538: Is This Working?

Ira Glass

OK, you're a middle school teacher. Here's a situation that apparently happens all the time. A kid walks into your classroom wearing a hat. There's a rule-- hats are not allowed in school. You tell him to take it off. He does.

Ten minutes later, you're teaching, you look at the kid, he's wearing the hat again. Again, you tell him to take it off. This time, he doesn't. And then he escalates the situation. He curses to himself. What do you do?

Ira Glass

Serena Nickle in Connecticut says that usually works. You demand compliance. Though one of our producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, asked over a dozen middle school teachers. Jose Vilson in New York would have a very different response.

Ira Glass

Jeff Reamer says that the key is no conversation, no stopping instruction at all, as he gives the kid a demerit on the kid's weekly behavior report.

Ira Glass

Smooth, right? Jamien Jacobs in Maine would not use any words at all. She'd give the kid a look. She'd do the whole thing in a look.

Ira Glass

All across the country, across different schools in different states, when it comes to disciplining young people, teachers are winging it. In 19 states, you're still allowed to hit kids if they think that'll work. And lots do. Chana asked the teachers what they learned about controlling their classrooms in their teacher training programs. Most of them said, not much.

There's this great book that's out now by a reporter named Elizabeth Green, about teacher training. It says, "Incredibly, at some education schools, disciplining kids, managing your class, it's not even a subject on the curriculum." When you ask teachers, OK, so really, how did you learn to do that thing that you do with your voice, your face, your shoe, they often answer with a name, a kid's name-- that kid taught me so much.

Ira Glass

Johnny and Z and Jeff and Alex are our nation's education school. These are the kids who were so hard to discipline that teachers just had to figure out what to do. So each teacher finds an approach that works for them.

Does it work for the kids? Who knows? There's no clear answer. There's no best practice that educators agree on.

Which is weird, since this is where kids should be learning to control themselves and how to live with others in the world. It's so essential. This is so basic. And there are lots of educators out there who are convinced that the way that we do discipline isn't just ineffective. They think it's actively messing kids up.

So today, we're going to talk about schools, but not about curriculum or testing or standards or any of the other stuff that people usually talk about on the radio and in the media when they talk about schools. Today, we're going to talk about discipline, because, you know, you kind of have to nail discipline before you can do anything else in a classroom.

Chana Joffe-Walt has been looking into this for months. She has learned things are not going so great with discipline. And lots of educators and parents are asking, is this working? Is this the best we can do? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Time Out."

OK, so let's start this show about discipline in schools at the very beginning of a kid's school experience, in preschool, with kids so young that you would think it would be pretty straightforward how to handle behavioral problems when they act up. Like, how bad can these kids be? And at this young age, this is where the question first emerges of whether the wrong kind of discipline in school will screw up a kid, maybe for years to come. Here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

JJ's conversational style is to tell you things he knows for sure. He's no fan of ambiguity, sticks with the facts. He's five. He does not like salad. His new house is OK, but it does not have a pantry.

He can spell the word "loss." His mom has a belly, because there's a baby in there. The baby will have brown skin. And he knows this because his mom said it is for sure, for sure. He does not like salad.

Chana Joffe-Walt

JJ just started kindergarten. I ask him what preschool was like before kindergarten. He tells me, "I was in green room with Miss Bethany and I-don't-remember-her-name lady. There were three racecars." More blocks than a number he knows.

Later, I talk to JJ's mom, Tunette Powell. And she told me a very different story about JJ's time in preschool. She says, last January, she was in the car on the way to a meeting.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Still, as she exited the highway, she did a special form of mental gymnastics I believe is familiar to parents everywhere.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When Tunette got to the school, the woman at the front desk gave her a form that said JJ threw a chair. She asked Tunette to sign it. So she did.

Chana Joffe-Walt

JJ was sent to his room again. No cartoons, no fruit snacks. A couple weeks after that, JJ spit on another kid. He got sent home again.

Tunette asked for more information this time. And there was a long back-and-forth about the definition of "spit on." It was not projectile; more like dribble.

And at home, they did the same routine-- you're going to go to your room, no treats. But Tunette worried JJ didn't seem to understand that, when he was bad at school, being sent home was a punishment. Tunette didn't think he got that connection.

Chana Joffe-Walt

So yeah, I don't think he got it. And of course he didn't. He was four years old at the time. To me, it sounds crazy to suspend a four-year-old. Like, there has got to be a better way to get your message across.

It didn't seem like it was messing him up or anything. JJ didn't seem traumatized. It just didn't look like it was working.

Then, after the third time he was suspended, Tunette started to feel like there was only one explanation for why it wasn't working. And it wasn't her parenting or the school. It wasn't JJ.

It was her. She was a problem student when she was a kid. And she felt like, somehow, she passed that on to her son. She disrupted class a lot, got in fights.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It had mattered greatly to Tunette that the situation would be different for her kids. She spent the last decade taking one enormous step after another away from her childhood. Her dad was in prison when she was a kid. Her children have a father. Her mom never had enough money.

She and her husband moved to Omaha so Tunette's husband could be in the Air Force. They have a steady income, four bedrooms, and a lawn. Tunette went into kindergarten knowing she was a bad kid. And she lived up to that reputation all the way through school.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A few weeks after JJ was first suspended, Tunette took him to a birthday party.

Chana Joffe-Walt

After the birthday party, Tunette's younger son, Joah, got suspended. Joah was three, though just barely three. He'd just had his birthday that week.

Tunette writes for a local Omaha parenting blog called Momaha. She wrote a post with the headline, "Is My Black Preschooler Just Another Statistic?"

I reached out to the preschool. And they did not want to comment or even allow me to talk to the director of the school. But Tunette's post got picked up by the Washington Post. And she started getting dozens of messages, especially from black parents, all over the country.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Tunette was very much not by herself. This is not a new conversation for lots of black and Latino parents noticing that their kids seem to be punished more harshly than white kids. That's not new.

What is new is that some academics and activists have been taking these stories and attaching them to a new, provocative term-- "the school-to-prison pipeline." The idea is that what's happening to Tunette's son is happening to lots of kids of color all over the country. And once those kids are old enough, the excessive punishment in school really messes them up and makes them much more likely to wind up in prison.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Michael Thompson is the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. It's a nonpartisan think-tanky type place. And Thompson kept hearing that term, "school-to-prison pipeline."

His job is to advise lawmakers on crime policy. So he was getting asked a lot, is this a real thing? Are black and Latino kids really punished more in school and ending up in prison because of it? It seemed a little far-fetched to Michael Thompson.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Thompson likes numbers. He enjoys being in close proximity to Microsoft Excel. And this is exactly the kind of assignment he does not like, because there are not consistent numbers on discipline in schools. Every school is different, every district, every state.

And then, Michael Thompson learned about Texas. Texas, somewhat miraculously, had followed every single public school student from seventh grade through graduation-- the seventh graders of 2000, 2001, 2002. And they had documented everything-- report cards, if the kid was poor, Asian, switched schools, gotten in trouble, followed them all the way through graduation.

So Thomson could ask the researchers in College Station at Texas A&M, how many white kids were suspended? For what? How many times? Which schools?

Chana Joffe-Walt

The lab coats peered down at a million students' lives-- the schools they attended, how they did, when they got in trouble. And they determined that African American and Hispanic students were twice as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension than their white peers for their first offense. When they looked at African American boys in Texas, 83% were suspended at least once. And usually, they were suspended a lot more than once. That includes anything a school calls suspension.

But still, take 10 black boys, two of them made it through middle and high school without being suspended. And what kind of infractions were they getting suspended for? Most of the time, these were not for big things, like hitting a teacher or bringing a weapon to school. They were for things like disrespect, insubordination, willful defiance, the kind of incident that often begins when an angry kid won't take his hat off.

OK, and one more striking thing you can see in the Texas numbers-- kids who were suspended were much more likely to be arrested outside of school, three times as likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The idea of suspending a young person for bad behavior-- what is that? A kid who's disrespectful or insubordinate does not want to be in class. So you suspend them? Just saying that out loud, that sounds weird, right?

A couple years ago, the state of Maryland wrote a law-- state legislator sat down and wrote this law-- that says you cannot suspend students for being truant. If a kid skips school, you can't punish him by telling him, you can't come to school. They needed a law to make that clear.

I talked to a sociologist named Pedro Noguera who told me that, over the last few decades, suspensions have become the go-to move in response to disruptive behavior, for everyone, actually, but especially black and Hispanic kids.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And because of the Texas numbers, we now know that those same kids are at a much higher risk of being arrested. So is there a connection here? One way to look at this is just that our society gives tougher punishments to black and Hispanic kids when they are JJ's age, when they're in preschool, and when they're in high school, and when they're old enough to go to prison. The issue is not school. It's just racism.

But Noguera says school is an important part of this picture. And here's the theory he laid out for me. You suspend a kid, he misses school, he finds it hard to catch up, he feels frustrated, falls behind. And maybe just as important, he learns he is bad. Because he feels bad when he's in school, he acts bad.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Producing it through the system of punishment that convinces some kids that they're bad.

In May, 2011, Michael Thompson got a meeting with the Attorney General of the United States. And he showed him the Texas numbers. And two months later, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education were standing together at a press conference about discipline in schools. They started gathering their own numbers from schools, all over the country this time. And those numbers were worse, even in preschool.

In March this year, the Department of Education issued a report that said black children make up 18% of preschoolers, but they make up 48% of preschool children suspended more than once.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I asked Tunette what the report meant to her. And she found it hard to summarize so many things.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She's talking about herself there, as a kid. Remember, Tunette was a problem student herself, preschool through high school graduation.

Even as she's saying that, Tunette isn't quite sure she believes it. She remembers being bad. She flipped over a desk in class one time. That happened. But she also remembers that, after getting suspended in preschool, she walked into kindergarten fully convinced the teacher was the enemy. And that never went away.

All those times she was suspended, she didn't come back less angry, ready to obediently follow directions. It was the opposite. Tunette says, "I went into kindergarten knowing I was bad. I went into first grade knowing I was terrible. And it just went up from there."

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt. Coming up, two ambitious, totally interesting, and completely opposite attempts to do discipline differently in schools. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, discipline in schools-- is it working? Is it messing kids up? One of our producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, has been looking into that for months.

And in this half of our program, we look at two approaches to discipline that teachers are trying in schools in poor, urban neighborhoods. There's a pattern that teachers see in a lot of these schools. The pattern is this-- the kids walk in on day one, they're already stressed out by the environments they come from, and they act out. So they get punished.

They get the message that they're bad. They come to hate school. They act out some more.

Ira Glass

Katie Furr first taught at a middle school in New York City in Washington Heights with tons of kids who acted out. There were fights.

Ira Glass

Often, she would just lose control of her class because of this kid named Christopher, a curly-haired 14-year-old with braces who gave her more trouble than anybody else in the class. Like one day, Christopher left class to go to the bathroom. And Ms. Furr took his coat. And she locked it in a closet with all the other kids' coats. There was a school policy in that school to lock up coats like that to make it harder for the kids to leave school in the middle of the day.

Ira Glass

In reaction to the kind of chaotic public school where learning is interrupted a lot and so kids fall further behind, two decades ago, some teachers launched one of the biggest recent experiments in American education, a whole movement of charter schools designed for poor minority kids. The idea is that the classrooms are rigorous, high standards, long school days. When it comes to discipline, they are strict, they're orderly, they are hyper-vigilant. There's a slogan they use-- they sweat the small stuff, so things never get to the point they did in Ms. Furr's class.

These kinds of charter schools have now been around long enough that the first generation of students who went through them are grown. And some of those students now look back on their time in those schools. And they think about, did it work? What worked? What didn't work?

In this act, Act Two-- we're calling this act "The Guinea Pig Becomes the Scientist"-- Chana talked with one of those students who grew up and decided to become a teacher himself.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Being a human subject is a thing that ranks pretty high on Rousseau Mieze's "who I am" list. He grew up in Roxbury, Mass. His parents are Haitian immigrants. And at age 10 years old, Rousseau became a human test subject when his mom signed him up to be part of the first sixth-grade class at the Academy of the Pacific Rim.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Rousseau's teachers had spent years coming up with the theories that created that first week of school. They wanted to close the achievement gap with long school days and high expectations. They have lots of slogans-- no excuses, zero tolerance for misbehavior. And Rousseau's teachers believed this approach would motivate the kids to behave. Which it did, for some kids. And for some kids, it did not.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A few of Rousseau's childhood teachers went on to start their own schools, went on to scale up their vision of rigorous, no-excuses schools for America's poor and minority students. Rousseau's former teachers now write books and talk about the mistakes they made early on and all the important lessons they took from those mistakes, things like, don't shame students by making them stand with their nose to the chalkboard for the rest of the class. Don't make them bark like a dog. It is not best practice to throw chairs in order to get kids to see you're serious. And when a kid is late, do not do what a teacher did to Rousseau.

Chana Joffe-Walt

For Rousseau, there was a big upside to his charter school experience. He got into college. He doesn't think that would have happened otherwise. And it gave him the life he has today.

But there were downsides, too. For one, lots of kids couldn't hack it, left the school. Less than half of Rousseau's sixth grade class stayed till graduation. And some of the charter movement's leaders say too many of those who did make it to college ended up dropping out. One reason for that-- after all the strict control in high school, they floundered when they had no structure in college.

When Rousseau aged out of being a human test subject, he pretty much immediately moved over to the other side and became a teacher. He got his first gig when he was still in college, a sort of teaching internship at a charter school in Rochester. He was 21 years old. And he finally had the distance to see things from the outside. He chaperoned his first field trip to DC, and it kind of freaked him out.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And Rousseau noticed that the kids were getting noticed. Grownups around them were smiling, pointing them out.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Rousseau was good with kids, especially the problem kids. When he graduated from college, he got a job through his charter connections. And Rousseau proceeded to be maybe the only rookie teacher in America who did not struggle with classroom management. Seriously, he was a genius at controlling the kids. The thing Rousseau struggled with was letting go of control.

By this point, the strict charters had pulled back some on the extreme discipline model. The slogans were still "zero tolerance," "no excuses." But Rousseau also heard a new one-- "power versus purpose." Make sure, when you are exerting your power, there's a reason for it.

Is there a reason kids need to walk quietly into a rest stop on a field trip? Is there a reason you need that kid to unpack his bookbag silently? There might be. But you know, ask the question. Rousseau said school felt so different than he remembered.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Rousseau and I talked in a small workroom at a school. And he had to interrupt our interview, because he said he needed to help with a transition. I didn't know what that meant, but I followed him into the hallway. And about 30 kids walked single-file line, completely silently, out of their classroom, down the hall, down three flights of stairs, to lunch. This is what that sounds like.

[CLAP]

30 or so 11- and 12-year-old children are streaming past me, down the stairs, single-file. No arms are flapping, no mouths are open, no one is tripping or falling, all the way to the cafeteria.

I listened back to try to find the infraction. And I think it must be this.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Yeah. That creepy feeling Rousseau had watching the kids at the rest stop, I had that feeling. And it was super confusing, because Rousseau had just spent an hour telling me about these eye-opening experiences he'd had seeing kids laugh and Barack O-comma and how he could never stay quiet as a kid.

So we talked about this for a while. And he says he's ambivalent about how controlling his school was, about all the ways his school today is a lot like the school he attended as a kid. But the longer he teaches, he says, the better he understands a thing that he did not get as a kid about why his teachers were so harsh. And that is that they were scared.

They were scared of losing control of the class. He knew that. That part was obvious to him even when he was a teenager. But what he didn't realize at the time was they were also scared for him. He knows this now, because he is a teacher of mostly poor, mostly black students, like he was. And he feels this for his students.

He's afraid for their well-being. He's afraid of the odds they will not graduate. He's afraid they won't get to college, afraid they'll get suspended or arrested for horsing around or being rowdy at the wrong place at the wrong time. So Rousseau finds himself saying things teachers said to him. And it's like when you're a parent and you hear your mother's voice coming out of your mouth, and you know what you are saying is such a worthless thing to say to a child, but you say it anyway.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Rousseau wants to be able to loosen his grip some as a teacher, allow kids more freedom. He's trying to do that. He takes tiny steps. But he says his fear gets in the way.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "The Talking Cure." So after the Texas numbers came out, and then more studies and punishments in schools, lots of educators and policymakers became convinced that a lot of the discipline that schools administer is not working, especially suspensions. So if you don't want to suspend kids, what do you do instead?

Well, one alternative that's talked about a lot, that the Obama administration and others are pushing for schools, is something called restorative justice. Now, the model for this comes from the criminal justice system, where offenders and victims will sit down in a mediation, and they basically try to talk it out and find a way to restore the harm done by the crime. That's why it's restorative.

So if this is the answer for schools, we wanted to see what it looks like when you try that in a school setting. Chana spent last spring semester at a public school called Lyons Community School in Brooklyn. It's a small middle and high school founded nearly eight years ago to attempt this approach with kids.

Just a quick note, the kids in this story are minors, and some of the names have been changed. Also, if you're listening to this on the internet or on podcast, there is cursing that we have not beeped in what you're about to hear. If you prefer a beeped version of our program, you can get it at our website, thisamericanlife.org. OK, here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I was popular at Lyons. It was a problem. Kids would see me walking around with my microphone, international symbol that someone is about to be made famous. And there'd be a scramble.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Some very quick process of natural selection would take place, a dozen kids would get pushed aside, and I'd be left standing with the champions.

Chana Joffe-Walt

How do you like it?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Having to move a conversation like this into an interview about restorative justice was a little bit of a bummer. Kids at Lyons don't necessarily know that term, nor do they want to talk about it. But when you ask them what their school is like, they have a lot to say about that, mostly what it feels like here. The teachers listen to you. And we have a voice.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Circles. That's a big thing here. They sit in circles after a fight. Circles are where conflict is resolved, consequences are discussed, feelings are shared. The kids at Lyons get the message that talking is how you are successful.

A beefy ninth grader named Alex, with an Afro and dimples, walked me through, in detail, how he calms himself down when he gets frustrated in class. And then he told me, "Lyons is what made me." I ask him what he means by that.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Later, Alex told me, "I wouldn't have walked away nicely, either." His teachers confirmed this.

All this talking at Lyons can just look like total chaos. There are kids in the hallway at Lyons all the time, there are fights, there's random screaming in between classes. Rousseau's charter school had zero tolerance. Lyons has a tolerance for disruption that rivals a paintball arena.

One day, I found a teacher and dean trying to game out how to approach a student who told a female teacher to suck his dick. The kid said this in class and then walked out.

Chana Joffe-Walt

These two teachers talk about what it means that the student said those words for an hour. They then speak with the student for another hour, the student and his mom, the student and other students, the student one-on-one again. It is a thorough investigation into the meaning and effect of the words "Suck my dick" on the kid, on the teacher, and on the class.

But that's kind of the idea, that kids are a long-term project, and over time, angry, hard kids become people who can explain themselves. At Lyons, they call this transformation "being Lyonized." The assistant principal was telling me about this, about how kids get Lyonized.

And a ninth grader named Nelson happened to be just sitting with us. So she said, "Like Nelson. In sixth grade--"

Chana Joffe-Walt

Nelson is not squirming or grimacing listening to this. The feeling is more of a loving parent teasing a grown child about what an awful teenager he was. But of course, what's so remarkable is Nelson is still a teenager. And this is not his parent. It's his principal.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Nelson tells me, "Just ask Espy what I was like in sixth grade." Espy is Dan Espinoza, a dean at the school.

Chana Joffe-Walt

One day, a girl said something nasty to Nelson, and he started screaming at her and then chasing her out of the classroom.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When I asked him how hard, Espy said, "It didn't break my jaw or anything." So that was sixth grade. Nelson is in ninth grade now, Lyonized.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Schools, like any institution, I guess, tend to attract believers, some more fervent than others. But Lyons is a building of believers. This is the way to do things, and it's the right way.

Which is why I want to tell you about what happened on May 7 last spring, something that threatened to reverse years of progress with Nelson and had lots of teachers in the school questioning what they're doing here. On May 7, two teachers named Chelsea and Jesse took a group of ninth graders on a field trip. It was an art class. They were going to Manhattan to look at public art. And even on the walk to the train, kids were noticing public artwork.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There are a lot of versions of what happened next. Some students say the guy reached to grab Nelson, to hit him. Some of them say the guy just stepped forward. Teachers and students, everyone, says, at that point, the kids, a large group of them, moved in on the man.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And Chelsea put her arms across the doors to keep the kids behind her inside the train. But for some reason, the doors did not close. The train did not move.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Jesse, meanwhile, the other teacher, was at the other end of the train car. So he couldn't see what was going on. But he stepped out onto the platform, and he sees this man there, screaming.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When I asked the kids about this moment later, a bunch of them told me the whole thing was so confusing until right then. The whole time, they were wondering, what's this random guy doing starting with us? And then, when they found out he's a cop, it was like, oh, that's why he's acting like that.

But Jesse and Chelsea both said this is where they got confused. The man made more sense to them as a crazy guy than as an officer, a plainclothes officer, who was now standing on a subway platform with his badge saying he got hit, and he wanted everyone off the train.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Jesse says the cop pulled aside Nelson, Alex-- that kid who told me Lyons made him capable of talking to me-- and a boy named Kamani. Jesse tried to stay close to the group.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Jesse pressed on. And the more he recounted this to me, I realized, oh, he's trying to do restorative justice with the guy. He was in teacher mode. He's got 25 of his students standing before him. So without thinking, he does what he knows how to do.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Restorative justice, meet plain old criminal justice. The cop was not about to sit in a circle. He was going to make some arrests.

And the kids geared into action. They shot video, started calling mothers and aunts and girlfriends. Someone made sure to get their backpacks.

Nelson's classmate Brianna got Nelson's phone out of his pocket while he was handcuffed. I asked Brianna how she knew to do that when someone was arrested. She was quiet for a couple seconds, like she was trying to figure out what exactly I meant by that question. And then her face cleared up, and she said, oh, I live here. I live in Brooklyn.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The cop arrested Nelson and Kamani. The rest of the kids watched. Nelson was charged with disorderly conduct. Kamani was charged with a felony for assaulting an officer.

The NYPD declined multiple requests for an interview or any kind of response. And the officer-- his name is Guillermo Lozano-- would not talk to me. He also didn't show up for Nelson's court dates. He did provide the courts with a written statement that says, after a heated verbal exchange with Nelson, the officer identified himself. Kamani, the statement says, then punched him in the right eye and yelled, "Fuck that."

Kamani denies this. But in court, he took a plea deal. All of the witnesses I spoke with say the cop did not identify himself until after the scuffle. Two people said, at that point, he did appear to have a mark on his face. Nelson and Kamani were booked and spent the night in jail. They were both 16.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I asked Nelson what he was thinking about all night.

Chana Joffe-Walt

When Nelson got out the next morning, he came straight to school. He said he wanted to let his teachers know he was OK.

The principal of Lyons, Taeko Onishi, sends out a weekly email to staff. And that week, it described the arrests and said, "There's an impending court case, so I won't get into too much detail. But it was one of those cases of a cop undercover, responding completely inappropriately to our students, our students then responding inappropriately back. Clearly, the cop was in the wrong. But equally clearly, many of our students really struggle to make the best of choices when faced with an emotionally charged situation."

Of course, Lyons staff discussed the incident exhaustively.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Espy, the dean who tells Nelson he loves him, could not stop imagining Nelson in jail. He imagined Nelson getting his prints taken, standing before a judge, seeing himself as a criminal. And Espy played out the alternate future he could now see for Nelson. Basically, he had the same moment Tunette had with JJ, seeing a path laid out before him, seeing him targeted by strangers who don't see him for who he is. It made Espy furious.

But other teachers at Lyons took the news of the arrests differently. Kamani's English teacher, Cindy Black, said she kept thinking about all the times Kamani acted out in her class, blew up, threw books on the floor. And she kept wondering, is what we're doing working for the kids?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Here's Chelsea.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Freedom to say "excuse me" to a stranger in a rude tone, to throw stuff, and to talk back. It seemed like the cop saw them as rowdy or threatening. What if they'd been more like Rousseau's students, quiet and in uniforms, doing homework? Maybe this whole thing could've been avoided.

But Espy reminded everyone, wait, the cop said, "Fuck you." Kamani only got involved when the cop started with Nelson. We're going to tell them he should have held back?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Still, restorative justice is what the school does. So after Jesse and Chelsea got the rest of the class back to school, they set them down in a circle. Here's Alex.

Chana Joffe-Walt

In other words, nothing that we could do, nothing you teachers can do, would have stopped that. I heard this from a lot of kids, the feeling that your funky little system is cool when we're in school and all, but don't try and take it and apply it to our world. You're in over your head.

If talking in circles are not the way the world does things, then Lyons is failing to prepare kids for the world they live in. And if they're not preparing kids for the world they live in, they're not doing their job, right? Isn't that their job? Is that their job?

This is the question I keep coming back to, thinking about all these stories. It's the same question Rousseau, at his no-excuses charter school, is asking.

What is the point of punishment in school? Is it to teach self-control? To get kids to be quiet so learning can happen? To prepare children to function as grownups in the world? To teach them how to avoid being arrested? If you want to know, is this working for the kids, you have to know what you're going for, right?

Every year, teachers have 30 or 100 students. A lot of those kids will be disciplined. And getting it wrong, even once, can be haunting. For example, remember Christopher, the kid who ran around the classroom with his teacher's stapler and Post-It notes coming out of his pockets everywhere? I tried to track Christopher down. I thought it might be interesting to hear what he remembered of the stapler, if he remembered his teacher.

And I found him, just last month in a Manhattan courthouse. He was being sentenced to six months at Rikers Island for burglary. Christopher's seventh-grade teacher did not cause that. But when I told Ms. Furr, she got really quiet, ended our call kind of abruptly, and then wrote me this.

"I was so heartbroken to hear the news about Christopher's recent trouble. All the times I talked about behavior with him, I wish I would have talked about how quick that he was at math and how much I liked to hear him read out loud. If you do speak to him, please tell him I'm glad to help in any way possible."

Katie Furr has no idea if those things would have made any difference, and I don't either. And I wasn't able to reach the one person who might have something to say about that, because he has been removed from the community, something he's gone through many times before, starting at least as early as seventh grade.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Our program today was produced by Nancy Updike with help from Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, and Alissa Shipp. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder. Editing help today from Paul Tough, production help from JP Dukes.

Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Research help today from Christopher Swetala and Michelle Harris. Music help from Damien Graef. Special thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joel Lovell, Rebecca Decola, Robert Murphey, Nava EtShalom, Judge Elijah Williams, Jamaal Bowman, Liz Fletcher, Judith Kafka, Ronald Butchart, Kelly King, Kathy Brody, Lamar Shambley, Kathy Cohen, James Settle, Tom Ryder, Matt Lunt, Janet Bass at the American Federation of Teachers, Amanda Pinto at the Achievement First Network, and the entire staff of Lyons Community School.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, every day he spent as general manager of WBEZ included that very special and memorable moment when he would stand in the hallway and yell--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.