From the New York Times news section:

Rising Discipline Problems in Schools: Another Sign of Pandemic’s Toll

Incidents of student misconduct have risen in New York City since pandemic disruptions, though serious crimes in schools have decreased.

Children are still dealing with the emotional strain of the coronavirus pandemic, experts and educators said.
By Bernard Mokam
March 20, 2024

New York City schools are grappling with a spike in discipline problems among children, evidence that the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are having lingering effects, educators and experts say.

Most of the misconduct involves lower-level disturbances that educators and advocates say show that many students are still having a hard time emotionally after the stress of the pandemic.

No doubt closing the schools had a dire impact on students, especially the many below the Laptop Class, whose scions tended to adjust to classes over Zoom with fewer problems than the poor. In general, poor kids seem to benefit from coming every day to an organized place (a school) and being talked at by middle-class grown-ups (teachers). For all the downsides of schools, they are better than about what half the population gets at home.

Still, in 2020, two different social revolutions were massively promoted by the news media: COVID social distancing and the George Floyd “racial reckoning” rebellion against order and authority. Granted, the latter historical event has been pretty much memory-holed from the hard-news sections of the New York Times, like this article, in order to boost Democratic chances in the fall. (But the reckoning is still frequently brought up with pride in the soft news cultural sections of the NYT, who haven’t got the memo from the Biden Administration about ixnay on George Floyd.)

Why in 2024 is it automatically assumed that the various post–May 25, 2020 increases in disorder (e.g., surges in homicides, in traffic fatalities, and in school misbehavior) must be primarily due to COVID rather than to the Establishment’s endorsement of BLM’s DEI demands, such as less classroom discipline?

Well, because blaming it on COVID sounds better for the Democrats.

As you get further into the details, the reporter starts vaguely alluding to the anti-discipline initiatives of the Great Awokening of the last decade:

Last school year, there were 14,048 school safety incidents, according to Police Department data. In the 2018-2019 school year, there were 11,504. The increase comes amid debate over how schools should respond to discipline problems.

In recent years, both the police and the Education Department have sought to reduce how often officers respond to low-level offenses like disorderly conduct. Police Department data shows that when uniformed officers and school safety agents do respond, they are now more likely to send students back to their schools for discipline instead of arresting them or issuing a summons.

Jenna Lyle, an Education Department spokeswoman, said schools should be “safe havens for our children,” adding that schools have the tools to “address any issues in a positive, supportive, and less punitive manner. ”

Still, the number of times students were suspended or removed from class rose last year, to 36,992 from 31,738 the year before, though it remains below prepandemic levels.

“Most discipline incidences are not serious,” said Madeline Borrelli, a special-education teacher and member of Teachers Unite, an organization focused on ending “the school-to-prison pipeline.”

… And racial disparities remain. Black pupils make up a quarter of the city’s public school population, but 40 percent of suspensions or classroom removals. Black students were involved in more than half of incidents in which the police intervened.

… But Sumarha Tariq, who attended the High School of Fashion Industries, is one of the students who may have benefited from efforts to reduce police involvement in disciplinary issues.

In 2022, after she was found with pepper spray in her backpack, which is illegal for minors, a safety agent referred her case back to the school.

A school counselor issued a warning, but not a suspension, after Ms. Tariq wrote a statement explaining that she carried the spray because she had faced harassment on her commute. She made it through the rest of high school without problems, graduated and is now a freshman at Yale University.

It was, Ms. Tariq said, “the best scenario.”

New York Times commenters are not impressed with the article. Here are the most recommended comments:

P
10h ago
I searched for evidence to support the article’s supposition that pandemic-associated isolation was the cause of increased student disciplinary incidents. There is none. Please explain why.

Lola commented 10 hours ago
10h ago
Teachers aren’t allowed to discipline students anymore. There’s a movement to keep students in class and in school, under the (correct) theory that those students generally need the stability of school the most.

However, once you eliminate the ability of teachers and schools to discipline, it all goes downhill. It takes ONE student to disrupt an entire classroom.

I’ve witness more “minor” issues in my kids’ (affluent) elementary classes, with kids just being terrible at listening and following instructions, speaking disrespectfully to teachers. And this is at a “good” school. So it’s not just poor, minority students.

I volunteer coached my 2nd graders’ soccer team and could barely get the kids to pay attention long enough to form a line, or to complete a drill. One girl kept trying to climb on the goal net, and when I told her to knock it off, she told me “My parents say I don’t have to listen to you, you’re not my parent.”

Janel commented 9 hours ago
As a high school teacher, parents are a big part of enabling this behavior. There is little support from parents for disciplining students in schools–when students are held accountable for their behavior and have consequences, more often than not, their parents are immediately calling and/or emailing the teacher who disciplined them, to complain that their child should not have gotten in trouble. It becomes very hard to provide any sense of discipline for the child when parents are undermining the consequences. In my classes, both parents and students sign the syllabi at the beginning of each semester to agree to the classroom and school policies, but this does not stop parents from marching down to the school the second their child is held accountable to the rules that they agreed to. Parents and teachers should be partners in educating the child from a disciplinary perspective. When parents are immediately insisting that any consequences for their child should be erased or retracted, all the child learns is that the rules don’t apply to them if their parents simply bully their teacher and/or school administration into submission.

JAS commented 8 hours ago
I am a teacher and I go home every night emotionally exhausted from battling obnoxious, defiant, belligerant kids all day. Teaching has become a nightmare. Administrators give kids a hug and send them back to class with no improvement. I would not reccomend anyone become a teacher unless they just love stress, cortisol burnout, and substance abuse. I have to get intoxicated every night just to be able to not come unglued. Many, many colleagues are in the exact same place. I have 7 years left to retirement, and I dont know whether I have the ability to make it to the end without losing my mind. The only thing worse than the kids behavior is the Millenial parents who take no responsibility for creating behavior or schoolwork expectations for their kids. They somehow think teachers are responsible for raising their kids. A parent actually said, “It’s not my job to read to my son.” Another dandy was, “why is my daughter not getting her homework done and what are you going to do about it?” It used to be the parents supported us when we called or sent email home. Now the parents demand meetings with admin and believe their kids before teachers. In 20-30 years our entire creative productivity as a nation is going to go into the toilet because none of the kids have any skills, discipline, or expectations for themselves. They all “need” specialized instruction because that gets them preferential treatment. The educational culture of our schools has become a putrid joke.

Carmen commented 9 hours ago
Something else besides COVID happened in 2020: George Floyd and America’s so-called racial reckoning. In my experience as a parent and educator, this led to a sea change in the way schools handle discipline.

Sensitivity to appearing racist or flouting equity leads educators to avoid punishing or suspending students with poor discipline, who, as this article identifies, are often disproportionately Black. No educator wants to be accused of feeding that “school to prison pipeline.”

I have heard so many times, from so many teachers, that the lack of being able to effectively discipline for fear of looking racist is one of the most frustrating aspects of the job, and the one most likely to make them quit. It’s also profoundly unfair to the well-behaved kids.

[Comment at Unz.com]