
When Military School Offers the Right Kind of Discipline for At-Risk Students - curtis
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/the-right-kind-of-school-discipline/415506/?single_page=true
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wtbob
I think it's pretty clear that what a military-style school can bring to the
table is a stand-in for paternal care to children without fathers, or with bad
fathers. Traditional schooling doesn't really instil confidence or pride, in
my experience; it's much more about not rocking the boat, or rocking the boat
in the way that the administrators would prefer (which, of course…isn't
rocking the boat).

As mapt elsethread indicates, these things can go wrong, just as the
traditional, maternal school system goes wrong (zero tolerance? students
disrespecting teachers‽).

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cma
Key quote:

>And ultimately, for all the success indicated in the MDRC study, the same
study shows that three years after completing the program, there are few
significant differences between graduates and their peers in the control group
on measures of crime, delinquency, health, or lifestyle outcomes.

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NPMaxwell
This article begins with the premise that programs that treat disruptive
children with kindness aren't working. His evidence is an article from the LA
Times: [http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-school-
discipli...](http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-school-
discipline-20151108-story.html)

Key text in the LA Times articles includes this:

"some teachers are dubious, in part because high staff turnover has stymied
efforts. A highly regarded restorative justice counselor was let go in January
because foundation funding ran out, and 10 of the 11 teachers on the school's
restorative justice task force last year have left the campus... Schools with
enough staff and training, however, report success."

Well yeah. You often get results that roughly match how well you run your
program.

Maybe a more important issue is in plain sight: "An ideal span of control in
an organization, according to modern organizational experts is approximately
15 to 20 subordinates per supervisor or manager. However, some experts with a
more traditional focus believe that 5-6 subordinates per supervisor or manager
is ideal." ([http://www.yourerc.com/blog/post/Span-of-Control-How-Many-
Em...](http://www.yourerc.com/blog/post/Span-of-Control-How-Many-Employees-
Should-Your-Supervisors-Manage.aspx))

A teacher typically manages 25 and up.

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mapt
There is a long history of horrific shit going down in these sorts of
environments.

"At-risk students" who volunteer to be there and are cherrypicked from the top
of a list of applicants are... not exactly the best statistical environment in
which to judge success or failure of the teaching method. Even if such an
approach were genuinely successful, the downsides to a slightly higher
graduation rate may be considerable.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens](https://www.reddit.com/r/troubledteens)

[http://astartforteens.org/](http://astartforteens.org/)

[http://wwaspsurvivors.com/](http://wwaspsurvivors.com/)

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2198956/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2198956/)

My experience in the industry is limited to a six week summer camp. I went
through a program wherein we were provided insufficient food & water and
subjected to forced march in the wilderness, with constant entreaties to
conform to their weird cultlike conflict resolution framework. To get us to
behave they frequently threatened us with forced admission to their sister
camp, which was marketed as an alternative to juvie, and ran on a level system
(a more carceral aspect up to and including stress positions). I became
suicidal after about two days on this regime; I 'gave up' and sat down on the
trail half a dozen times, but eventually gave in to their insistence was that
this was self-defeating and threaten my campmates because I would merely be
prolonging the time to the next resupply, and that no authority figure would
do anything but try to help them. I lost 40 pounds of bodyweight in 21 days,
developed open pressure sores & lost the ability to walk without pain for a
while. I staged a breakdown in front of the nurse when we got back to
basecamp, to try and get my parents on the phone (I failed). They put me in a
subprogram for kids three or four years my junior for the second session. The
abuse there was tame, limited to escalating penalties when we did something
judged disruptive, like make a disappointed face, until we gave in and
apologized in the proper form. Two children that year ran away, despite
threats to have the neighbor turn his dogs loose on them; One ended up back
with her parents, one in the prison camp. Another (a naive and very Mormon
little 10-year-old) was taken to a North Carolina state police station where
the counselors got an officer to threaten him verbally with 24hrs of lockup,
because his crying was getting out of hand.

I count myself lucky that I didn't face anything harsher, but never in my
wildest dreams would I test some child by admission to this largely
unregulated the-beatings-will-stop-when-morale-improves BS. Many of them
_brag_ about adopting coercive tactics invented by cults to keep people in the
program, get them to conform, and 'get your child under control'. Some of
these involve things a prison warden would not be permitted to do. Mine seems
to have been marketted in parallel as a disciplinary aid (one camp-mate was
there on court order) and as a "treatment" for things from ADHD (my ticket) to
autism. The deaths that sometimes occur pale in comparison to the amount of
PTSD that comes out of these places.

~~~
zokier
I'm wondering who did run the camp you experienced? I would like to believe
that actual public military organization run camps or schools (such as the one
hilighted in the article which is run by National Guard) would not be such
horrorshows as private organizations might be.

