Rather than trying something new and innovative, they're just undercutting the current traditional system that they have.

The Wall Street Journal has done some reporting that pandemonium and laziness are the result because…I asked my students about this, “What would happen, you guys, if the lowest grade I could give would be a 50 %?” They sat back for a second and they're like, “You know, we'd all stop working this much because we know…”

I mean, there are kids that are always going to strive for the 100%. There are also going to be a lot of kids that they know, “I cannot do most of these things. And if I hand in a few assignments over the course of the quarter, or if I just do the final project, I'm going to get a C and you know what, that's normal. And that's good enough.” 

So you get a lot of sloth and laziness, or kids even acting out. We're seeing some stories of teachers saying that behavior is harder to manage because the kids aren't doing the work. And if they don't have the work to do, they're going to find something to do and it's not going to always be productive.

ADAMS Yeah, well, these are challenges. I think—we probably don't have the answers, but I think these are definitely things that are problematic that have to be resolved in our local schools. We don't have time to solve all of those all today. 

What primary takeaway would you leave for teachers who are listening to this conversation? What do you want to say to teachers?

BUCK: Pick up a book by E.D. Hirsch and start learning about traditional approaches to the classroom. They work really, really well. I want to see the classical education movement spread. I want to see the approaches to the classroom, that a lot of no-excuse charter schools use, become more normative and mainstream.

Perhaps a word of comfort: as a lot of teachers are seeing chaos in their classrooms, that's not their fault. It can really quickly start to feel like it's your fault, but it's not. If the administration is setting you up for failure, if they're not backing you up, if parents aren't backing you up, if the society is blaming you, like it's not your fault, even though it feels like it is.

I see the pendulums starting to swing back. I see common sense coming back to the classroom, more people reporting on the behavior in schools. There are a lot of movements out there: Research Ed, Doug Lamov's organization, Teach Like a Champion. The classical education movement is becoming mainstream now.

There's a lot of common sense that's coming into the classroom. Find the people: Robert Pandisio, Jeremy Tate, Doug Lamov, Tom Bennett, Katherine Birbalsingh. Follow these people on social media. Read what they're writing. Follow their examples. 

Teaching can be such a rewarding career. I think there are so many examples of successful schools where teaching is just so rewarding, so much fun, so fulfilling, so successful. It can be done. 

I tend to be very pessimistic about education, but right now, in this moment, I'm feeling very optimistic about it because I see what education can be. Become a part of that movement of sanity. 

ADAMS: That's a great word. That is a great word. 

The reality is, we need our teachers. We need some of them to quit because they're awful, but there are a whole lot of them…they're there for the right reasons. They really love the kids. They care about the issue. They've prepared themselves. They're experts in their field, and they need to be empowered and strengthened. 

A lot of that does come, like you were saying—let's get back to the foundational principles, those things that always work, and become an advocate for those things where you are in your classroom. Try those things. Find out how well they work. I think you'll find that your colleagues often will be willing to join you, administration, if they see good results. Everybody's looking for good results. Be a leader. Be a leader. We need you.

Great. Let's shift now to parents. What are some of the thoughts you have for parents, concerned parents? They love their kids. They care about their kids. They want the best for their kids. Whether they're in a private school, a public school, homeschooling—it's all out there, and we support all of it. We believe the parents should have the authority, the right, to do what they believe is best for the kids. 

What do you have to say for parents? 

BUCK: For parents—and I've found a lot of parents have already done this. I've been on parent podcasts, and I'm astounded by how well-read these parents are in education theory, and practice, and all this kind of stuff. I think parents are realizing they can't necessarily just send their kids to school and trust that everything's going to be fine.

The best thing parents can do is pick up a book or two about education. Obviously, I want you to read mine, What Is Wrong With Our Schools? It will give you a pretty good overview. But E.D Hirsch is another great author. A whole lot of stuff is out there on classical education. Pick up a book or two about educational theory and approaches to instruction and reading and all of these kinds of things. 

Because so much in education, like you said—a lot of it's a sales pitch. Cui bono. Who benefits? There are these euphonious-sounding ideas. Individualized education is a good example. “We want individualized education for our students.” What does that really mean in practice in the classroom? Sometimes—let's say…I have a class that had about thirty kids this year, a fifty minute class. If I'm going to individualize education for those kids, I'm going to go to each one, and that leaves me two minutes with each kid in the class period.

And then what else is every other kid getting while I'm two minutes with Johnny, then two minutes with Timmy, then two minutes with Susie, then two minutes with whoever…every other kid is getting ignored. 

Sometimes something like individualized education, in reality, means collective neglect. Whereas whole class instruction, where you're doing 20 minutes of instruction, explaining up front, doing examples, the whole class, giving analogies, doing some call and response. We're all practicing the same thing. The whole class is getting the teacher’s whole attention that entire time. So something like individualized education sounds great in theory, not so great in practice.

Educating yourself about education, even though you're not a teacher and it's like, “This doesn't really apply to me.” If you want to be an effective advocate for your kids, you don't want to be duped by the district trying to candy coat things or educational salesmen trying to push the latest fad that just isn't effective…you need to be educated yourself.

And again, I think a lot of parents are doing this now and it's great. In my book, the last chapter is this long like annotated bibliography, basically, of some other resources. If you're looking for discipline, policy, instruction, curriculum, long books, essays, theory, research, I break it all down so you can kind of see what am I looking for? What do I want to read? and find exactly the book that you want. You can get my book and then that will help you find all the resources to look into. 

ADAMS: Where can they get your book? 

BUCK: Amazon's the best spot. If you look up Daniel Buck, What Is Wrong With Our Schools? it'll be right there for you. It's on Target and Barnes & Noble's website, and others too, but we all use Amazon nowadays, I think. 

ADAMS: Okay. 

I agree with what you're just saying to parents about: educate yourself, stay engaged, be aware, know what's going on. It's not about going back in time, it's about foundational concepts and principles. I think he has some great ones. You can find some of those on our website, nwef.org. Dg into these things. 

Daniel, do you have a website? Do you have other things, resources that you quickly want to share with our listeners, where they can learn more?

BUCK: I do not have a website currently. I was just thinking as I was driving back from dropping my daughter off that I do need to start a website for myself, probably. The best place to find me, shamefully, is on Twitter. My handle's MrDanielBuck. Daniel Buck was already taken, so I had to throw the “Mr.” in there. 

Most of my writing is at National Review and the Fordham Institute. National Review, you're going to get more politics and culture war kind of engagement than Fordham Institute, which has got a foot in the academic world. So if you're looking for research and very practical advice and more nerdy, wonkery articles, that's where you're going to go for that stuff. 

But First Things, National Affairs, Wall Street Journal…I've written all over the place. So yeah, Twitter's the best place for you to stay up to date, but all of my writing…most of it is National Review and the Fordham Institute.

ADAMS: @MrDanielBuck, it's been a delight to have you today. Thank you for taking this time and sharing with us and our listeners. God bless you for your work. 

BUCK: Thanks for having me on. This has been great fun.