There’s a certain restlessness and melancholy that comes over schools and classrooms in the spring, as plans begin to be made for the following year and staff and students alike prepare for separation.  In our province, spring means the unveiling of the provincial budget, that in recent years has not been kind to education funding.  Our school division subsequently scrambles to do as much as it can with less, but invariably there is stress about losing programs, losing staff, losing resources.

I considered this as I attended Nonviolent Crisis Intervention training a couple of weeks ago.  As we worked through the different sections of the course, we spoke of ways that students feel stressed, and how they sometimes exhibit that stress, whether through depression and retreat, or acting out verbally or physically.  I couldn’t help but think of all the stressful situations we put our students into multiple times a day, every day.  The stressful situations, whether crowded classrooms, or the lack of professionals such as speech language therapists and occupational therapists, or over-worked and stressed out teachers who are struggling with self-regulation themselves, are amplified with every budget cutback.

On the flip-side of crisis intervention are the many forms of positive behaviour reinforcements.  More and more there’s the expectation that students be given something for what was once a basic expectation of appropriate behaviour (doesn’t that make me sound like a grumbling old person!!).  I generally side with Alfie Kohn on this issue – extrinsic rewards bring fleeting cooperation, but do not sustain long-term citizenship qualities.  As Leanna Carollo points out in this post:

But are students truly becoming independent when they depend on external rewards for motivation? Extrinsic motivation is not just problematic for students with learning disabilities, it is problematic for everyone. A meta-analysis conducted by researchers led by Edward Deci of the University of Rochester indicates that external rewards often lead to poorer performance on activities and cognitive tasks. Participants focus more on the reward than the task itself. In other words, external rewards can hinder the potential for people to become internally invested in learning. For my students with autism, this translates to undermining their ability to become independent.

Are the positive behaviour systems just the flip side of the same coin:  are they our way of controlling stressed out kids in an easier and cheaper manner than actually alleviating the stress, or treating the stress?  And I wonder, when resources and services and people have been stripped away, is this all we have left?  Instead of giving students the help they need, the safe, happy, calm environments they crave, is all that’s left that we manage them with rewards, and failing that, restraints?  There’s a feel that sometimes we are only warehousing children, rather than providing them the safe environments in which they can grow and learn.

We know how to best help students who are feeling stress, but instead of putting real resources toward fixing the problem, we use quick fixes and coping methods.  Every spring, a little more is taken away from our system, and we feel the strain in our students.  I fear that someday we will be judged very harshly for this era in education, and I am distraught at the thought.