What Education Reform Can Learn From Policing
In some public services, like policing, highly-skilled people with specific training are asked to fill in and respond to much more than what they’ve been recruited, trained, and expected to complete. Law enforcement officers are called to enforce laws. But, they’re also called on to respond to varying disturbances like potholes, animals on the loose, and traffic details.
They’re also called on to respond to much more serious events, that of individuals in a state of mental health crises and domestic violence instances. It leads to terrible situations that turn into tragedies, including the deaths of Elijah McClain and Daniel Prude. This is not an excuse to the individual officers who were involved in those cases, who can and should be held accountable by independent review boards, but it does warrant a review of the systemic overreach of law enforcement to respond to events outside their traditional domain. Call the police when you are dealing with a robbery; call mental health responders when it’s a situation with a person in crisis. Unfortunately, police have been called for everything, resulting in varying inefficiencies with increasing regularity despite efforts to drastically change basic police officer training.
A key takeaway from an interview between NPR and the Police Executive Research Forum pointed out that, although specialized training techniques can be provided to the police force, the training can’t be put into practice too well because the sheer number of calls are more than what can be handled by an individual. The number of calls to law enforcement that actually deal with situations outside of the traditional realm of policing, and a lack of oversight and accountability, has led to delay in the progress of police reform. Unfortunately, this has also led to responses ending in disaster, sometimes fatally.
It’s almost as if police don’t have the support they need, and thus, revert to older, ineffective, and traditional training techniques. Overwhelming circumstances, combined with lack of support and hesitance for better policing, creates a culture of resignation and true progress can’t be achieved.
There’s a similar trend starting to unfold in a different public service domain, and if we have learned anything, we must act now before it leads to ineffective results. The stakes are different, but nonetheless impactful on our future.
When schools closed in the early response to COVID-19 back in March 2020, it became increasingly evident that schools are much more than an academic institution. Students facing food insecurity were of highest concern, but the other issues that teachers were responsible for, surfaced as well. As schools continued to be closed, calls were made to reopen as soon as possible, because teachers are often the first to notice signs of domestic abuse. Schools, and teachers specifically, are also seen as responsible for building a child’s social and emotional resiliency, and act as a mental health coach.
Including the demands of finding a better, engaging curriculum that has a positive impact to a student’s learning, adopting new technologies for engaging classes in seamless fashion, and effectively conveying academic material while also preparing students with enough life skills, teachers are asked for a lot more than “teaching.”
Overburdening teachers is a concern in itself, but coupled with no resources and a lack of appropriate training, it leads to tremendous burnout. Teachers become ill-prepared, thus revert to techniques that make it easier for them to cope. That results in delaying the progress and reform we’ve been expecting of, and asking for, in education. To an extent, It parallels the experiences of law enforcement. If we understand this now, and act appropriately with better policies, we can ensure the change we want to see in education actually occurs.
Resources don’t get cheaper the more you need them, and training is invaluable to be able to respond properly. Yet, that’s not the only thing we need to make available for teachers. We need to pare down their job descriptions to reduce the burden as well. Overburdening and increasing job responsibilities leads to ineffective job performance, and ultimately movement in the wrong direction of what we expect. Removing that burden has led to improved outcomes in law enforcement, as we’ve seen in a few cities partnering with mental health professionals.
Rather than continuously introducing increasingly varied, tangentially-related responsibilities to the role of a teacher, paring teaching down to the basics and partnering with professionals and institutions that provide other services as needed for these students ensures fair, equitable outcomes.
Otherwise, we run the risk of teachers reverting back to ineffective approaches to teaching, further perpetuating the inequalities existing in education despite the training and funding that is going into education reform. Support the teachers appropriately, and allow them to be the professionals they are trained for. Furthermore, collaborate with those who are better equipped to address the other issues students may face, and you have a better recipe for success.
Public service roles are essential to our society, but we can’t expect them to complete multiple highly-skilled roles concurrently at astronomically high levels. We can, and should, expect better outcomes when we ensure professionals are doing their own job with the support and resources they need.