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Violence and poor behavior have been a growing problem in the public school system for years now. It turns out that’s likely a direct result of how little bad behavior actually gets punished in public schools these days.
The simple fact is, children are known to push the line and try to see how much they can get away with, and when bad behavior isn’t punished, it gets worse. This trend often starts small but can escalate all the way up to students committing crimes on campus.
This is a pattern that Texas teacher Auguste Meyrat spoke about. He says, "Actual crimes that happen on a school campus, there’s always a history before that. Usually students will show many crimes and have a history of misconduct."
He thinks that even high-profile cases of violent crime, like the Karmelo Anthony case in Frisco, likely follow this same pattern. He said, "A lot of these bad kids that really do need to shape up and stop doing what they’re doing, if you never intervene, these behaviors can explode in pretty violent ways."
The good news here is that this problem does have a relatively simple solution, and that is to get back to punishing poor behavior. Meyrat says, "There are certain students where I think, ‘Okay, this person may need to be removed from the classroom at this point.’ I think if you intervene early, and you intervene often, and you’re really deliberate about it, you can nip a lot of these problems in the bud."
He went on to warn, however, that it’s important to walk the line between over-punishing students and not punishing them at all. He thinks that over-punishing students in the late ’90s and early 2000s may have caused the pendulum to swing too far the other way, leading to students not being punished at all.