The Right or Privilege of Instructional Time

If you're a teacher you know this no-win scenario all too well. If you're a parent, it's what you can't image a school would allow to be inflicted upon students in their care, specifically your child. It is the latest policy of a district in a death spiral. No student should be denied instructional time. 

The theory is that no student should be denied access to instruction. Therefore disruptive students can not be sent out of classrooms. This of course includes student's with physical disabilities. Students with cognitive disabilities have a right to mainstream classrooms too. Now, the kicker, students with behavior issues, no matter how severe, have a right to access all instructional time. The result of these policies is that all children, no matter what their issues may be are placed into a room together.

The reality is that some students learn best in different environments and some students flat out refuse to learn. Student's with disabilities are now being thrown into larger classrooms even if that means that they receive less actual access to the curriculum in a mainstream classroom. All in the name of "least restrictive environment". When least restrictive makes learning least effective, it's just another dumb idea that no one has the guts to say, "Hey, boss, I don't think that's going to work." The real problems start when entire classrooms are held captive to the clowns, the terrorists and the thieves that populate classrooms and teachers are left without recourse to defend their teaching time or the students they sincerely want to teach. My fellow teachers and I were actually told that we can not send a student out of the class unless, according the the California Education Code, it is a suspendable offense! The reality is no one leaves the room unless they are going to be suspended!

Do students who are obstinate have a right to learn when they feel like it and act however they want to without repercussions? I don't think they have a right to make other students  endure their clowning, terrorizing and stealing behavior. If a student refuses to learn and chooses to talk and play around teachers and teachers are left without any real recourse and the result is that the rest of the students suffer the real loss of instructional time. These students are a cancer and in my view thieves who are taught to disregard others and rewarded for their selfish behavior by not being punished quickly and with brutal severity. Their parents should be punished too. But, I find that the blockhead doesn't usually fall far from the cliff, so trying to deal with them and their child is like beating your head between two brick walls. 

An education is not a right, it is a privilege and as soon as you call it a right you start down the slippery slow of valuing the rights of an individual over the rights not of the group but every other individual. That of course is lunacy. Trying to teach in a classroom where the right of a child to act out as they please is more valued than the right to learn without being harassed is stupid beyond belief. Yet, it is happening in classrooms everyday.