Entrepreneur and real estate investor Grant Cardone has built his public persona around challenging conventional thinking on wealth creation. His assertion that “Warren Buffett made 99% of his wealth after age 50… Any excuse that you have about it being ‘too late’ is a garbage lie you tell yourself” reflects both his aggressive motivational style and a broader truth about financial success. The message underscores the idea that opportunity does not expire with age and that discipline and persistence can yield transformative results well beyond early career stages.
By citing Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) (BRK.A) boss Warren Buffett — widely regarded as one of the most successful investors of all time — Cardone points to an example that transcends individual philosophy. Buffett’s fortune, largely accumulated through decades of compounding returns, demonstrates how consistent effort, patience, and long-term investing strategies can produce outsized results later in life. Cardone leverages this reality to confront the myth that wealth-building must be achieved early or not at all, dismissing the notion of “too late” as self-defeating.
Cardone’s own career trajectory helps explain why this sentiment resonates in his work. After facing financial struggles in his 20s, he turned to sales and real estate, steadily building what is now a multi-billion-dollar property portfolio through Cardone Capital. His rise wasn’t marked by overnight wealth, but by persistence, scaling efforts, and reinvestment over time.
This makes Cardone’s endorsement of later-in-life success, like Buffett’s, consistent with his lived experience. He has consistently emphasized that individuals can reset their path regardless of background or age, provided they are willing to embrace discipline and sustained effort.
Cardone has become an authoritative figure in the world of personal finance education not by following traditional Wall Street models, but by building credibility through results. His influence is particularly strong among audiences seeking direct, motivational guidance outside of conventional financial institutions.
Given that, the authority of his comment here pulls from two sources: Buffett’s established legacy of long-term wealth building, and Cardone’s own track record of advocating persistence as the foundation of financial growth. While his style often leans toward the provocative, the core message reflects widely acknowledged principles of investing and entrepreneurship.
The philosophy that “it’s never too late” holds relevance across economic cycles. In markets, opportunities emerge continually — whether through new industries, disruptive technologies, or shifts in consumer behavior. Just as Buffett capitalized on compounding returns over decades, modern investors and entrepreneurs can find long-term success by identifying trends early and maintaining discipline through volatility.
Moreover, Cardone’s rejection of excuses echoes a universal investment truth: delaying action due to fear or self-doubt often proves more costly than market risk itself. Whether in real estate, equities, or emerging sectors such as digital assets, the principle of persistence applies. Markets reward consistency, and the effects of compounding reward time spent actively engaged rather than time lost to hesitation.
In aligning Buffett’s enduring wealth creation with his own philosophy, Cardone’s statement reinforces a timeless reality: financial success is not bound by age, but by discipline, mindset, and commitment to the long game.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
Predicting the future is often compared to reading tea leaves. In the case of forecasting what education policies Kamala Harris might pursue as president, though, a more apt analogy might be reading her mind. Frankly it’s anyone’s guess what her education policies would be given how few clues we have.
It wasn’t always this way. Previously, presidential candidates laid out detailed plans for schools. George H. W. Bush wanted to be the education president. Bill Clinton wanted to use stronger schools to build a bridge to the 21st century. George W. Bush wanted to leave no child behind, and move the Republican party in a more compassionate direction. Barack Obama wanted Democrats to break with teacher unions by embracing merit pay.
But in more recent cycles, education has dropped from the list of voters’ top-tier issues, and candidates have become increasingly cagey about their plans.
Donald Trump’s administration was known for its advocacy of school choice, but that wasn’t something he talked much about on the campaign trail in 2015 or 2016; it only came into focus with his selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.
And Joe Biden’s unwillingness to challenge progressive orthodoxy on education would have been hard to predict, given his moderate persona in 2019 and 2020. What turned out to be the best guide to his education policies was his self-identity as the “most union-friendly president in history” — plus the membership of his wife, community college professor Jill Biden, in the National Education Association.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
So here we are with another election in which education issues are barely registering, trying to predict what Harris might do if elected. She has said even less than Trump or Biden, partly because of the truncated nature of her campaign, and partly because of her strategy of leaning into positive vibes and declining to offer policy specifics in the hope that doing so will better her chances of prevailing in November. Official statements — a Harris campaign policy document and the Democratic Party Platform — are thin on details.
Making things even harder is Harris’ well-known willingness to run away from previous positions. She did that in 2019 when the Black Lives Matter movement made it awkward for her to embrace her record in law enforcement — including her tough stance on prosecuting parents of truant children.
Expect a new era of isolation, separatism and a “politics of humiliation” in education
That’s why looking at Harris’ statements from the campaign trail five years ago or her record as a U.S. senator only goes so far.
What we do know is this: She’s sitting vice president. She has positioned herself in the middle of the Democratic Party, not wanting to break with progressives on the left or business-friendly centrists in the middle.
And while her image is not blue-collar like Biden’s, she’s been careful not to put any sunlight between herself and the unions, including teachers unions. One of her first speeches as the presumptive Democratic nominee was to the American Federation of Teachers.
For these reasons, it is likely that a Harris administration would bring significant continuity with Biden’s policies, including on schools.
Picture her appointing a former teacher as secretary of education, proposing healthy increases in school spending and speaking out against privatization, book bans and the like. Call it the Hippocratic Oath approach to Democratic policymaking on education: First, do no harm.
Can those of us involved in K-12 education hope for bolder strokes from a President Harris — including some that might move the needle on reform? Anything is possible.
The most significant play we might anticipate, though, could be on teacher pay. Boosting teacher salaries by $13,500 per year (to close the gap with other professionals) was the centerpiece of her education agenda when she ran for president in 2019.
She has a ready vehicle to pursue it thanks to the looming expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which makes new legislation around tax reform a must-pass item for Congress next year. The most straightforward way for the federal government to put more money into teachers’ pockets isn’t through a complicated grant program to states and districts, but via tax credits that would flow directly to educators.
A major teacher tax credit could quickly get expensive, however, given the size of America’s teaching force (3 to 4 million depending on how you count it). At, say, $10,000 per teacher, that’s $30 to $40 billion a year — in the neighborhood of what we spend on Title I and IDEA combined.
A smarter, more affordable approach would be to target only teachers serving in high-need schools — as the student loan forgiveness programs already do. Studies from Dallas and elsewhere acknowledge that great teachers will move to high-poverty schools — but only if offered significantly higher pay, in the neighborhood of $10,000 more per year.
We also know that when we pay teachers the same regardless of where they teach — the policy of almost every school district in the country — the neediest schools end up with the least-experienced teachers.
A tax credit for teachers in Title 1 schools — which get government funding for having high numbers or high percentages of students from low-income families — could transform the profession overnight, significantly closing the teacher quality gap, school funding gap and, eventually, the achievement gap, too.
Given Democrats’ interest in boosting the “care economy,” perhaps such a tax credit could flow to instructors in high-poverty childcare and pre-K centers, as well. This would fit well with Harris’ promise to move America toward an “opportunity economy,” including by boosting the pay of childcare and preschool teachers.
Still, a big effort on “differential pay” for teachers might be just one wonk’s wish-casting. We’ve had two presidential administrations in a row with little action on K-12 education. It’s quite likely that a Harris administration would be a third.
But here’s hoping for a pleasant surprise after November.
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served in the George W. Bush administration.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
One deputy was convicted of driving drunk with a loaded gun in the car. Another was suspended for failing to promptly report an on-duty traffic accident. An experienced detective was accused of lying on his job application. And a commander was demoted to captain for turning a blind eye to a cheating scandal in a popular law enforcement relay race.
For five months, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office has fought to keep secret the names of eight Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at the center of the case against Diana Teran, a top district attorney’s office advisor accused of misusing confidential personnel records as part of an effort to track cops with disciplinary histories. She is now facing six felony charges under what legal experts say is a “novel” use of the state’s hacking statute.
Courtroom testimony during a preliminary hearing last month showed that the allegedly confidential records in question were actually court records. But state prosecutors still fought to hide the deputies’ names and the details of their past behavior by redacting identifying portions of key documents in the case.
After comparing gaps in the government’s redactions to hundreds of public civil suits, appeals and publicly posted disciplinary records, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Public Press identified seven of the deputies and tracked down court and public law enforcement records that shed light on the allegations against them and their efforts to overturn their punishments. In five of the seven cases the disciplinary actions were reduced or overturned.
“This just shows how Attorney General Rob Bonta has wasted the time of several Los Angeles judges by asking them to keep these court records secret,” said Susan Seager, the UC Irvine law professor who has been fighting on behalf of the LA Public Press for the release of the deputies’ names since May. “Anyone can go to the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse today and find all the deputy lawsuits challenging their discipline and post them online. What happens in our public courts belongs to the public.”
Bonta’s office has argued that releasing the deputies’ names would be a violation of state laws that keep police personnel records secret, as members of the public would then be able to connect the deputies’ names to their past conduct and discipline.
A review of the deputies’ legal filings shows that at least half of the identified officers were disciplined for incidents involving an allegation of dishonesty. The punishments included everything from terminations to demotions to suspensions.
None of the deputies agreed to speak on the record, though one said he had never been officially informed about the case. James Spertus, the attorney representing Teran, said the news organizations’ efforts called into question the state’s theory of the case.
“The fact the court orders at issue in Ms. Teran’s case were located independently by the LA Times and the LA Public Press establishes the arguments that we have been trying to make since the case was first filed,” he said Monday. “She does not need ‘permission’ to ‘use’ public court orders.”
The California Department of Justice did not immediately offer comment.
In a statement, Steve Johnson, the president of the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Association, vehemently disagreed with release of personnel information which he described as “stolen,” even though they were court records, and said that it would endanger deputies, families and peace officers who serve the community.
*****
The allegations at the center of the case against Teran date to 2018, when she worked as a constitutional policing advisor for then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell. Her usual duties included accessing confidential deputy records and internal affairs investigations.
A few years after leaving the Sheriff’s Department, Teran joined the district attorney’s office. While there, in April 2021, she sent 33 names and a few dozen related court records to a subordinate to evaluate for possible inclusion in either of two internal databases prosecutors use to track officers with histories of dishonesty and other misconduct.
One is known as the Brady database — a reference to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady vs. Maryland, which says prosecutors are required to turn over any evidence favorable to a defendant, including evidence of police misconduct.
According to a 2021 Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office manual, material relating to dishonesty, assaults, racial bias and acts of moral turpitude can all be relevant Brady material. Under office policy, prosecutors are required to turn over any material that could call into question the officer’s credibility — even if they believe that information might be false.
The state Department of Justice alleged several of the names Teran sent to her subordinate to consider including in D.A. databases were those of deputies whose files she had accessed while working at the Sheriff’s Department years earlier.
However, testimony during the preliminary hearing last month showed she did not download the information from the LASD personnel file system. In most cases she learned of the alleged misconduct when co-workers emailed her copies of court records from lawsuits filed by deputies hoping to overturn the department’s discipline against them.
But after searching news articles and public records requests, state investigators said they found that 11 of the names hadn’t been mentioned in public records or major media outlets. Thus, prosecutors said Teran wouldn’t have been able to identify the deputies, or know to look for their court records, were it not for her special access while working at the Sheriff’s Department.
At first, prosecutors charged Teran with 11 felonies under state hacking statutes — but they refused to release the names of the deputies or details of their misconduct, making it difficult for reporters or members of the public to fully understand the allegations at the center of the case.
After the Los Angeles Public Press fought in court for more information, in June the state released two of the names. Both deputies — whose records were easily discoverable through a Google search — had been fired for incidents involving dishonesty or false statements.
Without explanation, prosecutors later dropped the two counts against Teran involving those deputies, as well as a third count. According to what Spertus previously told The Times, the alleged victim described in the third count — identified as Deputy Doe 11 in court records — was a civilian employee and not a deputy.
Last month, L.A. Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta tossed out two more of the counts against Teran following a four-day preliminary hearing at which he determined there was enough evidence to move forward to trial on the six remaining counts.
At the same time, in response to motions filed by lawyers for The Times and LA Public Press, Ohta ordered the release of unredacted exhibits that would identify most of the deputies. But he held the release of that information for three weeks to give the state time to file for appellate relief — which it did, arguing in a petition that the deputies’ “disciplinary matters here do not implicate any Brady obligations and/or were determined to be unfounded by the superior court in the litigation of those matters.”
The court of appeals denied the request.
But the redacted documents already made public contain distinctive notes and markings, as well as identifying dates and apparent redaction oversights, which make it possible to match them to public court records containing the deputies’ names.
On one exhibit, state prosecutors left public the department identification numbers corresponding to Deputy Does 7, 8 and 9. On another, they left public a connected civil case number. In at least four cases, handwritten margin notes and signatures made it possible to match redacted exhibits to the public versions of the same documents already in L.A. Superior Court records.
Of the seven deputies identified through those methods, at least two had legal appeals easily discoverable through a Google search. One had been demoted as part of an incident covered in 2013 both by The Times and by the news blogWitness LA.
Then-commander Patrick Jordan was knocked down to captain after a cheating scandal at the 2012 Baker to Vegas Challenge Cup Relay race, a 120-mile foot race that draws teams of law enforcement officers from around the world.
A team representing the Sheriff’s Department swapped out a deputy for an ineligible runner who was not a department employee. Though court records indicate Jordan didn’t learn about the switch until the morning after the race, he was later demoted because he failed to report it. He appealed unsuccessfully to the Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission, which upheld his discipline.
In 2016, a judge denied Jordan’s final attempt to reverse the disciplinary action. One of the documents in his civil case matches an exhibit in the Teran case, including a handwritten mark in the margin and a description of the discipline imposed. His employee identification number matches the one listed in another exhibit. Jordan could not be reached for comment Monday.
Another case involved a deputy working in Court Services. In 2009, Gerald Jackson used force on an incarcerated person who allegedly assaulted him and a fellow deputy, according to records from the lawsuit Jackson filed to overturn his discipline.
A civil lawsuit filed by the incarcerated person — which was ultimately dismissed — alleged that Jackson struck the jailed man’s eye repeatedly with a container, and beat and pepper sprayed him after a verbal altercation.
Jackson was investigated and eventually discharged in 2012, but court records show a judge reversed the decision two years later, when Jackson argued that the Sheriff’s Department had missed the deadline to impose discipline on him. A review of his court records showed that one document matches an exhibit in the Teran case, including a reference to the case number of another deputy who was involved in the same incident.
Most of the cases involved deputies who entered their own disciplinary histories into court records when they filed suit. But in one case Sheriff’s Department officials brought the matter into the public record when they sued to challenge a decision by the Civil Service Commission to reduce a deputy’s discipline from discharge to a 15-day suspension.
Andrew Serrata, a former police officer from the defunct Maywood Police Department, was hired by the Sheriff’s Department in 2011 and later fired when the department realized that Serrata had incorrectly answered questions on his application related to his legal history, liabilities and debt.
Serrata had successfully been sued by an ex-girlfriend, had his wages garnished for several months, and still owed money — all of which he failed to disclose properly on his job application, according to a 2013 letter the department sent notifying him of its disciplinary decision.
Serrata — whose employee number matched one listed as a Deputy Doe in the Teran case — later appealed his discharge to the Civil Service Commission. The Sheriff’s Department pushed back, vigorously petitioning the court to overturn that decision and writing that Serrata’s claims were “simply, inherently unbelievable, and inexplicable for one filling out a form which warns that dismissal would result from misstatements.”
Ultimately, a judge sided with Serrata and the commission, and he kept his job until he retired in 2021. When reached by phone Monday, he declined to comment for this story.
The other deputies reporters identified faced discipline for allegations ranging from criminal convictions to crashes, according to records from the civil lawsuits they filed to challenge their punishments.
David Carbajal damaged his patrol vehicle and failed to promptly notify his supervisor about the damage or fill out the required forms to report the situation, resulting in a 10-day suspension.
Rachel Levy got into an altercation with a driver and used profanity after already being relieved of duty stemming from a separate incident. She was fired but ultimately successfully appealed her discipline to a 30-day suspension.
Salvatore Guerrero was discharged after a complaint stemming from a call for service in which a woman accused him of inappropriate behavior, including returning to the residence while off-duty. A judge ultimately ruled that the evidence did not support the allegations.
Jordan Kennedy pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court to driving drunk with a loaded duty weapon in his car. He was notified of the planned punishment — a 20-day suspension — while he was deployed overseas with the military. When he returned, he said he’d never been properly notified of the disciplinary decision, and a judge eventually ordered the department to overturn it.
They could not be reached for comment, or did not respond.
Jonathan Abel, an expert on Brady material and associate professor at UC Law San Francisco, reviewed court records from the seven deputies’ cases reporters identified.
“There is nothing untoward about investigating these types of things,” he said, explaining that although dishonesty is the “core” of Brady material, past convictions could be a sign of “moral turpitude.” And sometimes uses of force can be relevant, as in cases in which a defendant accused of assaulting an officer aims to show the officer had a pattern of using excessive force.
“To build that [Brady] list, you would have to sink a few dry wells,” he continued, explaining the need to evaluate material that might ultimately be irrelevant. “How can you know whether something’s Brady or not until you’ve read the documents?”
A family member of one Deputy Doe — who asked to remain anonymous to avoid negatively affecting the deputy’s current job — said she’d been following the Teran case, even before the Sheriff’s Department reached out to alert the deputy to it several weeks after the matter became public. By that point, state prosecutors had already released two of the deputies’ names.
“It almost feels like they keep getting punished over and over,” she said.
Most guys have personal growth backward – and you might have focused on the wrong thing all this time, too.
We’ve all been unhappy with where we are in life, business, or our relationships.
And in a good, old-fashioned manly manner, we try to fix the problem.
This usually means:
Work harder
Talk to your partner
Try a new, exciting hobby
These are a great start, but they have one problem in common.
They’re external fixes.
“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” – Dalai Lama
We do what we’ve learned – work harder, get better at flirting, buy a new car…
And it helps – for a short while.
Sooner or later, you fall back into the same old patterns like a rigged Roulette wheel. I know because I’ve experienced it many times.
I got a new partner but fought the same fights. I started a new business but faced the same problems. I bought new stuff but felt the same emptiness.
Why does this happen – and how do we stop the cycle and finally grow to a new level?
This Is Why You’re Stuck On The Same Level
If you experience the same issues repeatedly, it has one simple reason.
You’re still the same person.
Now, I know what you might think.
“I’m not the same person as ten years ago! I’ve changed! I’m much older, more experienced, my life is completely different.”
Yes, I agree with you. Your life is different – on the outside, just like mine was.
I sold everything and traveled the world for three years. I quit a prestigious graduate program to start blogging online. I changed my surroundings like Kim Kardashian lip fillers.
Yet, I still carried the same beliefs, emotions, and perspectives – and this created the same life experience.
Endless hustle. Toxic relationships. Never feeling enough.
Until I finally did what I should’ve done long ago.
I looked on the inside.
What Really Determines What You Get From Life
Most people have personal growth backward.
They work their butt off to create the life they want – but their core beliefs always pull them back.
They follow strategy after strategy, set up fancy systems, and follow the super secret relationship hacks.
There’s nothing wrong with it, but you have to understand that the external world conforms to your internal world, not the other way around.
In simple terms:
What you believe, you create and experience.
Your brain is a goal-achieving machine. The universe responds to the energy you send out. If you combine both, it makes it easy to see that:
If you believe you aren’t worthy of true, unconditional love, you’ll attract people who confirm this belief.
If you believe you have to grind your butt off and can’t take time off, you’ll create endless hustle.
If you believe you need more to be happy and aren’t worthy with what you have right now, nothing will ever be enough.
And if you believe the opposite, you will create the opposite.
I have seen it in my clients and myself countless times.
The person you are creates the life you experience – on every level.
“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” – James Allen
The external is just a mirror of the internal. The optimist and the pessimist will look at the same event and see two completely different things. Glass half full. Glass half empty. Glass with Vodka (if you’re Russian.)
This means that if you want true, lasting, fundamental, through-the-roof personal growth, there’s only one thing to do.
Change your identity.
This 3-Step Process Will Help You Jump To The Next Level
Changing your identity is insanely powerful because it takes care of everything else.
You won’t have to micromanage your social interactions if you are charismatic and socially confident.
A great, healthy relationship will naturally happen if you heal old wounds and become the most amazing version of yourself.
You will experience financial abundance if you focus on what you have and what you can do and stop focusing on a lack of resources.
This isn’t some woo-woo hippie stuff.
It’s simple cause and effect. Look at all the successful athletes, the big visionaries who changed the world, and the everyday people who made their dreams happen.
They believed in their desired reality on the inside before they experienced it on the outside.
They became a version of themselves who already had what they wanted so it’s only natural that what they wanted followed.
And you can do the same – here’s how to shift your identity quickly:
Let go of your limiting beliefs
Repeated thoughts become beliefs.
When these beliefs tie you to your current reality, they limit you.
“Making money is hard”
“All women are irrational, emotional, etc.”
“I have to work my butt off to get XYZ”
Like a ship that sets sail for the next harbor, you have to loosen the lines and hoist the anchor that keeps you stuck in your current reality.
Use these questions as starting points:
“What do I believe about the thing I want and myself regarding it?” (e.g. I’m not good at making money, I always attract these kinds of people, I can’t this and that…”)
Where does this belief come from and is it necessarily true?
It helps you set the route to the harbor of your new identity.
But to steer your ship, you need to look at your emotions – they’re like the rudder adjusting your course.
Feelings are the bridge between body and mind.
If you feel stressed, it creates more anxious thoughts and causes your body to tense up, making you more likely to act out of scarcity and fear.
If you feel relaxed, you create happy thoughts and make your body feel bliss, making it more likely to act out of abundance and inspiration.
So, ask yourself:
How would I feel if I had already achieved the thing I want?
Envision this experience. Close your eyes and step into that version of yourself. Feel it.
What you feel, you become.
Take aligned action
Actions drive results.
But most people fall victim to the classic “when… then” fallacy.
“When my wife acts right, I’ll be more understanding and calm.”
“When I have more money, I’ll tip better and worry less about cash.”
“When I see results at the gym, I’ll double down on it and eat healthy, too.”
That’s like saying “When we get our ship to the next harbor, we’ll set sail and start rowing.”
Instead, act like the version of yourself who already has what you want.
How would you deal with money if you were wealthy already? How would you spend, invest, save, and earn?
How would you show up in your relationship if you were the most amazing, understanding, loving, and supportive husband and had an equally amazing wife already?
How would you go through your life if you were already happy, free of worry, and at peace?
You don’t need to blow your retirement savings on a Ferrari. Your millionaire self wouldn’t break his bank with an out-of-budget mansion, either.
It’s about the energy and motivation your actions come from – e.g. “I buy the healthy, expensive food because it’s an investment in myself.”
This is how you align yourself with your new reality, in everything you do.
Internal change creates external results.
Wrap-Up to Help You 10X Your Personal Growth
You’re probably familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s quote:
“If you want what you never had, you have to do what you’ve never done.”
Today, you have the chance to understand it on a much deeper level.
It’s not just about doing new things.
It’s about leaving your old patterns behind because they created your current reality.
Instead, start thinking, feeling, and acting like the person who already has what you want.
This will boost your personal growth and massively improve your results for three reasons.
1.You will no longer repeat the same patterns that got you into your current situation.
2.You will walk your own path, one that is focused on creating the reality you want.
3.What you believe, you create and experience. Your beliefs shape your reality.
Decimation (from Latin decimatio ‘removal of a tenth) was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.
Knowing is one thing, doing it is a different beast altogether.
We all slack off sometimes and kick the can down the road. And even though sustainable change and discipline are important, sometimes you just need a low-voltage taser in the butt.
Here are my best unconventional ways to find motivation when you need it.
“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” – Derek Sivers
Shift Your Focus In A Way You’ve Never Done Before
We often approach tasks in a way that’s inherently demotivating.
Why?
Because we focus on costs rather than benefits.
Look at your calendar, your to-do list, and all the things you need to do that you’ve stored in your mind.
They’re called “do this, do that, check this, check that.”
No wonder you don’t want to “do a tax return.” You immediately think of all the forms you have to fill out, receipts you need to collect, and the dance battle with bureaucracy and your accountant.
What if you’d call it “get back tons of money?”
What if instead of “go to the gym” you said “get shredded and have a six-pack?”
What if you called “mowing the lawn and cleaning the house” “living in my personal paradise?”
Ask yourself how you can reframe your dreaded to-dos.
Focus on the benefits. You’ll still have to do the work, of course. But you’ll be a lot more motivated to make it happen.
How To Hack The Lazy Part Of Your Brain
Humans are inherently lazy.
Evolution hardwired us to conserve energy. It’s one of the reasons why we prefer instant rewards over future ones – we don’t have to waste time and energy waiting. Psychologists call this effect temporal discounting.
Unfortunately, this means we often don’t do things that would pay off nicely in the future.
Eating healthier, building a side hustle, regular reading… the list goes on. We know they’re the right thing to do, but we have no immediate payoff.
Over the last few weeks, I struggled to take walks during lunchtime and hit the gym in the afternoon.
I was stacked with a big project and any effort on top of it felt like being stuck in tar up to my hips.
What helped me was to connect immediate rewards with these things.
For my lunch break, I listened to some music while walking and allowed myself 20 minutes of video games once I came back.
For the gym, I took some sweets with me as a post-workout nutrition.
Both helped me step into gear a lot.
Make a list of all the small rewards you can give yourself – then connect them with the things that pay off in the long run.
The Simple Mindset Shift You Have To Make
Almost everyone has a massive misconception when it comes to reaching their goals.
What matters isn’t how much you want it – but what you’re willing to do for it.
When I got ready for my bodybuilding competition, I often didn’t feel like working out. I watched videos of donuts while eating dry chicken and rice. Many times, I cursed because it was so damn hard.
However, throughout every meal, every workout, and every gag-inducing protein shake, I remembered one thing:
“This is part of the job.”
When you face something unpleasant, you often subconsciously wish for things to be different.
That means you argue with reality.
Instead, eliminate these thoughts from your mind and accept reality as it is right now.
Once you accept that, you can motivate yourself to do it.
You can thrive in the fact that you’re doing what’s required and who you will become through it. You no longer waste your energy on doubting, complaining, and wishing.
You just do the job.
“Suffering is not objective. It depends largely on the way you perceive. There are things that cause you to suffer but do not cause others to suffer. There are things that bring you joy but do not bring others joy.” ― Hanh Nhat Thich
Do A Switcheroo With Reverse Psychology
I’m a rebel at heart.
When I was a kid, I never wanted to do what others told me. In a way, we’re all like that. If someone shows up demanding you do something, your first reaction is likely to introduce their left cheek to the back of your right hand (reverse if you’re left-handed.)
Psychologists call this trait reactance – it’s our human tendency to rebel against orders.
The most straightforward way to exploit this would be to tell yourself “You’re not allowed to go to the gym.”
Unfortunately, your brain isn’t stupid and will see through the bluff.
Instead, I’ve tried something else – I only allow myself a certain time to do something.
20 minutes for answering my emails. 60 minutes for cleaning the house. 90 minutes at the gym.
This does three things:
First, you’ll want to see whether you can make it within the time limit.
Second, it reduces the commitment because you won’t be stuck with the task any longer than you want to.
Third, it creates scarcity, which makes it more valuable.
See which of these effects triggers you most and use it.
The Ultimate Motivation (Not For The Faint-Hearted)
This will make you uncomfortable, but it’s almost guaranteed to work every time.
Again, we’re going to use psychology here – something called the endowment effect. People place a higher value on something they already own rather than the same object without owning it.
In an experiment, participants wanted more money to sell a cup they owned than they were willing to pay for that same cup in the first place.
Here’s how you can use that.
First, grab yourself a really good friend and tell them what you want to do.
Then, give them an amount of money that would sting if you lost it.
Last, tell them to not give it back to you until you’ve completed the thing.
Technically, it’s still your money, which means you value it even higher than face value due to the endowment effect. It hurts more to lose money you have than it is rewarding to earn money you don’t.
That’s why it’s so powerful and James Clear, author of the New York Times bestseller Atomic Habits, recommends this approach for adding extra motivation to your actions.
Commit and you’ll be motivated to make it happen.
Summary To Help You Find Motivation For What You Dread Doing
Everything you do is a battle between motivation and resistance.
If something’s unpleasant to do, you’ve got a lot of resistance – so you need high motivation to make it happen.
These five approaches will help you tap into it:
Focus on benefits instead of costs.
Give yourself small rewards until the big ones come in.
View it as “part of the job” instead of something you can avoid.
Use reverse psychology and limit how much time you can spend on it.
Pay a friend money and only get it back after you’ve done the thing.
Motivation isn’t the end-all of your problems – but it’s a damn good place to start.
The no-nonsense truth you need to understand to achieve your dreams.
Deep down, we all want life to be easy.
I’m no exception.
Thank god, there are shortcuts: Get-rich-quick schemes, miracle diets, and dating hacks.
You can guess by my choice of words – they aren’t what they seem to be.
“This is something I learned the hard way. You spend so much energy trying to find a shortcut to success only to realize that success requires hard work. And without it, you will never get there. The sooner you realize it, the faster you’ll reach your goals.” – Angel investor Paul Kroger
Evolution hardwired us to conserve energy – why make it complicated when it can be simple?
But once you’ve taken enough shortcuts, you realize they’re actually detours.
It’s like buying a cheap counterfeit knockoff that breaks after one month of use: failed investments, yoyo effects from crash diets, attracting the wrong partner. You’ve wasted time, money, and energy and are just where you started.
That’s why there is only one shortcut that truly works.
The Harsh Truth About Success And Growth Most People Don’t Want To Admit
One day changed my life more than any other.
No, it wasn’t a psychedelic trip, or going on a 14-month solo backpacking trip to Australia.
It was when I first stepped foot into a gym.
For twelve years and counting, I’ve lifted weights, sweated buckets, and eaten protein. Through this time, the iron temple has taught me more about life than anything else – mostly discipline, consistency, and dedication.
When friends ask me for advice based on how I improved my appearance and increased strength, I always give them the same answer:
“Train hard, eat healthy, sleep well. Repeat for five years.”
They look at me like I’m insane. They expect some sort of secret trick, a miracle exercise that makes their muscles blow up like popcorn in a microwave. They think there’s an easy way, but…
It’s supposed to be hard.
Itwas the biggest lesson I learned in over a decade in the gym – growth comes through hardship.
This doesn’t mean you should purposely grind yourself to the bone or make things extra hard just for the sake of it.
But stop looking for easy ways out, when you could just be doing the work.
Doing the work is the shortcut.
How To Fall In Love With What Matters
Deep down, 99% of people know this already.
Yet, miracle diet pills still sell like hotcakes, get-rich-quick schemes are actually making some swindler rich, and magic workout solutions are a billion dollar industry.
Why?
Because we don’t like to feel uncomfortable.
I’ve faced tons of hardships over the last few years with my business, going to therapy, and traveling full-time.
You can’t avoid the hard work – but you can fall in love with it.
Here’s how:
Doing the work is the reward
Most people act based on results
Work hard so you get money. Support your partner so they’re happy. Exercise so you get a six-pack.
The problem is this leads you to duality thinking. Do something you don’t like to get something you like. Subconsciously, if the reward is good, you’ll view the work as bad.
But what would happen if you turned the work into the reward? What if you felt the gratitude and beauty in the hardship? What if you focused on the pride and self-esteem you get from putting in the effort?
Hard would turn into something good.
Face the pain. Be grateful for your challenges. Dedicate yourself to the creation.
“The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination.” – African Proverb
Think in 100s
I first heard this idea from prodigy entrepreneur Alex Hormozi.
He built a business valued at over $100 million, goes viral on social media every day, is super jacked, and has the rare combination of being off-the-charts smart and super humble at the same time.
Instead of thinking about how many hours he needs to put in or how many times he needs to do something, he uses a 100X multiplier:
“How many 100s of hours do I need to spend on this? How many 100s of tries do I need to become good? How many 100s of times do I need to do this until I’ve accomplished my goal?”
This thinking instantly shifts your mind to longer time horizons and more commitment.
It pulls you away from expecting results quickly and giving up when you don’t have them.
Instead, you’re in it for the long run.
100s of workouts until you get jacked. 100s of hours until you master a skill. 100s of iterations until you get it right.
It’s harder, but it will get you 100 times the results.
Consistency over Intensity
Cheetahs are the fastest mammals, with top speeds of 75 miles per hour.
However, they can only hold that speed for about 30 seconds, which equals a distance of .62 miles covered.
At the same time, the African Buffalo covers large distances every day by slowly trotting across the lands between grazing sessions. However, it has to walk all the time – and sometimes gets eaten.
If you can combine both, you’ll have the best of both worlds.
Don’t burn or bore yourself out by doing too much all at once or too little forever.
Go hard at it, rest, repeat.
Remember This And You Will Go Far
Shortcuts are seductive.
They lure you in through grand promises with little effort. But a dead investment is still dead, even if it’s small.
If achieving big goals was easy, everybody would do it – but most people don’t have tons of money, a magazine-cover body, or a textbook healthy relationship.
The truth is most good things in life are hard to get.
View the work as the reward. Think in 100s. Put in intensity consistently.
The only shortcut is doing the work.
The only way to speed it up is patience.
The only easy way is the hard way.
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” – Jerzy Gregorek
LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.
Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat.
Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”
Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.
This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”
In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.
A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.
A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.
As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.
Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.
A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.
That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”
In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance.
A “restorative rounds” poster on the wall of Brooklyn Avenue School in East L.A. creates a protocol with steps and “sentence-starters” that teachers and students can use to process conflict, reconnect and be heard. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.
The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.
All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.
That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.
At William Tell Aggeler High School, Robert Hill, the school’s dean, calmly shadows an angry, upset student, prepared to help restore calm rather than impose a punishment. His response is part of LAUSD’s transition to a more positive, relational form of discipline meant to keep students from losing educational minutes. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.
The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.
Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.
And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices works with schools to develop and implement behavioral expectations. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.
Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”
That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”
Critics warned that eliminating suspensions for “willful defiance” would render schools more chaotic and less effective, but Maywood Academy High School is calmer than it used to be, according to teachers and principal Maricella Garcia. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”
In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”
Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.
“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.
District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.
Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”
When restorative justice coordinator Marcus Van approached a student who was out of class without permission, he led with curiosity rather than threatening suspension. Maywood is a calmer school more than a decade after LAUSD shifted to restorative practices and positive behavior interventions and supports, teachers and administrators say. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”
Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”
Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”
Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”
Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices falls under the “joy and wellness” pillar of the district’s strategic plan. Information pushed out by the PBIS/RP office aims to help students and staff connect in a positive, forward-looking manner. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”
The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.
Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.
In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.
“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”
This story about PBIS was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for theHechinger newsletter.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.
Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip.
Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice.
But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school.
“OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said.
The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance.
Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.
For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont.
Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.
Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.
Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.
Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.”
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher.
“She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”
Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.”
In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.
Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue.
The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension.
At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”
In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way.
“Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.”
The connections are often much clearer to parents.
A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.)
Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room.
Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled.
Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions.
The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers.
Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities.
A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.
Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”
Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”
Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”
Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly.
Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says.
But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island.
Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct.
Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.
Cranston Public School officials would regularly call Michelle Gomes and tell her to come get her daughter for misbehaving in class, she said. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report
Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.
“Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”
Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.
“She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said.
Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.
Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said.
This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.
“Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavandra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org. “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.”
On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises.
Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available.
In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.
But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mindblowing to me, not one of you can do that.”
Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
JOHNSBURG, Ill. — A group of fifth grade boys trailed into the conference room in the front office of Johnsburg Elementary School and sat at the table, their feet dangling from the chairs.
“It was brought to my attention yesterday that there was an incident at football,” Principal Bridget Belcastro said to the group.
The students tried to explain: One boy pushed a kid, another jumped on the ball, and yet another jumped on the boy on the ball. It depended on who you asked.
“I tripped — if I did jump on him, I didn’t mean to,” one student said. “Then I got up and turned around and these two were going at each other.”
Belcastro, listening closely, had the unenviable job of making sense of the accounts and deciding on consequences.
In elementary schools across the country, an incident as common as a playground fracas over a football could result in kids being suspended.
A Hechinger analysis of school discipline data from 20 states found widespread use of suspensions for students of all ages for ill-defined, subjective categories of misbehavior, such as disorderly conduct, defiance and insubordination. From 2017 to 2022, state reports cited these categories as a reason for suspension or expulsion more than 2.8 million times.
Signage throughout Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois encourages students to regulate their emotions. The school primarily uses social emotional learning interventions instead of exclusionary discipline. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In many cases, young students were removed from their classes for behavior that is common for kids their age, according to additional discipline records from half a dozen school districts obtained through public records requests.
In Montana, students in K-5 made up almost 4,000 suspensions for disorderly conduct. In New Mexico, it was nearly 2,700.
Elementary school students are often punished for conduct that experts say is developmentally typical of children who are still learning how to behave and appropriately express themselves in school. Even severe behaviors, like kicking or punching peers and teachers, can be a function of young children still figuring out how to regulate their emotions.
In many other cases, the behavior does not appear serious. In Washington, a kindergarten student was suspended from school for two days for pulling his pants down at recess. A second grader in Rhode Island was suspended when he got mad and ran out of the school building. In Maryland, a third grader was suspended because she yelled when she wasn’t allowed to have cookies, disrupting class.
At Johnsburg Elementary School, which serves about 350 third through fifth grade students on the northern outskirts of Chicago’s suburbs, administrators are trying to limit the use of suspensions. Student conferences, like the one after the fight during football, are just one piece of a much larger effort aimed at preventing and addressing misbehavior. In the end, the boys didn’t lose time in the classroom, but they were no longer allowed to play football at recess.
Belcastro’s decision not to suspend the boys was based on research that consistently shows suspending students makes it more difficult for them to succeed academically and more likely they will enter the criminal justice system as adults.
Suspension can be particularly damaging when doled out to younger students, said Iheoma Iruka, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Being kicked out of the classroom can fracture kids’ trust in their teachers and the institution early on. Those early impressions can stay with students and cause long-lasting harm, Iruka said, particularly to students for whom school is the most consistent part of their lives.
“Over time, it erodes children’s sense of safety. It erodes their relationship with teachers,” said Iruka, who is also the founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition at UNC, a group that researches and develops policies to address bias in the classroom.
Classroom posters and signs emphasize how students should behave at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In part because of concerns like these, advocates and policymakers across the country often focus on the early grades when pushing for discipline reform. At least 17 states and D.C. have passed laws to limit the use of suspension and expulsion for younger children, typically students in pre-K through third or fifth grade. In Illinois, where Johnsburg Elementary School is located, schools are allowed to suspend young students, but legislators passed a law in 2015 that encourages using suspension as a last resort.
Child development experts say that, ideally, suspensions should be used only in extremely rare circumstances, especially in elementary school.
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
Misbehavior at any age is often a symptom of deeper issues, experts say, but young children, especially, struggle to identify those issues and communicate them effectively. Students in the early grades are also still trying to figure out how to function in a school environment.
“We can hold older students accountable to know the rules of behavior in their schools,” said Maurice Elias, a professor of psychology who researches social emotional learning at Rutgers University. “We certainly can’t expect younger children to know all of those things and to anticipate the consequences of all their actions.”
And young students need to be specifically taught how to manage their emotions, added Sara Rimm-Kaufman, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.
“Helping kids understand what’s OK at home might not be OK at school, or making kids feel appreciated, respected, understood — that’s a really important issue and it keeps kids engaged,” she said.
Teachers at Johnsburg Elementary are trying to do just that.
The school adopted a new program this year called Character Strong, which is aimed at helping students with coping, emotional regulation, self-management and relationships. A few weeks into the school year, teachers filled out a screener to identify students struggling in those areas.
A booklet is flipped to a cartoon creature depicting “frustration,” the emotion of the day in school social worker Dawn Mendralla’s office at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
On a Thursday morning in November, four third graders left class to meet with social worker Dawn Mendralla. Twinkling lights lined the ceiling of her office; a small flip book depicting various emotions was opened to a page with a purple creature gritting its teeth and holding up its fists in frustration. A poster on the cabinet said: All feelings are welcome here.
“Regulation means we’re controlling ourselves, we’re controlling our behaviors, we’re controlling our emotions,” Mendralla said to the students. “Do we have trouble sometimes controlling our behaviors in class? Sometimes we have the urge to talk to our neighbor, or we have the urge to look out the window, or to not pay attention or to fidget with something?”
Once a week, the identified students attend a group session with Mendralla focused on improving those skills. Children who need more help also briefly check in with Mendralla, individually, every day. Students who misbehave, like the group of boys who got into a fight at recess, are also sent to Belcastro’s office.
Like other schools throughout the country, Johnsburg Elementary has been dealing with the ongoing impact of the pandemic on children’s behavior.
“There’s an increase in emotional outbursts, frustration, and they don’t know how to manage their emotions effectively,” Belcastro said. “Secondly, would be social interaction changes, because they weren’t around other kids and other people for so long, they didn’t have that and now they’ve forgotten how or never learned how to make friends.”
During the 2022-23 school year, Johnsburg Elementary had 687 referrals, or disciplinary write-ups, involving a student misbehaving, up from 222 referrals in 2021-22 and 276 referrals in 2018-19.
Even with the rise in behavior challenges, the school has tried to limit student suspensions; Through February of this school year, only three students had been given an in-school suspension and one had been sent home.
Elsewhere, though, the post-pandemic rise in misbehavior has caused some states to backtrack on policies limiting exclusionary discipline and instead made it easier for schools to kick students out of class.
In Nevada last year, legislators lowered the age at which students can be suspended or expelled from 11 to 6 and made it easier for schools to suspend or expel students.
In 2023, Kentucky lawmakers gave principals the ability to permanently kick students out of school if they believe the student will “chronically disrupt the education process for other students” and if they have been removed from class three times for being disruptive.
“There’s just been more and more discipline problems across the nation, and definitely across the state. We’ve just gotta get things under control,” said Rep. Steve Rawlings, who was among the legislation’s sponsors. “We have to prioritize the safety of teachers in the classroom and fellow students so that the focus can be on academics and not be distracted by issues of discipline.”
Elias and other experts say suspension should act more as a rare safety measure in extreme cases, rather than a disciplinary measure.
A fourth grade student cuts out a paper turkey he colored in class at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Students at the school are almost never sent home from school for misbehavior. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In the discipline records The Hechinger Report obtained, some school districts reported suspending young children under disruptive conduct for punching peers or throwing items at teachers.
In such cases, suspension may make sense, experts say, while allowing educators time to develop a longer-term response to the misconduct. But schools should not expect that removing kids from class will magically improve their behavior.
“When a child comes back into a classroom after a situation like this, it’s often that there’s just going to be a continuation of what was happening before, unless the child is brought back into the community in a way that changes the direction and nature of the relationships between the child and the people around them,” Rimm-Kaufman said
That’s something Belcastro has argued as well. Occasionally, there are tensions with parents who want to see other students punished when their own child has been harmed in some way. Belcastro doesn’t’t think that’s an effective approach.
“Punishments do not change behavior. No kid at this age level considers what the potential consequences might be before they do an action,” Belcastro recalled telling one parent who was upset about a student at the school. “So it really serves no purpose, it’s not helpful. But instead, working to prevent the behavior is what we need to do, so it doesn’t’t happen again.”
In Mendralla’s room, a small group of fourth grade boys showed up for a group session one day in November. The goal of this weekly session is for students to learn how to better regulate their emotions.
“What happens when we keep things all to ourselves, things build up, and we keep things bottled up inside us?” Mendralla asked.
“Then you explode,” a student said. “With emotions.”
Mendralla asked the students to think of rules they would like to have for these group sessions. A couple of students threw out suggestions: no running around the room, no interrupting, no blaming others, nobody is better than anybody else.
Another fourth grader raised his hand.
“If there’s another person making fun of another person because of the way they look and act, don’t join in,” he said. “We don’t know what they’re going through.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Improve your life, not just your performance on the job.
You are not your work.
You know that, but like lots of men, you don’t treat yourself that way. You spend your best waking hours at the job, come home exhausted, and have no energy and time left to work on yourself.
I don’t judge this – it’s what society encourages and normalizes.
But if you’re honest with yourself, you know that if you spent just a fraction of your time and energy on being productive after work:
You’d look in the mirror again and be proud of how fit you are
You could achieve the dreams you’ve had for so long
You could be a better dad and husband
But when you come home, you’re just too tired and don’t have enough time. All you want to do is relax after a long, hard day.
“Don’t be so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – Dolly Parton
The truth is, the situation won’t change by itself. You’ll have to figure out other ways to make time for your self-improvement.
Here are five of them.
Use This Powerful Physics Principle To Your Advantage
Physics can teach you a lot about life.
For example, the energy needed to get an object in motion is much higher than the one needed to keep it in motion.
This is true for life as well – overcoming initial friction often takes a big push.
Getting up from the sofa to go to the gym
Turning off the TV and picking up a book
Dropping your ego and learning something you aren’t good at yet
In our minds, there’s a massive mountain to move. We often feel like if we don’t do a lot of something, it isn’t worth it.
You can reduce this initial friction by committing to just five minutes.
Even though I’ve been working out regularly for over a decade, I still have days where I don’t want to go to the gym. When that happens, I commit to only one exercise. I allow myself to leave after if I want to.
By the time I’ve completed it, I’m already warmed up, hyped, and in the flow of lifting weights. Paradoxically, it becomes harder to stop than it is to keep going – this is another physics principle known as Newton’s First Law:
“An object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by an external force.”
All you need is the initial push. Make the perceived challenge small enough so you can get started easily. Then, you just have to keep rolling.
Five minutes is all it takes.
Don’t Lose Your Momentum
Laziness is a luxury.
There’s the adage “If you want something done, ask a busy person.” It’s true. During times in my life when I didn’t have much to do, the simplest tasks could overwhelm me.
I just wasn’t in the mode of doing anything.
However, when I worked full-time, did a side project, and went to the gym six days a week, time seemed to magically appear out of thin air. Looking back at it now, I realize it was because I didn’t make time for being lazy.
Instead of heading home after work, I went straight to the gym. Instead of plopping down on the couch after, I warmed up my meal prep. Instead of leaving the dishes in the sink, I cleaned them up straight away.
This doesn’t mean you should stuff your schedule to the brim and burn yourself out.
Just don’t lose the momentum – do things while you’re still in “doing mode” from work. It seems harder, but makes it easier.
Once you’re done with working on yourself, you can fully enjoy your relaxation.
Turn It Into A Shoulder-By-Shoulder Activity
Ever heard of shoulder-by-shoulder activities?
It’s when you’re doing something by yourself, but with each other – like going for a hike with your buddy or hitting the gym with a training partner.
Psychologist Paul Wright observed men tend to be more comfortable with these shoulder-by-shoulder activities than women.
I’ve noticed it myself – doing things with others adds a level of accountability, commitment, and enjoyment. If you have a slow day, your partner can get you up to speed – and vice versa.
So instead of tackling everything as a solo mission, get someone to do it with you.
Read with your partner on the couch
Watch self-improvement courses with a friend
Do house or yard work with your kids
Often, the other person doesn’t even have to do much.
I’m perfectly happy with my partner sitting next to me reading a book while I’m working. Them just being there can be enough motivation, accountability, and support to get me going.
Walking the path can be tough, especially when you’re exhausted – so get someone to walk with you.
Use These Approaches To Deal With All The Small Tasks
I love the German language because of all the quotes and sayings.
One of my favorites?
“Small animals also shit.” (There’s a reason we call ourselves the country of poets and thinkers – this sentence isn’t it.)
The English equivalent would be “many a little makes a mickle.”
Small things are often overlooked because they’re, well, small. But if you collect enough of them, they pile up and become a tough mountain to climb. Before you know it, you have a to-do list that’s longer than Santa Claus’s beard after a long night of drinking with the elves.
The good news?
If you approach these tasks properly, you’ll plow through them in no time and feel great for accomplishing so much.
Here are my favorite techniques:
Batch processing Group similar tasks together – for example, anything that’s exercise-related, e.g. finding a gym, creating a meal plan, and watching a video on proper form. It’s much easier to do them all because you’re already in the right mode.
Two-minute-rule If you can do something in under two minutes, do it right away. This gives you a quick win instead of wasting mental bandwidth by keeping it in your mind.
Small things can add up – use that to your advantage.
Hack The Motivation-Friction-Equation
All human behavior follows the same equation.
Motivation > friction = you do it.
Friction > motivation = you don’t do it.
Being tired, having big tasks you don’t like, and not knowing where to start create friction. Having energy, doing what you enjoy, and an enjoyable outcome increase motivation. If your willingness to do something is bigger than the resistance associated, you’ll do it – simple as that.
This also explains why it’s so hard to do things after work. You have little energy, willpower, and drive. Your motivation is as low as the shawty with the apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur in Flo Rida’s song.
I’m living in Colombia right now and although I’ve committed to taking Spanish classes, doing them after a long workday was a pain in the neck.
Then, I found a learning website that has interesting documentaries and entertaining videos with native speakers explaining why some penguins’ poop is pink in Spanish, sorted by language level.
It made learning a breeze because this skyrocketed my motivation – I was looking forward to the videos every day.
Make your tasks fun and you’ll be much more likely to do them:
Turn on some music while you’re doing household chores
Make it a game of seeing how much you can get done in 20 minutes
Combine it with something you enjoy (e.g. watch your favorite show while doing cardio, have a nice tea while reading, etc.)
Set challenges (e.g. read 20 pages) and reward yourself immediately (with a nice drink or your favorite tunes)
The higher your motivation, the more friction you can overcome.
How To Stay Productive After Work And Focus On Your Self-Improvement
There’s more to your weekdays than your job.
The last thing you want to do is spend all your energy in the office and then survive through the rest of your waking hours until it’s time to sleep and start the whole cycle anew.
Use these five strategies to make sure you invest as much energy into yourself as into your day job.
Make getting started easy by committing to just five minutes.
Keep the momentum going after work.
Turn your tasks into shoulder-by-shoulder activities.
Use batch processing and immediate action to take care of the small stuff.
Add something that makes your chores fun.
Invest in yourself – it will pay off for the rest of your life.
A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions.
A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language.
Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.
Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful.
At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found.
Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons.
Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)
Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.
“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice.
The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing.
Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.
These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct.
Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer.
Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third.
In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent.
Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:
Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.
Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.”
The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”
Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found.
For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”
Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.”
Officials in several other states said the same.
The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules.
In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.
“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”
But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.
Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said.
Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012.
Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students.
But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.
Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”
“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the director of the California Policy Lab, a group that partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.”
This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.
On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.
“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”
In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions.
District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”
Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers.
Following a suspension, Yousef Munir founded the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools. Credit: Albert Cesare/ Cincinnati Enquirer
At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.
Munir left anyway.
That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”
The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct.
The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.
Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said.
In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in Maryland’s Dorchester County Public Schools were assigned for disrespect and disruption. Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report
Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives.
Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.
In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it.
To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct.
“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.
Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return.
“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.”
In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior.
Records from Maryland’s Dorchester County Public Schools show that the main goal for some students who were suspended for defiance and disruption was getting sent home Credit: Sarah Butrymowicz/The Hechinger Report
On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads.
By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.
Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.
Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.
Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.
“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”
Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.”
Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings.
And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs.
And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher.
Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students.
“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.”
She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class.
Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”
In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension.
In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.
Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support.
Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”
In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships.
It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key.
“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”
Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report.
Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
What does the daily life of a legendary philosopher look like? Learn about Arthur Schopenhauer’s unique routine that he consistently followed for over 27 years.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a major figure in German philosophy throughout the 19th century along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
While he’s known for his pessimism and negative outlook on life, there’s no denying that Schopenhauer was an intellectual powerhouse of his time who influenced many great thinkers, philosophers, and artists long after his death.
His book Essays and Aphorisms is a great introduction and overview of his philosophical ideas. It explains his core metaphysical belief of “world as appearance,” continuing the legacy of other idealist philosophers like Plato, Kant, and Indian philosophy, which warn about viewing the world strictly through a materialist lens.
The beginning of the book provides a nice biography of Schopenhauer’s family background, education, and life history. There’s one interesting section on his daily routine that caught my attention and wanted to share; it’s always fascinating to gain insights into the habits and lifestyles of influential figures, especially potential role models we can emulate and borrow from.
This specific routine characterizes the last third of Schopenhauer’s life:
“From the age of 45 until his death 27 years later Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt-am-Main. He lived alone… every day for 27 years he followed an identical routine.”
Keep in mind, I’m only sharing this for educational purposes. I don’t necessarily recommend this way of living, but there are interesting lessons to takeaway from it, including how some of these habits relate to Schopenhauer’s overall philosophy.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s Daily Routine
Here’s a breakdown of Schopenhauer’s daily routine for the last 27 years of his life:
“He rose every morning at seven and had a bath but no breakfast;
He drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and writing until noon.
At noon he ceased work for the day and spent half-an-hour practicing the flute, on which he became quite a skilled performer.
Then he went out to lunch at the Englischer Hof.
After lunch he returned home and read until four, when he left for his daily walk:
He walked for two hours no matter what the weather.
At six o’clock, he visited the reading room of the library and read The Times.
In the evening he attended the theatre or a concert, after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant.
He got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed.”
While Schopenhauer mostly kept to this strict routine unwaveringly, he was willing to make exceptions under specials circumstances such as if he had friends or visitors in town.
Key Lessons and Takeaways
This daily routine seems fitting for a solitary and introspective philosopher, but there are key lessons that fit with conventional self-improvement wisdom:
Early Rising: Schopenhauer started his day at 7 a.m., which aligns with the common advice of many successful individuals who advocate for early rising. This morning ritual is often associated with increased productivity and a sense of discipline.
No Breakfast: Skipping breakfast was part of Schopenhauer’s routine. While not everyone agrees with this approach, it resonates with intermittent fasting principles that some find beneficial for health and mental clarity.
Work Routine: Schopenhauer dedicated his mornings to work, writing until noon. This emphasizes the importance of having a focused and dedicated period for intellectual or creative work, especially early in the day.
Creative Break: Taking a break to practice the flute for half an hour after work highlights the value of incorporating creative or leisure activities into one’s routine. It can serve as a refreshing break and contribute to overall well-being.
Outdoor Exercise: Schopenhauer’s daily two-hour walk, regardless of the weather, emphasizes the significance of outdoor exercise for both physical and mental health. This practice aligns with contemporary views on the benefits of regular physical activity and spending time in nature.
Reading Habit: Schopenhauer spent time reading each day, reflecting his commitment to continuous learning and intellectual stimulation.
News Consumption: Reading The Times at the library suggests Schopenhauer valued staying informed about current events. It’s worth noting that he limited his news consumption to a specific time of day (but it was easier to restrict your information diet before the internet).
Cultural Engagement: Attending the theater or a concert in the evening indicates a commitment to cultural engagement and a balanced lifestyle.
Regular Bedtime: Going to bed early reflects an understanding of the importance of sufficient sleep for overall health and well-being.
While Schopenhauer’s routine may not be suitable for everyone, there are elements of discipline, balance, and engagement with various aspects of life that individuals may find inspiring or applicable to their own lifestyles.
The Immovable Mind
Schopenhauer was known for his persistence and stubbornness – his consistent daily routine is just one manifestation of this.
He wrote his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation in 1818 when he was only 28 years old, and he never fundamentally changed his views despite continuing to write and publish until his death at 72.
Schopenhauer has been described as an “immovable mind,” never letting himself deviate from the course he was set out on.
His two hour walk routine in any weather is one of the most popular examples of this. From the biography in the book:
“Consider the daily two-hour walk. Among Schopenhauer’s disciples of the late nineteenth century this walk was celebrated fact of his biography, and it was so because of its regularity. There was speculation as to why he insisted on going out and staying out for two hours no matter what the weather. It suggests health fanaticism, but there is no other evidence that Schopenhauer was a health fanatic or crank. In my view the reason was simply obstinacy: he would go out and nothing would stop him.”
While this immovability has its disadvantages, you have to admire the monk-like discipline.
Schopenhauer was a proponent of ascetism, a life without pleasure-seeking and mindless indulgence. A lot of his philosophy centers around a type of “denouncement of the material world,” so it’s not surprising that a little rain and wind wouldn’t stop his daily walk.
This way of living is reminiscent of the documentary Into Great Silence, which follows the daily lives of Carthusian monks living in the French mountains while they eat, clean, pray, and fulfill their chores and duties in quiet solitude.
One of the hallmarks of a great routine is that it’s a sustainable system. The fact that Schopenhauer was able to follow this regimen for the rest of his life is a testament to its strength and efficacy, and something worth admiring even if it’s not a lifestyle we’d want to replicate for ourselves.
Enter your email to stay updated on new articles in self improvement:
SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.
Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.
The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.
But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.
In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.
“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”
Data from the Wicomico County, Maryland, Sheriff’s office shows that over the past eight years, county schools have sent children more than 750 times to the emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation. Credit: Julia Nikhinson/ Associated Press
In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.
Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.
At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.
In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.
One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.
“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”
The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.
A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.
In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.
In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.
In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.
‘Trying to get him out of school’
Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.
The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.
Black students in Wicomico County schools are sent to psychiatric emergency rooms at a higher rate than their peers. Advocates say the same is true for students with disabilities. Credit: Julia Nikhinson/ Associated Press
She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”
Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.
“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”
A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”
“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”
Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.
Educators stretched thin
By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.
But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.
Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.
“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.
Parents and community leaders in Wicomico County, Maryland, are concerned that schools are sending students to the psychiatric emergency room too often and for the wrong reasons. Credit: Julia Nikhinson/ Associated Press
Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.
In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.
Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.
“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.
In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.
“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”
Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs
On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example.
“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”
When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.
“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.
Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.
ER trips increased after settlement
The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.
The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”
But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.
“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.
“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”
Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law
Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”
Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.
“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”
But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.
“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.
“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”
Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services
Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.
But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.
“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”
The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Black parents point to culture problem
Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.
They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.
Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.
Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior.
Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..
“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”
Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .
Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.
A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.
The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.
“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”
This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Ready for a major lifestyle change? Uncover successful strategies when embracing the “cold turkey” approach to break bad habits, making the process of change both easy and manageable.
This content is for Monthly, Yearly, and Lifetime members only. Join HereLogin
Brad is a university lecturer with a master’s degree in Kinesiology and is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) with the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). He has competed as a drug-free bodybuilder, is a cancer survivor, and a 21 year veteran of the Air National Guard. Brad has been a Primer contributor since 2011.
Many think of motivation in a singular way. That is the act of getting up and doing the thing you want to do. The fire that is under you so you can successfully drive forward and accomplish your goals.
There seem to be as many techniques to foster motivation as there are pithy social media quotes, in-depth blog posts, and self-help books. For some, it can be conjured up through traditional means of incentivizing while for others it can be as personal as a fingerprint.
The author in Afghanistan in 2003
When I went through boot camp motivation wasn’t hard to come by. One couldn’t afford to not be a motivated individual in a large group working toward a common goal. Military training has motivation built in but requires your best efforts to be sustained and effective.
1. Narrow focus
When we showed up to boot camp we quickly were instructed to put away our personal belongings as we were issued uniforms, taken to the BX for personal hygiene items, and basically stripped away of any and all identifiable belongings.
Overnight our lives became incredibly simple. More challenging, but simple. We quickly adopted a singular focus on what we needed to do each minute of the day.
Get up, PT, shower, shave, eat, train, drill, classes, clean, and whatever else we needed to get done.
Basic training was an extreme exercise in simplified focus. It did, however, provide a hidden perk. It made being motivated much easier. We didn’t have worldly distractions to derail us. We didn’t have the luxury of putting things off, getting sucked into a show, or having technology entertain us. We were feverishly engaged in the tasks at hand.
Apply it
The modern world isn’t short on distraction. In fact, boredom is now referred to as a net negative. Since we have supercomputers in our pockets now, we can easily stave off boredom and become blissfully distracted at all times. Unfortunately, this habit has seeped into our work and personal lives as well. We are losing our ability to focus on one task for more than a few minutes.
Now with many people owning multiple devices: phones, tablets, laptops, streaming services, podcasts, social media sites, etc., we are becoming a more distracted society by the minute.
The motivation to do something great has no room to flourish. Simplify. Make it a priority to set aside time for scrolling, stick to an organized schedule, leave your phone on silent, block time-wasting apps, and grapple back your attention–it’s yours after all.
Get focus back into your life and you will naturally cultivate more motivation to do the things that take priority and are important.
2. The pressure of teamwork
Normally, people will think of motivation from an individual perspective–internal, personal, and self-driving. But boot camp places you in a very unique environment. Yes, you are an individual and have personal responsibilities and tasks to complete, but you’re ultimately a part of a bigger mission.
Not only do you have a unified goal to achieve you also must perform your assignments as an integral part of a larger group. You have others that rely on you–that look to you to do your part. This, in turn, results in a synergistic energy that cultivates motivation. It is a kind of pressure to hold up your end. To do your job and do it well.
There becomes an unwritten but well-known rule that you must perform at a certain level because everyone else is. It’s a healthy, motivating pressure to do your best because others are relying on you.
Apply it
You don’t need to be in the military to subject yourself to motivational teamwork. One of the most important aspects of doing good work is placing yourself in the right kind of atmosphere. One that promotes a certain level of performance and lends itself to that healthy form of pressure to do your very best work.
Being a part of any team should demand that you become an important member who possesses unique skills and abilities that ultimately contribute to the team’s success. You cross the finish line together. In this age of individualism and self-promotion, it’s tougher to come by people who want to surrender themselves to the betterment of the team, but if you put away the ego and think of the common goal for the group, you’ll find that motivation is easier to achieve. Be a team player, offer up your unique skills, and allow yourself to be pushed by that mutual environment.
3. Extreme ownership
It may seem a bit hypocritical to list extreme ownership as a tool for motivation just after we mentioned teamwork, but there is a strong connection. Without the individual effort of doing a good job, the team will suffer as a result.
In boot camp yes, you are a part of the bigger picture, but you still have the burden of owning up to your individual responsibilities that ultimately benefit the group. I say burden with an asterisk. Without some form of burden, motivation is nonexistent. Much like the pressure felt from the team environment, you will need to take personal ownership of your job.
And this goes for screwing up too. In the military, individuals will be called out for their lack of performance. That’s why it’s imperative to get used to the idea of taking full responsibility for your failures even when things out of your control contributed.
Apply it
This extreme type of ownership is as important in the civilian workforce. Take the time to learn your position in an organization, and always improve your skills so that you become an asset to the team. Work to become a unique piece to the puzzle but never lose sight of the bigger picture.
This even goes for owning up to failures. We live in a blaming society. Our instinct is to often try to find some outside influence that leads to our mess up. Whether it’s another person or some circumstance out of our control we find comfort in being void of blame. However, if you apply extreme ownership to those failures, more than likely you’ll become someone seen as a highly honest, mature, and responsible individual.
They say that comparison is the thief of joy, but when thrown into a barracks full of others who are striving for the same things you will naturally tend to compare your work to theirs. Whether it was making the perfect hospital corners on our racks, folding our T-shirts into perfect six-inch squares, being the most accurate during marksman training, or trying to finish the timed run ahead of the pack, there can be such a thing as a healthy comparison.
You can also call this competition, but let’s face it, we are always comparing our work to others. Being around others and personally experiencing how your peers are performing can go a long way when you need motivation.
Apply it
When you use comparison in a healthy way with the sole intent of improving your own skill and abilities then it can become a welcomed ally. This is especially true when you’re a young start-up and take on an apprentice role. Looking at the more skilled and seasoned workers around you and seeing how things are done, processes are carried out, and expectations to uphold is like going to class on your feet. You can’t beat the instant and personal lessons of being around others and experiencing how things work firsthand. Of course, you’ll eventually blaze your own trail, but in the beginning, let comparison motivate you to grow and get better.
The words “competition” and “comparison” have different linguistic roots, but they share some common elements in their etymology.
“Competition” comes from the Latin word “competere,” which is a combination of “com” (together) and “petere” (to seek or strive). So, “competition” essentially means people or entities coming together to seek or strive for a common goal, often involving rivalry or contest.
“Comparison” also has Latin origins, derived from the word “comparare,” which is a combination of “com” (together) and “parare” (to make ready or prepare). In this case, “comparison” refers to the act of putting things together in order to make them ready for assessment or evaluation, typically to identify similarities or differences.
5. Pride
One of the best motivators around is having a sense of pride in your work. Boot camp had pride built into it. The feeling of committing to the military and your country, the history and lineage that you have the honor of carrying on, and the honest hard work you have the opportunity to exercise are ever-present.
One example in particular had to do with our drill instructors. At first, our instructors were people you wanted to avoid at all costs. You never wanted to draw special attention to yourself. In particular, I turned 18 in boot camp. I didn’t tell a soul. However, near the end, everyone was proud of their time with the instructors. We had the utmost respect for them and would do anything for them. Our pride fostered motivation.
Apply it
Take pride in all that you do. There’s a saying that you should do your best work even when no one is looking. Have pride in your work, in your relationships, in your home life, and in how you care for yourself and others.
Pride will lead to higher expectations you’ll have for yourself. It will compound over time into increased work quality, deeper relationships, and improved self-worth.
In turn, you will naturally become more motivated to uphold your new standard and it will rub off on others. Your motivation will become second nature.
One of the common threads throughout all the points above is that motivation doesn’t have to be something you work towards alone. Look around. Surround yourself with others who are as motivated as you want to be, take ownership of the good and bad that happen, learn from others, reduce distractions, and take pride in all you do. Over time your motivation will skyrocket without any self-help guru hack.
A proven 4-step process to help you rise from the ashes.
Two things are true about life.
No. 1: It will knock you down.
No. 2: You can choose to get back up.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill
I’ve had periods in life where I took more hits than an average cow carcass in a Rocky Balboa movie.
My business lost 90% of its revenue. My childhood trauma resurfaced. My ex told me she wanted to move in together and marry me, then left without an explanation. All within a year. It knocked the air out of my lungs like taking a bowling ball to the stomach.
Surprise, overwhelm, anxiety, bitterness, desperation, anger, fear – I knew them all too well.
The shit life throws at you is bad by itself, but what makes it ten times worse is not knowing how to shovel it.
When you lack a clear path forward, you don’t see a way out. Your fears keep telling you it will stay like this forever. And if you don’t do something, it will.
But do you know what’s funny?
Today, I’m grateful for all that happened because it made me grow massively.
With a clear path ahead and the right mindset, you’ll be able to rebuild yourself – stronger, wiser, better, and happier.
Here’s how.
Step #1: Achieve True Acceptance
Acceptance comes before change.
After my ex broke up with me, it took me almost two years to make it part of my reality. Until then, I was still hooked on the old relationship.
I thought I could’ve done more, would never find someone like her again, and blamed myself for everything that happened – the whole nine yards.
This meant I wasted insane amounts of time and energy ruminating about the past. I turned down beautiful women who wanted to connect with me. My hands were full with old stories, so I had no space for new ones.
Rationally, I understood what happened, but true acceptance doesn’t happen on a rational level – it happens on an emotional, spiritual, and energetical one.
“Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and there’s got to be a way through it.” — Michael J. Fox
The ego will shut you off from your emotions to protect you. But this creates an inner conflict. One part will want to stay down in the ditch, the other will want you to climb out.
Allow yourself to feel. Make the painful realizations. Don’t run from the uncomfortable emotions, don’t numb them, don’t smoke or drink them away.
Sit with them instead, experience the frustration, and bawl your eyes out. Allow yourself to feel down and experience the dark places.
If you’re neck-deep in shit, accept it fully.
Everything else is lying to yourself.
Step #2: Accept The Invitation
When my client went bankrupt, they owed me over $6000.
I cursed. I got angry – first with them, then with myself. I slipped into a victim mindset, asking why this happened to me.
In essence, I did what we all do every day – I assigned a label to an event before knowing its full consequences.
When you look at our language, you’ll realize how dominant either/or thinking is. Good or bad. Hot or cold. Up or down. Love or hate. Bright or dark. We create this duality, every day.
But this means we often jump to conclusions prematurely.
The client who couldn’t pay me turned out to be the much-needed kick in the butt that forced me to change my business. A year later, I operate on another level, doing work I enjoy much more for a bigger paycheck.
This change was worth way more than $6000.
When I realized this, I also realized the event hadn’t changed at all – I did.
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.” — Haruki Murakami
Nothing is good or bad per se. It’s what you make of it. All of it is part of your path.
The tough stretches are life’s way of saying, “You’re strong enough, you’ve got so much more ahead of you, you can live up to your full potential.” I know you don’t want shit to hit the fan. You want to live in peace.
But that’s not how life works.
The sucker punches are part of it, whether we like it or not.
Ask yourself the following:
“What growth can come of this?”
“What baggage does this allow me to let go of?”
The sooner you accept life’s invitation, the better.
Step #3: Overcome Your Ego
A few years ago, I read a sentence from popular self-help blogger Mark Manson that now lives rent-free in my mind.
“Not everything’s your fault, but everything is your responsibility.”
It wasn’t my fault that my client went bankrupt.
It wasn’t my fault that the guy I’d been friends with for years started flirting with my girl.
It wasn’t my fault a reckless driver hit me while cycling and sent me flying through the air like a tent in a hurricane.
But it was my responsibility to learn from it.
When life hits you in the nuts, you feel powerless.
You lose control. Things happen you don’t want to happen and you can’t do anything about it. Taking responsibility gives you that power back.
But learning from your mistakes requires you to let go of the ego.
You’ll have to realize what you did wrong, what toxic patterns you engaged in, and what you contributed to the situation.
A simple reframe is to see mistakes as something admirable, something that causes growth.
I often ask myself, “If for each mistake and learning I can identify, I get one bonus point – how many can I find?”
Don’t self-loathe or set unrealistic expectations. Don’t blame yourself for what happened. Just take responsibility.
You have the choice and the ability to do better next time.
Realize how powerful that makes you.
Step #4: Rebuild The Right Way
I recently asked my friend a stupid simple question.
“How do you build a house?”
After some laughs, we got our German, efficiency-focused minds together.
“You first dig a hole, then build a sturdy foundation in it.”
The good news is if you want to rebuild yourself, life already dug the hole for you. All that’s left for you is to put in the basic structures.
When you hit rock bottom, the smallest goal can seem like a massive mountain you have no idea how to climb. I used to work 10-hour days, hit the gym, and read daily. After my business lost most of its revenue, I had trouble getting out of bed and brushing my teeth.
But small steps build momentum.
Instead of trying to do everything at once again, I pushed myself to research one article, do one minute of meditation, and leave the house once per day.
“Standardize before you optimize.” – James Clear
The wheel started turning again and got faster with every little effort.
Most people think you rise to the sky magically after life knocks you down.
But the climb is tough and you’re exhausted.
Focus on the basics. Stack the small wins. Get moving.
Build the right foundation and everything else will come on top easily.
Summary To Help You Rise From The Ashes Quickly
Hard times are rarely fun.
They’re messy. They’re painful. They bring you to your limits.
But they also have a silver lining.
Like a forest fire, they destroy everything– but leave the soil full of nutrients and plants ready to regrow.
Life gives you hard times because you’re strong enough to make it through them. And with a little guidance and perspective, you will.
Practice true acceptance on an emotional, spiritual, and energetical level.
Accept life’s invitation to grow and realize what good can come of it.
Let go of your ego so you can see your mistakes clearly and learn from them.
Rebuild yourself by focusing on the basics and building momentum step by step.
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway
