In the month since the deadly mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, we’ve learned that the fourteen-year-old suspected shooter reportedly had behavioral issues at school. Likewise, the Parkland shooter, who was 19-years old when he murdered 17 people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, had a history of troubling in-school behavior, as did the Columbine High School shooters in Littleton, Colorado. As FBI Special Agent Shohini Sinha said in a Salt Lake City press briefing, “Active shooters, mass shooters, do not just snap.” The FBI’s Prevent Mass Violence initiative that she pointed to includes “[a]ngry outbursts or physical aggression,” “[u]nusual difficulty coping with stress,” and “[s]eeing violence as a way to solve their problems,” among its list of concerning behaviors that often lead to mass shootings, including school shootings.
Indeed, school shooters often start small, and school shootings are on the most extreme, most deadly, and most publicized end of the broader, less publicized epidemic of violence that has unfortunately overtaken our K-12 education system. In the 2021-2022 school year alone, there were more than 850,000 incidents of violence in American public schools — even if the vast majority of these weren’t deadly, they are part of a culture whose policy choices all too often allow the most violent students, including eventual school shooters, to thrive at the expense of everyone else in the building. That is to say, if we care about preventing school shootings, we need to address the more common and seemingly minor incidents that often lead up to them and that have the same root cause: a government and a culture that tie teachers’ hands from disciplining students who exhibit dangerous behavior.
According to a recent study by Pew Research Center, 68% of teachers report having experienced verbal abuse by students and 40% report having experienced physical violence. Moreover, it’s not just that student behavior is bad — it’s that student behavior has actively gotten worse in the post-COVID era: in 2023, 70% of teachers, administrators, and school staff said that their students were misbehaving more than they did in fall 2019, an uptick from 66% in 2021.
While it’s easy to point fingers at teachers for being unable to control student behavior, teachers are ultimately subject to school administration and government regulations, and, often, are not allowed to control their classrooms as they see fit. Per Pew, two thirds (67%) of teachers say that teachers don’t have enough input with respect to student discipline. The hard truth is that there are cultural and policy shifts which teachers alone can’t be held responsible for, especially as progressive ideologues in the highest levels of government claim that the very concept of school discipline is “racist.”
Consider the consequences of the Obama Administration’s push for restorative justice. Rather than investigating specific reports of civil rights violations, the federal Department of Education changed its guidance in 2014 to automatically assume that there was discrimination if statistics showed that some races were disciplined more frequently than others. Schools were instructed to use conversation-based, no-punishment approaches, rather than traditional disciplinary methods like detention, suspension, and expulsion that restorative justice advocates claim discriminate against students of color.
The result? It became legally impossible for teachers across the country to remove disruptive students from classrooms — including the Parkland high school shooter, whom the school directed to the district’s restorative justice department rather than to law enforcement. A study from the RAND Corporation of Pittsburgh Public Schools indicates a similar trend. When the district implemented restorative justice policies, the number of suspensions went down but the number of student arrests didn’t; meanwhile, students reported that their peers were less respectful and supportive, and math achievement declined for middle school students, black students, and schools with predominantly black student populations. In other words, when teachers can’t remove disruptive students from their classrooms (most often via suspension, detention, or expulsion) those disruptive students drag down their peers with them.
But our problem extends past our government. Far too often, our society makes excuses for school-age children when they act out — for instance, gentle parenting ideology, which is all the rage these days, tells parents to prioritize their child’s feelings over correcting their child’s behavior. With many children today never hearing the word “no” at home, their teachers may very well be the first people in their life who have ever denied them something that they want. Somewhat understandably, these children proceed to act out in school more than they would have in a culture that prioritized holding them to basic standards of respect and good manners outside of school as well as within it. Indeed, undisciplined children become more and more entitled, especially in group settings like classrooms where their every desire can’t possibly be catered to.
In today’s culture, adults often believe that by validating children’s feelings and never correcting bad behavior, they are protecting children. But, as the dire state of our schools goes to show, they are, if anything, accomplishing the exact opposite of their intent and making American schools less safe. Change starts by recognizing the benefits of discipline and empowering teachers for the good of all of their students.