Behind bullying behavior we usually find a depressed individual who needs help. We need to understand why a child bullies and get them that help so they will stop bullying.
Most people understand how serious the issue of bullying is to children and the country, and how schools should be on the forefront of addressing bullying.
The latest plan in regard to bullying in Florida is to give parents of the students who are bullied private school vouchers. Pay attention America. They’re touting this plan for the country.
The Florida legislature, still guided by Gov. Jeb Bush and his chief executive officer Patricia Levesque of the lobbying group Foundation for Excellence in Education, see this as a way to push vouchers.
What’s sad about this plan is that it does nothing to address bullying and the mental health problems that might exist behind it. If a child bullies another child, and if the bullied child leaves, the bully will go on to bully someone else.
If schools don’t have programs to address mental health, bullying will eventually mushroom out of the school and into the general public. We all know what can happen when bullying behavior is ignored.
If Bush and his friends really wanted to help end bullying, they could address policy that really helped children.
Here are just two school issues they could change.
- Instead of vouchers to private schools, Bush, Levesque, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos should #rethinkschool by ending 3rd grade retention based on high-stakes testing. Failing a child in 3rd grade means they could grow into a bully, or they could be bullied. Retained children are often older than their peers and they look older. This stokes bullying. That’s one welcome move policymakers could change.
- Another is to reinstate adequate recess in every school. By recess I mean 20 minute breaks several times a day. Children socialize during recess. It’s where teachers can observe interactions and assist children to work out the kinks that show up in their behavior. Well-trained teachers recognize bullying behavior on the playground and can immediately address it. They can find extra support for the child. Recess is not organized P.E. or following directions on an interactive video game. Observing children playing on their own, cannot take place in heavily structured environments. The American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes the importance of recess to how children get along, as do many teachers, parents and citizens. They say: Through play at recess, children learn valuable communication skills, including negotiation, cooperation, sharing, and problem solving as well as coping skills, such as perseverance and self-control.
Florida’s vouchers to private schools are not really about bullying and children, they’re about dismantling public schools. Bush wants every child out of public school and facing a computer screen for their education.
Technology won’t get rid of bullying. It will only change to cyberbullying and more expensive programs to control cyberbullying. This never gets to the problem of bullying behavior.
The Voucher Isn’t Enough to Attend a Good Private School
With Florida’s plan bullied children would receive $6,700 to use toward tuition costs to private schools through sales tax credits on automobile purchases. According to Education Week, when someone buys a car in Florida, they would have the option to give $105 they would otherwise pay in sales tax to the scholarship fund. The program would be capped at $41 million a year. This is another way to cut funding to real public schools.
But $6,700 doesn’t buy you much these days when it comes to schooling.
For example, Lake Highland Prep in Orlando is a good private school, yet they charge the following fees:
- $17,250.00 for elementary school
- $19,600.00 for grade 6
- $21,450.00 for 7-12
The voucher of $6,700 will not help a poor or middle class household. Children will only be able to travel to another public school far away from their home, or attend an unproven, substandard choice school.
Smaller private schools are not accountable to the general public, and parents don’t know what kind of behavior or academic learning to expect.
Private Schools and Bullying
Bullying can also take place in private schools. Although, good private schools often control enrollment. They don’t permit students who have problematic behavior to stay in the school. Public schools do not have that option. Yet, public schools are the very place to address bullying and what could be a serious mental health issue.
Good private schools also have smaller class sizes, more teachers and staff, and closed circuit TVs to monitor school grounds. They have less diversity. They might be focused on religion, gifted and talented students, or a group of students with similar culture and beliefs.
Ninety percent of students in America attend public schools. Most Americans want to save their free public schools.
Parents want consistently outstanding public schools that deal with the problem of bullying.
If parents have a child who has a problem bullying, they want help to turn that behavior around. They don’t want their child to wind up in a school that has become a dumping-ground with other students who bully.
Finally, most of us know this Florida bullying plan is just another scheme to force parents into school choice. It isn’t about bullying at all.
Reference:
Arianna Prothero. “In Florida, Bullied Students Will Get Vouchers to Attend Private School.” Education Week. March 8, 2018.
Well said!!
Nancy, you are right to address the problem of bullying in schools and to poor scorn on the idea of giving bullied children ‘vouchers’.
However bullying is a complex issue and simple solutions like ‘severely punishing bullies’ don’t work. In my experience as a parent, teacher, headteacher and grandparent, few schools are effective at addressing bullying of their pupils. In fact it is worse than that. The response of many schools is more likely to worsen, rather than improve the plight of the victim.
A bad sign in school literature and pronouncements from the head is the bald statement, ‘Bullying will not be tolerated in our school’, or something similar. This suggests that bullying is primarily a disciplinary offence that will be dealt with extremely firmly by punishing bullies. The problems with this are as follows.
The perceptions of ‘victims’ and ‘aggressors’ are likely to be strongly held and completely different. This often includes their accounts of what has happened. A complaint of bullying made by a pupil to a teacher or a parent may not be true. Even where it is mainly true, it is unlikely to include the whole truth.
Successfully combating bullying in schools needs the right school culture of empowering the victims of bullies and their peers. The bullies themselves also need to be helped to recognise their behaviour, to respect the rights and needs of others and crucially to address their own personality issues.
My headship school was a national leader in this field. Read more here.
https://rogertitcombelearningmatters.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/bullying-in-schools/
Of course bullying is a complex issue. I certainly agree. I also never said bullies should be severely punished. School staff like counselors, special education teachers, school psychologist and general ed. teachers need to figure out what’s behind the bullying. There’s a lot that can be done to address this issue.
But no one is talking solutions in Florida. My point.
Thanks, Roger. I look forward to reading your article.
I agree Florida’s announcement of this voucher plan was a half-hearted effort to pretend Betsy Devos is pillaging the DOE for humanitarian reasons. One gets the impression that they started with a “solution” and worked backwards to find a problem it could “solve”. There’s no indication that put any effort into understanding the nature of the bullying issue or what experts in the field have been recommending.
Are there any eligibility criteria to qualify as “victims” or we’re just having them self-identify and assuming they have accurate insight into themselves and their bullies and can understand the nuanced difference between interpersonal conflict with peers that’s not bullying vs true bullying, where the harassment is deliberate, persistent, and exploits an imbalance of power.
If they were genuinely concerned about victims of bullying, it might have occurred to them that changing schools is disruptive and anxiety-inducing, so if a kid reports being bullied and the school’s response is, ‘we can’t offer you anything here, so
if you don’t want to keep getting bullied, your only option is transferring to whole new school.’ There’s a wide body of literature on the negative impacts changing schools has on kids, which is magnified if they have a mental health condition, which both victims and bullies are more likely to have than the general public.
That’s an interesting point that I left out of the post but thought a lot about. How will they determine who gets the voucher? Will they have to set up teams to explore what a student has to go through to get a voucher? How much time will the principal and teachers have to spend on determining who has actually been bullied, when they could be focusing on those who are troubled and need help?
Thank you so much for bringing this up. It is a critical question.
You are so right that it is much better to resolve any inter-personal conflict than resort to changing schools. That’s why self-identified victims should always be encouraged rather than discouraged from seeking help, but that help has to be effective.
This only works if the school culture is to support ‘no blame’ investigations and conflict resolution measures in which the primary goal is always solving the problem ahead of seeking the punishment of perpetrators.
One party may indeed be the aggressor and if so, this will need to be recognised and acknowledged in the resolution stage, which has to result in the admission of wrong/misguided former actions (possibly from both parties not necessarily to an equal degree), apologies, sometimes appropriate restitution (eg if property has been damaged or stolen) and crucially a promise in front of witnesses not to repeat the offending behaviour.
Such conflict resolution always needs to take place through a face to face meeting between the victim and the alleged aggressor as described in the article that I linked to in my earlier post.
Instead of flunking kids in 3rd grade how about getting help 1 year, 2 years before or 3 years before. How about free pre-school for at-risk and anyone else for that matter to prevent not reading at 3rd grade level. Prevention is that such a hard concept?
At this time, when so much money in the state budget is being allocated to improve students’ mental health, it is hard to understand how Pinellas County school board can propose an early start time for high schoolers (7:20) that leaves students sleep deprived thereby, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, increasing their risks for anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, poor impulse control and self-regulation, increased risk-taking behaviors, dropping out, lower attendance, emotional dysregulation, decreased positive affect, impaired interpretation of social/emotional cues in self and others, decreased motivation, increased vulnerability to stress, cognitive deficits, impairments in attention and memory, lower academic achievement, nonmedical use of stimulant medications, and more. In addition, a study published in Journal of School Health and selected by the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on School Health as a 2013 Top School Health Paper found that “Students with insufficient sleep had higher odds of engaging in the majority of school violence-related behaviors examined compared to students with sufficient sleep. Males with insufficient sleep were at increased risk of weapon carrying at school” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23586885
The sleep issue with high school students is a real pet peeve of mine, and connecting it to this post about bullying is a great point and enlightening! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!