As a new school year approaches, teachers, school administrators, and students are continuing to grapple with an exponential rise in verbal harassment, classroom disruptions, and physical aggression since the broad return of in-person education after the school closures imposed in 2020-2021 amid the COVID pandemic. Experts say that policies that dispensed with punishments for classroom misbehavior in the name of “restorative justice” and racial “equity” are largely to blame for the rise in lawlessness in schools.
In a newly published report from former teacher and education policy expert Daniel Buck, he argues that “lawlessness in American schools post-pandemic is perhaps the most consequential story in education that receives little to no coverage.” In March, Buck reached out to almost 200 teachers across the country to ask them about their experiences with school discipline. He was inundated with descriptions of constant fights “with little consequence,” “persistent anxiety” as schools “teetered on the precipice of chaos,” and teachers being “cussed out, threatened, and disrespected every single day.”
One woman described the environment in her school building as a “spiraling, out-of-control situation” in which ...
