Imagine teaching a room full of students, wading through the tedious details of algebra, when a student starts throwing his pencils at his classmates. However, even as the teacher, you cannot do anything to confront or stop this disruption.
Worse, imagine the disruption is more dangerous than hurling pencils, such as a student assaulting a classmate or attempting to attack you.
Now imagine being a student in the classroom, trying to focus through this incident. Or consider being the parent of the disruptive student, left uninformed about your child’s behavior.
This is the reality of many American public school classrooms.
But one bill in Wisconsin aims to reform classrooms in the state. Assembly Bill 614—the Teachers’ Bill of Rights—would protect teachers’ authority to maintain an orderly classroom and teach discipline.
“If you look at the surveys, school and student discipline is the single biggest concern to teachers right now,” said Daniel Buck, who has testified in support of AB 614. He is a former assistant principal and classroom teacher in Wisconsin, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network.
“In surveys—and what teachers are telling me—is that… the job isn’t worth doing anymore because they’re spending their time trying to talk over students,” he added.
These problems do not emerge in a vacuum. Their origin can be traced to popular, yet unproven, progressive educational methodology that devalued discipline and structured instruction. Instead of recognizing that children need strong guidance as they learn to navigate the world, progressive education proponents posited that children were born inherently pure and good. This created a hyperfocus on children’s emotions, born out in movements like social-emotional learning and gentle parenting.
Meanwhile, critical race theory has brought racial quotas and restorative justice into the classroom, resulting in policies that explicitly prevent teachers and administrators from disciplining students to avoid the perception of racial bias.
Both students and teachers have been caught in an ideological web that has forbidden traditional and proven practices. The result? Rather than forming students into well adjusted, educated adults, schools are focused on affirming students’ whims and behaviors—however absurd or dangerous.
Under current Wisconsin law, for example, teachers can send a disruptive student to the school’s principal, but the principal makes the ultimate decision on whether the student should remain in his or her class. Far too often, students are quickly sent back to class without consequences, and parents are not informed of their child’s behavior.
This leaves teachers saddled with unruly students and no recourse to maintain an orderly classroom. And parents, meanwhile, are left in the dark about their own child’s behavior and classroom environment.
These scenarios aren’t just hypothetical—they are a sample of far too many real world stories.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which helped draft the Teachers’ Bill of Rights, frequently hears from teachers who feel unsupported in classroom management, according to WILL Education Counsel Cory Brewer.
“We’ve been contacted enough [by teachers] to know this is a very real problem in the state of Wisconsin and across the country,” she told IW Features.
However, many teachers are afraid of speaking out, she added.
Parents have also contacted WILL with concerns about the unruly classroom environment their children are forced to navigate, she said.
Across the nation, teachers’ stories show the same pattern.
“I was told to decrease the number of detentions that were issued for a certain race that showed up late, because culturally it’s acceptable for them, and that just boggled my brain,” Michelle Mangiapane, a former public educator in Michigan, previously told IW Features.
Beth Eom and Beanie Geoghegan, both former public educators, likewise explained to IW Features that the gentle parenting philosophy and educational bureaucracy created an environment where they felt they could no longer be teachers.
“I was in the math classroom with the regular teacher with some students, and the one student got up—very small little girl, fifth grader—[and] punched the teacher in the stomach,” Geoghegan said. “She was down in the office maybe for 10 minutes. She literally returned with a bag of chips 10 minutes later to the classroom.”
It is situations like that that the Wisconsin Teachers’ Bill of Rights aims to fix. The bill would ensure that teachers cannot face termination or retaliation for:
- Maintaining order in the classroom.
- Establishing and enforcing classroom rules.
- Calling 911 in an emergency.
- Taking immediate action if a pupil’s behavior is dangerous or disruptive.
- Requesting immediate assistance from school administrators during a disruptive or violent incident.
Additionally, AB 614 would require schools to notify parents if their child is involved in a “disruptive incident.”
Certainly, discipline can go too far, and there are good arguments for reforming the modern classroom setting, which is too restrictive for many students. But there’s also a parallel conversation about the value of students learning how to engage in an ordered society. The two points can—and should—exist together, just as liberty and order ought to be balanced in society at large.
Whether or not Wisconsin can find this balance in the classroom remains to be seen, but the Teachers’ Bill of Rights could be a step toward orderly classrooms. And if teachers can foster safe classrooms, then perhaps students can once again focus on learning.
For Wisconsin teachers, students, and parents alike, that would be a relief.
