Working as an education lawyer and former teacher, respectively, we hear about a lot of bad behavior in schools. Teachers have told us stories of students brandishing knives, threatening violence to get a grade changed, screaming profanity in teachers’ faces, threatening loved ones, and starting brawls. Many of these students never face administrative consequences. Rather, the consequences fall on everyone around them, as their behavior disrupts the learning of every other student in the classroom.
Unfortunately, incentives often run against strict administrative action. The parent of a punished child has a strong interest in filing formal complaints, speaking before the school board, and even threatening litigation. The punished student also has a host of legal protections surrounding him and established procedures for challenging the punishment. These incentives shape administrators’ decision to suspend, expel, or look the other way.
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The suffering of other children caused by disruptive behavior is comparatively faint and diffuse, placing less immediate pressure on administrators. These children deserve an education uncompromised by classroom chaos. But under the current system, they often cannot get one.
Three possible avenues exist for shifting these unbalanced incentives: transparency, litigation, and accountability. States should pursue all three if they want to fix the discipline problems in their schools.
Transparency is the simplest fix. When a severe incident occurs, such as a violent student episode, schools could be required to notify families. That would make the harms of school chaos become more acute for parents, thereby emboldening the parents of behaving children to demand answers for how school leaders and teachers will maintain order.
Litigation offers another potential tool but is not much of a threat under current law. Federal law provides no general right to a safe, orderly, or even effective public education, and courts have been reluctant to impose liability on school districts for harms caused by other students. Parents and teachers have tried to hold schools legally accountable for unsafe or dysfunctional learning environments, usually with little success. The result is another imbalance in incentives.
State lawmakers could change that balance, though they should be careful not to turn judges into school principals. A broadly worded right to a “safe” or “orderly” classroom, enforceable in court, could invite judges to second-guess disciplinary decisions that they are poorly equipped to evaluate. A better approach is to impose a limited set of clear, objective duties on school districts while leaving the substance of discipline to educators.
A slate of laws in red states called Teacher Bills of Rights offer a useful model. Rather than imposing a disciplinary code, they establish a few basic rules. Most TBORs require that when a teacher removes a persistently disruptive student, an administrator should have to respond. The student’s return should then follow a clearly defined process, rather than happening at the administrator’s behest. TBORs also require that serious incidents be documented and that teachers and parents receive appropriate notice. Teachers also must have somewhere to turn when administrators simply refuse to follow the rules.
Those protections mean little, however, without an enforcement mechanism. States could establish an administrative-complaint process that lets parents or teachers bring alleged violations to the school board. That would give local officials an opportunity to investigate and correct them. If the district still refuses to comply, a limited cause of action could permit a court to declare that the district violated the law and order it to take corrective action.
Even that limited enforcement mechanism could change administrators’ incentives. Today, failing to discipline a disruptive student often presents the path of least resistance. A credible complaint process would put meaningful pressure on the other side of the disciplinary calculus.
Finally, states could strengthen an accountability system that already exists. Federal law requires every state receiving federal education funds to identify “persistently dangerous” schools and allow students enrolled in those schools to transfer to a safer public school.
Though obviously useful, this designation is maddeningly rare. In the 2021–22 school year, states identified not a single persistently dangerous school nationwide, even as districts reported roughly 1.2 million violent offenses. The following year, only four schools in the entire country received the designation.
In the early 2000s, education reform focused on standards and accountability. Federal and state policies set clear academic standards and measured schools to see if they met them. Failing schools faced institutional consequences, including giving students a right of exit with a voucher, state takeovers, administrative replacement, or simple shaming through transparency. Academic scores slowly but surely improved over the decade, especially for low-income students.
States could learn a lesson from the 2000s education reform era and revisit the standards they use to identify persistently dangerous schools. Rather than rely heavily on suspension or expulsion numbers, which can perversely reward schools for declining to discipline students, states could measure violent incidents, classroom evacuations, and assaults on teachers and students. Designation could also be broken down into further categories.
Persistent failure to keep order should carry meaningful consequences. At minimum, families should know when a school fails to provide an orderly learning environment and have the opportunity to send their children elsewhere. And mandatory school-improvement plans, administrative overhauls, and state takeovers should be on the table.
As the late businessman Charlie Munger said, “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” Presently, incentives lead schools toward leniency and sow chaos. Accountability, litigation, and transparency are necessary political levers to correct the incentives and ensure that schools guarantee the basic conditions for educational success: order and safety.