Attitude Adjusters

BACK STORY • Schools take on behavior problems with new ideas

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Mar 25, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (7 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTOS

Fourth-grader Deaustin Clay pushes a hockey puck during PE class at Boise-Eliot, where administrators say the new dress code has brought a better attitude into the school.

Fourteen-year-old Micah Mitchell isn’t proud of his behavior at school over the past few years. He’s acted up in class, talked back to teachers and the principal, and in general rebelled “for no reason,” he said.

But after a long history of suspensions at North Portland’s Ockley Green School in his fifth- through seventh-grade years, he’s now an eighth-grader at North Portland’s George Middle School, where he’s on track to finish up the year in good standing and move on to high school, where he hopes to advance his dreams of becoming an architect.

“They get paid to design buildings and make stuff,” Micah said, a shy smile spreading across his serious face. “I just think that’s cool.” Of his new outlook on school, he says: “I’m just here to learn. I don’t want to be stupid, end up living on the street.”

Micah’s transfer to George in October – after his mother threatened to send him to boot camp – came at an opportune time, when the school began taking on a new strategy to manage student behavior.

“Last year was a difficult year,” Principal Beth Madison said. “It totally wore people out. We just made a commitment to turning things around.”

As a result of their new tactic – a contract with a Houston-based classroom management program called Envoy – discipline rates this year have been cut in half, and the hallways and classrooms are noticeably more mellow, Madison said.

Yet many schools still are struggling to get a handle on discipline problems, recognizing that school climate is a crucial factor in student achievement, equity and preventing high school dropouts.

A Portland Tribune analysis of Portland Public Schools discipline data over the past four years shows three major conclusions: that discipline rates spike at the middle-school level; that schools in poorer areas have much higher discipline rates than the others; and that there are large over-representations of black, Hispanic and American Indian students involved in disciplinary incidents.

That’s no surprise to administrators, who say they’re trying to confront these trends.

“Does poverty have an effect on behavior? That’s kind of a question I have,” said Tammy Jackson, the district’s student conduct program manager. “The literature would suggest yes, it does. Kids who have more challenges come to school less ready and able to learn. So what is it that schools need to be about to help the kids be successful and deal with the barriers they have?”

Backgrounds play a role

Randy Sprick, a national educational consultant who brought his student behavior program called “Safe and Civil Schools” to 26 schools in the Portland district last fall, notes that he works with a wide spectrum of districts – from Dallas, Texas (with 84 percent of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch), to Bellevue, Wash., at 17 percent.

Portland is in the middle, with 45 percent. (A school’s share of students who qualify for the federal lunch program indicates how many of its students are from low-income families.)

“I’d be cautious implying that this is a poverty issue,” said Sprick, who graduated from Portland Public Schools and now teaches at the University of Oregon. “But certainly schools in poverty have a higher number of incidents because of absenteeism, higher transience rates. … You also run into some culturally based issues.”

Nikole Hartman, a student intervention specialist at George who has been working with Micah to control his impulses to act out, has noticed that cultural differences play a big role in how kids behave at school.

“A lot of things that come out of my students’ mouth, to them, are completely OK,” she said, referring to some of her black and Latino students. “Their parents say, ‘Oh, it’s a cultural thing.’ Stuff that I would consider wholly inappropriate is fine by their culture and family values.”

Hartman, who is of mixed race, thinks that any racial overrepresentation that exists stems not from any racism by teachers but from the fact that many schools, like her own, simply have large minority populations.

At George, a third of the students are Hispanic, 19 percent are black and 12 percent are Asian.

Districtwide, students may get suspended for everything from fighting and bullying to vandalism, theft, possession of alcohol, tobacco or drugs, or failure to follow rules. The most common cause for suspension in the district is fighting, with bullying coming in a distant second.

Jackson and others also caution against reading too much into the data because various schools handle their disciplinary incidents differently, and some don’t record or report all incidents for fear the marks will tarnish their school’s image.

John Danielson, principal at Southwest Portland’s Jackson Middle School, which has one of the lowest discipline rates, says he doesn’t manipulate his numbers.

“When you suspend kids, the data goes in,” he said. “We do a lot of work here trying to get to a point where we’re proactive about student behavior.”

He attributes his low discipline rate to a lot of staff training, a strong parent community and an engaging “integrative arts” model, a curriculum that crosses lessons between subjects such as math and art.

“If you’re really engaged in what’s going on at school, you’ll probably perform better at school,” he said.

Still, Jackson said she’s been trying to work aggressively with schools throughout the district to better track their misconduct data.

“The more we keep information about kids who are struggling with their behavior,” she said, “the more readily we can respond when something’s a problem.”

Pressure’s on in middle school

Leslie Rennie-Hill, who oversees the district’s Office of High Schools, agrees that engaging kids in their studies is key. She said the overrepresentation of minority and poor students in discipline data mirrors the achievement gap, which the district has been working to tackle.

“Many of the norms in public education in the country stem from a white, middle-class background,” she said, such as having a mostly white teaching and administrative work force and outdated textbooks that lack cultural diversity.

“We’ve worked to differentiate and add cultural competency to what we do. I’m not at all saying ‘water down.’ But the way you demonstrate respect to a young black man may be different. We need to develop our ability to do this.”

She said while her office’s focus is on academics, there’s no doubt discipline is intricately linked. “If a student isn’t in a class (because of a discipline issue), they’re missing the class,” she said.

That’s why a student’s behavior at ages 12 to 14, before transitioning into high school, is so important to address, educators say.

“In many districts, middle schools are the biggest problem, disciplinewise,” Sprick said. Issues tend to swell in middle school for a variety of reasons related to adolescence, he said: “an incredible degree of peer pressure, a lot more behavior testing – pushing limits, seeing what you can get away with – and also, by high school, a lot of problem kids have dropped out.”

To stem that tide, Rennie-Hill’s office has been working on an effort to track the progress of freshmen who are more at risk of dropping out, based on their marks in eighth grade.

The district has identified 1,100 so-called “academic priority students,” about a third of all district freshmen. Each month, teachers and administrators pore over their progress and try to find ways they can either get additional tutoring or make up a class or part of a class to gain credit.

The early results at the semester mark are encouraging, prompting administrators to ask more about their common assumptions, Rennie-Hill said.

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