Choice Theory (36 page)

Waiving the requirement that they gain the knowledge that they have not acquired will give them hope. Once they have caught up on their skills, then we can worry about requiring knowledge. We
have to do what it takes to prevent them from becoming Stacys. No matter how badly they do in school, we can reverse this process if they attend. In most cases, we have several years to reach them, but to do so, we have to change the system.

What we also need to do that is now within our reach is to create model quality elementary schools all over the country. To expand quality education to middle schools is much harder but possible if the students come from quality elementary schools. I think quality high schools are out of our reach until the communities the high schools are in move toward becoming quality communities (I discuss quality communities in chapter 12,). In the end, it may turn out to be easier to move an entire community to choice theory, the basis of a quality community, than to move only a high school.

Quality schools would be schools staffed by teachers and principals who practice lead management and teach choice theory to both students and their families. Already more than two hundred schools have banded together to try to do this in the Quality School Consortium. What is stopping other interested schools is the lack of administrative and community support and the few dollars needed for training. The cost of keeping one Stacy in prison for three years would more than pay for the total training of fifty teachers.

Cooperative leadership from both district superintendents and the teachers’ union is needed to get things started. There is plenty of room for skeptics and naysayers in the thousands of schools that will not consider this approach; there is no room for any of them in quality schools. Just as all administrators and teachers need certificates to teach and manage, every member of a quality school staff should have additional training that would lead to a specialist’s certificate in quality school education.

Our experience so far has been that unless schools are staffed by teachers and principals who hold these certificates, we will never have more than a few quality schools. The William Glasser Institute does the training that is needed and awards these certificates. It is prepared to cooperate with schools of education that
want to educate prospective teachers in this specialty. (Further information on how training is done is presented in the appendix.)

We are pushing for drug-free schools. We need to push even harder for coercion-free and failure-free quality schools because it is the alienation caused by coercion and punishment that leads young people to turn seriously to drugs. At the Huntington Woods Elementary School in Wyoming, Michigan, the principal and teachers have all been fully trained in the ideas of this book and my other books. What we have learned from that training has now become the substance of the Quality School Specialist Program offered by the institute.

Public school teachers who read these paragraphs will recognize immediately that they have some or many wannabe Stacys in their classes. When parents are educated and involved with what their children are doing in their school, it could be that many of the potential Stacys are incorrectly labeled learning disabled.

This label strongly implies that the students have something wrong with their brains that makes it difficult for them to learn. But what makes it difficult for so many of them is not abnormal brains but excessive schooling. Our brains are not set up to memorize information we do not use, and we are certainly not given brains that can even remotely compete with a calculator. What many of these students do is take schooling and with it, a lot of essential schoolwork, such as reading and writing, out of their quality worlds. When they do so, there is no way anyone, through any sort of testing, can tell whether they have chosen not to put what they are told to learn into their quality worlds or their brains are incapable of learning what they are told to learn.

These Stacys often have parents who accepted schooling, did well in school, and see nothing wrong with their children being forced to memorize and calculate. They are puzzled by their children’s poor performance and tend to go along with any diagnosis
that explains that what’s wrong with their children is no one’s fault; the children have abnormal brains. The current diagnosis that parents and teachers tend to accept is attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). In terms of what the students actually do, it doesn’t make any difference whether they
won’t
learn or
can’t
learn. They choose the same behaviors: They don’t attend, become hyperactive, or display what is called emotional disturbance.

They may even claim they want to learn and are often puzzled themselves when they seem unable to. A child who knows nothing about his quality world can’t tell the difference between not having something like reading in his quality world and having something wrong with his brain that makes it difficult for him to learn to read. All he knows is that he is having trouble learning to read. The way to tell if it is a brain dysfunction or if he has taken reading out of his quality world is to observe him closely. This close observation cannot be done by a pediatrician; he or she does not have the time. It must be done cooperatively by the school and the parents, who then report what has been observed to the pediatrician. Diagnosing and labeling a child as learning disabled or handicapped because of an inadequate brain is a serious diagnosis. It can affect the child’s future, so it should be accurate. Here is what to look for.

1. Does the child who is labeled ADD or ADHD watch television and understand what he or she is watching? Does the child play games like Nintendo that require close attention? Is the child able to use a computer?

2. Does the child do better for some teachers than for others?

3. Does the child do better in one subject that requires reading and listening than in another subject that requires the same level of reading and listening?

Does the child have good friends, who are attentive in school, with whom he or she enjoys playing and who enjoy playing with him or her?

If the answer to
all
the points of the first question is no, the child probably has a learning disability and should be evaluated by a competent pediatrician, and some of the current brain drugs like Ritalin should be considered. If the answers to questions 2 and 3 are no, again you should suspect a learning disability. If the answer to either one is yes, it is unlikely that the child is learning disabled. The brain does not turn off in special situations; the problem is that the teacher or the subject is not in the child’s quality world. If the child has good friends who are attentive in school whom he or she enjoys, question 4, I would not suspect a learning disability. If the child has no good friends, then I would suspect that he or she is lonely and too concerned about making friends to pay attention in school. Before that child is diagnosed and labeled as having a learning disability and given medication for it, a serious attempt should be made to help him or her learn social skills and make friends.

It may also be that the child who is not doing well in school is not getting along well enough with someone at home and may be so concerned about this relationship that he or she is not willing to try to concentrate in school. Before a label is put on any child, the parents should pay close attention to the choice theory child rearing I explained earlier. If too much is expected of young children at home and enforced with punishment or rejection, they may rebel by choosing to do little in school or to disrupt. How the child rebels is not predictable. What to watch for is a child who is very good at home but nonattentive or disruptive in school. This child especially needs help with relationships, and the parents may need some counseling, too.

A mentally healthy child is ordinarily sometimes difficult at home but good both in school and away from home. The child behaves this way because he or she feels loved and secure enough to push the limits at home but sees no reason to do so away from home where people will not accept this behavior. But keep in mind that a child who does not accept a school filled with punishment and
schooling
does not necessarily have an inadequate brain or poor relationships at home. It may be that he or she is more
sensitive and more discriminating than other children and even more secure. When my grandson was in the fifth grade, he told his mother that he had done his last calculation in school. He would not disrupt; he would draw while his classmates calculated. His mother told the teacher she would not interfere. My grandson scored high on tests with story problems, so his teacher did not press the point.

In Huntington Woods, the few potential Stacys who enroll are taught in the regular program and are not recommended for medication. They quickly become learners, and some have become outstanding students. Obviously, the problem was not with their brains; it was that schoolwork was not in their quality worlds before. What helps most of the students who are diagnosed as learning disabled in coercive schools is that with this label, many of them are put into special classes where they are not coerced or punished and usually not
schooled.
This environment accounts for a lot of the success that trained special education teachers have had with them.

It is interesting that close to half the population who marries—including teachers—have divorced. Of those who have not, many are unhappily married. The reason for this personal unhappiness is the same as the reason for the Stacys: external control psychology.
^*
For example, when you ask a Stacy why he or she does not like school, the answer is:
The teachers. They don’t care for me, they don’t listen to me, they try to make me do things I don’t want to do, they have no interest in what I want, and it’s no fun.

When you ask an unhappily married woman,
Tell me what’s wrong with your marriage,
she almost always says:
My husband. He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t listen to me, he tries to make me do things I don’t want to do, he has little interest in what I want to do, and it’s no fun.
When teachers learn enough choice theory to put it to work with the people they want to be close to in their
own lives and see how successful it is, they will be much more inclined to try it in their classrooms than they are now. And they will be much happier in both places when they do.

The Schwab Middle School, a 700-student seventh- and eighth-grade school in the Cincinnati public school system, was a troubled school when my wife, Carleen, and I arrived in the fall of 1994. Carleen worked full time the whole year, and I consulted and spent about seventy days that year in the school. Ninety percent of the students were African American, and many had failed one or more grades. External control was firmly in place. For example, 1,500 students had been suspended for ten days the year before we came-15,000 school days of suspension. The school was like a sinking ship with the crew and the passengers fighting over the few lifeboats that were operational. But we soon discovered that the staff was highly skilled. They had been fighting a losing battle with the fear-driven system that is central office policy in Cincinnati, as it is in most school districts, for so long that they had almost given up hope.

To be fair, the central office was pressured by the school board, and the board operated in fear of the newspaper and the community. What we were dealing with in Schwab was a good staff rendered close to nonfunctional by the threat-and-fear hierarchy that was and is alive and well in Cincinnati. It took us from September to January to convince the teachers that these students were not dedicated Stacys. They were wannabe Stacys who would change their minds if they were treated differently in a better system.

I asked to be invited into the classrooms, and I received a lot of invitations as soon as the teachers found out that I wanted only to help and support, not to criticize, and that I was willing to work with the students. I would go to a classroom for the period before the teacher had a student-free preparation period so we could talk afterward about what went on. I went to the classroom of a
young teacher who had no preparation in his own education or in his teacher training for what he had to contend with at Schwab.

There were about twenty students in attendance. When the bell rang, the teacher locked the door—students were locked in or locked out, depending on how you look at it. It was a math class. The teacher gave a ten-minute lesson on how to solve a story problem that asked students to use a map to find the shortest way from home to school. This was a sensible problem, and the teacher taught a good lesson. The only difficulty, and it was a major difficulty at Schwab, was that I was the only one in the class who was listening. The students were talking at their seats or walking around. About four had their heads down on their tables with their hoods pulled up over their heads. They were inert; they may have been sleeping.

The teacher had put four problems on the board. He finished the lesson and told the students to work on the problems. Not one student even looked at the problems; they all just continued socializing or sleeping. They did this all quietly; there was no noise or fighting. This was actually a good class. Some were much worse, and many with more skilled, experienced teachers were much better. But even in the good classes, although students did work, they retained little of what they learned because a lot of what they were asked to learn was
schooling.
The students could see no way that they could use what they were being asked to memorize in their lives. Since nothing was retained, each day was a new day. I, too, had no preparation for what to do, but I thought that since the teacher viewed me as an expert, he expected me to do something, so I thought I’d better start.