Choice Theory (38 page)

The six security assistants for the 700-student school who were busy the first semester had less and less to do, but they made a great contribution by socializing with the students. The students needed socializing with happy people who cared about them more than anything if they were to get the idea that they, too, could be happy without drugs and violence. By the end of summer school, 148 of the 170 students enrolled in the Cambridge Program went on to high school. The predicted number for this group when the school year began was close to zero.

As much as possible, we got rid of the failure that is so disastrous in school, especially when there is little support for school in the home. Even more important, we got rid of it for the staff as well. I don’t want anyone to think that we did more than we did. What we did is show it could be done and at a cost of $22,000
plus some training money left over from the previous year. Carleen’s salary was paid by the district. Since Carleen is a senior instructor in the William Glasser Institute, she was able to do all the training continuously throughout the year. The staff we inherited was capable but demoralized. It was how they were treated that helped them to do what they did. What we practiced was
lead management
based on choice theory. What they were used to was boss management based on external control psychology.

What we began at Schwab has been accomplished at Hunting-ton Woods. At Huntington, they have created a happy school. Their happiness is based on good relationships, on everyone in the school putting each other into their quality worlds: teachers, students, administrators, and parents. This is the key to any successful organization or relationship, such as marriage and the family. When the students at Schwab were asked why they were working and getting along, they always said,
This is a good school; you care about us.
It’s so simple to say, but in our coercive world, so hard to do.

When we got to Schwab, the school was almost nonfunctional. Few of the students were in order, and even fewer were learning. The halls between classes were filled with yelling, screaming, pushing students. Every forty-three minutes when the bell rang, it looked like a scene from a rock concert where no one could find a seat. All the teachers could think about was discipline, and the main procedures were segregation into time-out rooms and suspension. What we did was to show the teachers that discipline is never the problem. The problem is sensible education-no schooling, no failure, a lot of care, a lot of patience, and an opportunity to start over if you are far behind. At the end of the year, a lot more education was still needed, but disorder was no longer a problem. We had made a strong beginning toward changing from a punitive bossing system to a satisfying, choice theory leading system.

For years, schools all over the country have been buying discipline programs that promise to get students in order in a coercive system. Such programs provide fertile ground for problems to occur. I developed one myself in the 1970s, the Ten-Step Discipline Program based on reality therapy, and unfortunately it is still in use. But by the time I began to understand choice theory, I realized that rebellion or resistance to being forced to do what you don’t want to do is the natural, even the sensible, choice. Discipline programs, even those that are
kindly coercive,
do not work on potential Stacys who are the real problem. They work only on the students who have teachers and schoolwork in their quality worlds. But, of course, these students don’t need these programs. They need a little attention, a little patience, and a lot of useful education.

The school administrators believe in these programs because they think the programs would have worked on them when they were students, and it is probably true. These people had, and still have, teachers and schoolwork in their quality worlds and were rarely out of order. It is analogous to the parents who show up at Parent-Teachers Association meetings and school functions. It’s good to have them, but they’re not the ones who need to be there; their children do well in our schools as they are.

Examples of the programs that are now in vogue besides my ten-step program are assertive discipline (pure but mild coercion) and restitution, a program that claims to follow my ideas. But because it focuses on the student, not on changing the system, it is not following the quality school concepts I clearly spelled out in
The Quality School
and
The Quality School Teacher.
Any program that focuses on changing the student instead of the system is not a choice theory program. What we started at Schwab, and what has been put into place at Hunting-ton Woods, is a complete change of the system. In a choice theory system there are disciplinary incidents but rarely problems. Each incident is treated individually; programmatic approaches to discipline will not work. There is no happiness in coercion and punishment.

This small elementary school in Wyoming, Michigan, is completely based on choice theory, and the teachers, students, principal, and parents have each other in their quality worlds. It was started by a dedicated and charismatic principal, Kaye Mentley. Everything described in my two books on quality schools can be seen in operation in this school, as well as the class meetings that are so crucial to the success of any school program, which are explained in my
Schools Without Failure.
But the entire staff has created, and continues to create, far more than I could even imagine when I wrote those books. It is the kind of school that I would want my grandchildren to attend and your children and grandchildren, too. Although I will describe it and urge you to visit it, it should not be copied. It is, as is Schwab, a school to be understood. Once you understand it, you can also create a quality school, but one that you tailor to the needs of your staff, students, and community.

Kaye Mentley read
The Quality School
and immediately had a dream,
I want one.
She was then the principal of a good elementary school in Wyoming and she began to start to realize her dream in that school. But it was difficult; some of the staff wanted to learn choice theory and others did not. As Abraham Lincoln might have said, a school divided against itself will never become a quality school. Even Huntington Woods could not have accomplished all it has unless it started with an undivided staff. To start with a highly divided staff and students who have been threatened and punished for years, as we did at Schwab, makes the job much harder. However, Schwab had one advantage over an easier school: The staff was not complacent; most of the teachers were desperate for change.

With strong parental support for what they have accomplished, Huntington Woods could expand into a middle school and high school if it had the room. Expanding from an elementary school is one way to create secondary quality schools. To do what we did at Schwab with so many turned-off students to begin with
is much harder. The sensible thing to do in Cincinnati would have been to use Schwab as the middle school model and create a K-12 track focusing on what was being done at Schwab. Whatever money any school, whose students come from homes that are not highly supportive of education, spends that continues to use coercion and punishment will either be wasted or, more likely, make things worse.

The superintendent of the Wyoming Schools saw the problem Kaye was facing and believed in Kaye’s ability to lead a school to become a quality school. He had an old, unused elementary building and offered it to her. She could take the teachers she wanted from her present school and hire other teachers who believed in the ideas and were willing to do the training. Now her entire staff has had training, and most have finished the institute’s training program and have been certified in the use of choice theory ideas. It is this kind of dedication that has made Huntington Woods one of the top elementary schools in the nation.

What you see at Huntington Woods is happiness. There is joy on the students’ faces, and the teachers are obviously very happy doing what they are doing. The school is a beehive of activity; children inside and outside the classrooms are busy learning. There is no schooling. Children are learning by themselves or in a variety of group situations. The classes are all double, fifty students and two teachers. Each class is made up of students in one of two age groups. Kindergarten and grades one and two are in the lower grouping; grades three, four, and five are in the upper grouping. By the time the children get ready to move to the upper level, many are already doing upper-level work.

There is no failure; no sense of I’m ahead of you or behind you in school; and no attempt to keep the students apart in the classes by any measure, including age. The teachers share the instruction, and because two are in each double classroom, one can tutor while the other teaches if that seems the thing to do. The children also help each other, and the upper level will send students to the lower level to tutor or help. The competition is more with oneself than with others. There are no bells and no formal recess. The
teachers can take the children outside to play or to learn any time they want to for as long as they want.

The teachers and children eat together in the room, and this is a time for relaxing and socializing. The emphasis is always on getting along with each other and enjoying each other’s company. The teachers are treated as professionals. They decide what goes on in their classroom. The principal’s job is to see that they are able to do it. She is on call anytime a teacher wants her for anything, including taking over all fifty students if that is what’s needed.

All the children are taught choice theory, and by the time they are in the school a year, most of them know it quite well. They know they are in a quality school and why. There are signs all over the school saying, “Whenever we have a problem, we talk it over with the people who are involved and work out a solution with no one threatening or hurting anyone else.” Because problems are worked out, there are no ongoing problems or problem children. All the teachers and the principal are trained to counsel, so while there are occasional disciplinary incidents, they are worked out as soon as they occur. There is no punishment or time out.

There is absolutely no need for a discipline program; taking care of problems individually, not through an inflexible program, is the ongoing practice. But even though all the teachers have been trained to counsel using choice theory, the main reason there are no problems is that the quality school program prevents problems. Schools with the kind of teacher-student relationships that are the norm at Huntington Woods have no difficult problems.

There is no programmatic focus on learning disabilities. The staff recognizes that children learn differently, and the program is adjusted to take care of these normal differences. Some children have been diagnosed as suffering from some sort of learning disability, but so far they have been handled easily by the program. A few of the children are on medication for behavioral or learning problems, but this is at the parents’ request. The school never requests this.

To give you the flavor of this school, here is one of the many letters I get from Kaye Mentley:

Since Kaye is a firm believer in our economic system, visitors have to get on a waiting list and pay $50 for the privilege. She pays for almost all the training with this money, and the more she raises the price, the more people want to come. The students show visitors the whole program; it’s part of their education. Even cleaning the school and replacing the towels and the toilet paper are a part of their education. The students know how much everything in the school costs and how much work is needed to keep the school functioning. They do not waste supplies, time, or money, since they have learned the value of what they are asked to do. They are paid for their work in school money, but they have to use that money to rent their desks and to buy their supplies. There is no free ride at this quality school. In this program, school mirrors life.

In a quality school, to get credit, all students must do competent work—the equivalent of B in a traditional grading system. There are no lower grades than B. This situation again mirrors the real world, in which competence is the minimum requirement to succeed. Besides, even though it is not required, all are encouraged to
do some quality work or the equivalent of what would be A or better in all other schools. This level of competence has been achieved at Huntington Woods. The worst flaw in the punitive schools we have is that they use low grades not only for punishment but to give students credit for incompetent work. In any place work is done, you cannot accept anything less than competence if you want high quality. In a quality school, we call that level TLC, for “total learning competency.” That TLC is also the acronym for “tender loving care” is a lucky coincidence.

The students, however, are urged to improve any of their good work until they and their teachers agree that it is now quality work. One of the ways in which quality work is accomplished is through using tests, but not so much to measure students’ progress as to increase the quality of their work. To understand what I mean, let me suggest a way to increase our knowledge of the rules of the road by improving the written test we take now when we get or renew our driver’s licenses.