In response to the post, “And Your Point Is,” a reader writes:

“I live and work in a boarding environment at a private school, so our program is quite a bit different. However, we sometimes remove students from the classroom to do something similar to DAEP. It is all about remediation and behavioral change, rather than academic instruction. As one who’s worked in that DAEP environment from time to time, though, I have to say that teaching remediation is not like working with a positive and interested class at first. It’s very much about resetting long-standing behaviors, and engaging disengaged kids. They lose a lot of time in that kind of environment, and I mourn the loss of focus and direction that those kids have during that window they’re away from a functional classroom.”

SC Response:
A voice of reason, a teacher who understands that the longer a student is out of his class the further behind that student is getting, every day!

In the early 2000’s, I was working with a district that decided to track student performance on the state accountability tests vs. discipline interventions. I don’t have the data anymore so don’t hold me to specific numbers, but the trend is accurate.

What the district found is that students who had two or fewer office referrals had about a 98% passing rate on the TAAS test (an older Texas accountability test).

Student who were referred to In School Suspension once had about an 88% passing rate.

Students who were referred to In School Suspension more than once had about a 68% passing rate.

Students who were referred to the DAEP had about a 48% passing rate.

The deeper we push kids into the hole, the less chance they have of getting out. And yes, we push kids. Until, we can get the majority of staff to understand that our job is to coach kids to success, not sort them into “easy to work with,” and “easy to get rid of columns,” we are systematically destroying futures.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn…