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Repetitive writing is fine as discipline, Vallas says

Susan Snyder

Ohanian Comment: Vallas' statement is not surprising, coming as it does from the man who used the National Guard Training Manual as a model for his reform of Chicago schools.

Requiring disruptive students to write sentences repeatedly as a form of punishment is a fine disciplinary technique, Philadelphia School District chief executive officer Paul Vallas said yesterday.

"I have no problem with it. In fact, I like it," Vallas said in an interview.

His comments came in response to an incident last week at Cramp Elementary School in West Kensington, where disciplinarian Fred Creel was removed from his post in part because he required children to write sentences 100 times as a form of punishment. School officials told Creel, who has been moved to a teaching assignment at Cramp, that they considered such assignments a form of corporal punishment and detrimental to the education process.

Sonia Perez, a regional administrator overseeing discipline issues at schools in the Kensington area, said last week: "To repeat a sentence is not a form of disciplining a child. It's a form of punishing a child. Every opportunity that we have, we should be teaching children self-management."

But Vallas said that he did not view the writing assignments as corporal punishment and that he had told his administrative team to get the word out to principals and teachers, including those at Cramp: Repetitive writing assignments are A-OK.

Cramp principal Adrienne Carpenter declined to comment yesterday on Vallas' position.

Vallas recalled that when he was a child, his teachers and mother gave him those kinds of tasks. For example, he remembers having to fill a blackboard with: "I will not talk in class."

"If you counted the lengths of the blackboards in miles, then I did about 10 miles of repetitive writing in my lifetime," he said.

"It used to have an effect on me. It also improved my handwriting."

Critics of the process say that it can sour a student on writing, but Vallas dismissed that charge.

"Give me a break," he said. "Any time the punishment can be academic, all the better."

He said he also supported essay writing as a disciplinary remedy.

But Vallas said he would not intervene in Carpenter's decision to move Creel and appoint an assistant principal to oversee discipline. He said she had other reasons for making the move beyond the issue of repetitive writing, but he declined to elaborate.

Creel was accused by several parents of grabbing students and calling them names. Creel said he did neither.

Last week, a large group of parents, including the president of the home and school association, demanded that Creel be restored to his position, saying behavior at the school had become worse since he was transferred in October. The teaching staff also supports Creel.

"I'm not going to micromanage my principals when they make individual decisions on how to deploy their staff," Vallas said.



— Susan Snyder
Philadelphia Inquirer
2004-02-24
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/8024242.htm

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