EDUCATIONREALIST: “The Spring Valley High School incident is yet another case of a teenager treating a cop like a teacher.” “This is, as always, a terrible idea.”

The question is not what should the cop have done, but why did the administrator call the cop? And what would you have had the administrator do instead? Don’t focus on that single incident, because teachers, administrators, and cops don’t have that luxury. They have to handle it in such a way so that defiance doesn’t become a regular routine, that students customarily obey their teachers, maybe with some backtalk, maybe with ample opportunities to walk a bad mistake back. Ultimately, though, students have to comply. If a school backs away from that line, defiance gets contagious. It’s one thing for new, inept teachers to have trouble controlling their students, quite another for an entire school to give up. . . .

Schools that fail to establish order are those like Normandy High School, with out of control violence, open defiance of teachers and administrators, and students in constant danger of assault. Students should have the opportunity to learn, even if they aren’t mastering material at the rate our policy wonks would allow. Schools that can’t enable that are genuine failures.

Related: Don’t Treat A Cop Like A Teacher. “Kids who live in poverty receive profoundly mixed messages about adults in authority. Angry, sometimes violent, adolescents attend high schools and are rarely if ever killed on campus for being a threat. Yet at the wrong time, in the wrong situation, these young men can be killed by police officers, supposedly for threatening the officers lives, more likely for being defiant and violent in ways not dramatically different from their high school behavior. Thus my observation, ‘One might say Michael Brown is dead because he was foolish enough to treat a cop like a teacher.'”