The great school behavior mystery, Part I

Or, why everyone wants to talk about this until it's on the record.

A month or so ago I sent a freelancer to look into something we heard during the Wausau School Board elections. That student behavior has been trending in the wrong direction.

In fact, it was being presented as a crisis. Wausau School Board Member Pat McKee in his interview said it was one of the most important issues facing the district.

In March, a group of teachers stood up and defended the job of the dean of students position who faced elimination in the face of a need to cut $3.5 million out of the district’s budget. Why? Because behavior had become such an issue, those teachers said, that they couldn’t afford to lose him.

In talks with other teachers off the record, I heard much of the same thing. Student behavior is getting worse.

But then something happened. Everyone went cold. Suddenly people who were eager to speak about it suddenly couldn’t be reached. McKee, after having set up a meeting with my freelancer, backed out and couldn’t be gotten ahold of again. None of those teachers, who’d spoken on the record about student behavior problems during a Wausau School Board Meeting with their boss watching on, couldn’t be reached.

What is going on?

Our freelancer, who is currently on break, said there didn’t seem to be much in the data to match up with what we were hearing. But, knowing that the DPI website can be thoroughly confusing to the uninitiated, I decided to take a look myself.

What does it show? Well, it’s complicated. Here is the Wausau School District’s behavior data (the year 2019-2020 is missing for some reason, so I removed it from the data):

Created from DPI data using the new Chat-GPT-o model - it not only writes the code but runs it right in chat.

Like I said, it’s complicated. There are a few ways you can look at the data.

1. Other rule violations — anything that doesn’t fall into the other categories — dropped the year after COVID first struck and has been on the rise again since. (But not nearly as high as it had been before COVID. Suspension rates have largely done the same, steadily rising since COVID but not to pre-COVID levels.

2. Assaults actually fell in the post-COVID years.

3. But endangering behavior, along with drugs and alcohol violations are actually on the rise, exceeding pre-COVID school years.

It paints a complicated picture.

The other explanation that is possible, and that matches with what I’m hearing anecdotally, is that the kinds of behaviors that are frustrating teachers aren’t the kind that would show up in the data. I’ve heard anecdotally that attention spans have withered to nothing, and getting students to pay attention is an exercise in frustration. Others have said parental involvement or discipline is lax, making it tough for teachers to get anything like discipline out of their students.

Another possibility that the data potentially suggests — the recent rise in behavior issues is a shock to teachers who were used to pandemic-level behavior levels, which were much lower than normal. In other words, a recency bias.

Attendance

I also decided to look at attendance, and that is getting worse as well. Here is statewide data:

These are from DPI directly, not created in Chat-GPT.

And then, here is Wausau’s:

The trend in the Wausau district isn’t quite as direct as it is statewide, but attendance is getting worse overall.

The dropout rate in Wausau is a bit complicated too:

Other than a spike in the 2021-2022 school year, the data is trending downward in Wausau, something you want to see with dropout rates.

And that’s actually much better than statewide data:

Putting a plan together

I have a couple of official sources lined up when I’m ready, but some other options for sources have presented themselves.

I actually think one of the best sources would be the school resources officers. They’ll have a handle on precisely what’s going on with student behavior and will probably have some good anecdotes.

I also reached out to Wausau Police Chief Matt Barnes to ask about data around school calls. I reached out more conversationally, to ask what data they typically track in that regard. I think that could be really telling. (UPDATE: Barnes wants me to go to the school district for any data. What is with everyone passing the buck on this story?!)

Of course, I’m going to keep working teachers and other sources behind the scenes.

I see this as a long, ongoing project to be worked. Much like our Big Trouble in Little Kronenwetter series, this will be a “working in public” series.

And, if you have suggestions (or hey, if you’re a teacher who wants to talk or the story, even better!), you can reply to this email or email me at keepitwausome@gmail.com.

Keep following along. Like my Big Trouble in Little Kronenwetter series, future editions will be for paid subscribers only (with previews for everyone).

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