Discipline ideology
The latest findings, academic studies, or reports related to collective punishment, education, and behavioural psychology.
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When provincial bodies dismiss parental expertise: POPARD, sticker charts, and the refusal of heterogeneity
In the previous essay, I examined neuroimaging research demonstrating that autism and ADHD are not internally homogeneous diagnostic categories but rather contain multiple neurologically distinct subgroups, often with opposite patterns of brain structure alterations relative to controls. The Pecci-Terroba study reveals what categorical intervention logic refuses to accommodate: diagnosis alone cannot determine whether a specific…
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How collective punishment turns provincial funding failure into disabled children’s “behavioural failure”
Many years ago, my kindergarten child Robin went onto an ice field during recess. Robin was seeking sensory input—the visual shimmer, the cracking sound, the tactile feedback their nervous system required. The school had told students to avoid the ice for safety reasons. Robin’s support worker redirected them repeatedly; Robin kept returning. Eventually the principal…
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Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School (SD39 Vancouver): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School’s Code of Conduct, reviewed June 19, 2024, presents itself as a framework for creating a “safe, inclusive, equitable, welcoming, nurturing, and healthy school environment.” The document employs the language of care, respect, and community while constructing a disciplinary architecture that presumes neurotypical development, rewards compliance, and positions disability as exceptional deviation…
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Alberta’s erasure of disability rights
In November 2025, the Alberta government released the final report of the Aggression and Complexity in Schools Action Team, offering seven recommendations to address what it calls “rising aggression and complexity in classrooms.” The package includes $300 million over three years to hire 1,500 educational assistants, the creation of a Class Size and Complexity Cabinet Committee,…
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Why I won’t stop in 2026
The principal used collective punishment against my child almost two years ago, and yet I remain unreconciled to what she did. People suggest moving on, starting fresh, forgiving. Schools are obsessed with ‘fresh starts,’ framing each September as reset opportunity, as though institutional harm dissolves at arbitrary calendar boundaries. My daughter carries what happened in…
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B.C. teacher who pushed elementary school student gets 1-day suspension
“A B.C. teacher who pushed an elementary school student she believed had insulted her mother has agreed to a one-day suspension and remedial education. Jeven Kaur Gill agreed to the punishment in a consent resolution agreement with B.C.’s Commissioner for Teacher Regulation last month, which was published on the commissioner’s website Tuesday.” CTV News The…
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The principal’s casualness reveals authorisation to harm
When a principal cancelled my daughter’s volleyball game with bureaucratic ease, her comfort while causing harm revealed systematic institutional authorisation.
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From trauma to topology: the grotesque work of quantifying institutional denial
When institutional harm accumulates in childhood—in objects confiscated, spaces denied, bodies excluded—the evidence lives first in memory and affect. The saucer eyes of a humiliated or frightened child. The sting in the sobs of a child who just wants to be with her friends at the volleyball game. The physical weight of a garbage bag…
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A multi-lens analysis of accommodation denial in BC Schools
When the school handed me a garbage bag filled with jackets at the end of the year, it was evidence of a failed executive function accommodation. When I was handed a box containing hundreds of dollars of fidgets, it was evidence of a regulation accommodation that had been denied. There’s a lot of reasons an…
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Material witness: objects and architecture in the exclusion of disabled children
When schools perform inclusion while enacting exclusion, the evidence accumulates in objects and spaces, in the material culture of neurodivergent childhood, in the things that were meant to help but became instruments of control, in the architecture that promised safety but delivered abandonment. These are the objects that witnessed what happened to my children in…
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The affective architecture of room clears
Room clears should be rare. In adequately resourced classrooms with sufficient staffing, with educational assistants trained in co-regulation, with adults who understand that compliance is not wellness and frozen silence is not calm, most crises could be prevented or held without architectural intervention. But British Columbia schools operate under manufactured scarcity, austerity politics disguised as…
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Justice and dignity too expensive for BC NDP
In 2018, experts told BC exactly how to fix special education funding. The government has spent five years “consulting” instead. Meanwhile, your child sits in hallways. The 192% problem nobody wants to fund Between 2015 and 2024, autism designations in BC schools exploded by 192%. Total student enrolment? Up just 11.6%. The province knows this. They…
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When delay becomes policy: British Columbia’s strategic abandonment of disabled students
In 2018, an independent panel reviewed how British Columbia funds kindergarten through grade twelve education and recommended a prevalence model for special education funding, a shift that would allocate resources based on statistical prevalence of disability within the general student population rather than on individual diagnostic designation. The proposal threatened to expose what the existing system carefully…
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Positive behavioural interventions and supports: a behaviourist rebrand
Positive behavioural interventions and supports circulates through British Columbia’s public schools with a gentle, polished confidence, offering administrators the comfort of matrices and fidelity tools, offering families soothing language about positivity and predictability, and presenting itself as an enlightened evolution of schoolwide discipline, yet what I see each time I study its structure is the…
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The behaviourist spine of BC’s urgent-response systems
In Urgent behaviour intervention teams in major BC school districts I shared research which identified the intervention teams in many of the larger districts in BC, describing their processes and roles, mostly in the language that they describe their services. This essay attempts to analyse those systems through a disability-justice lens, revealing how roles, processes,…
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What research says about school conduct codes and disabled students
This explainer summarises what a small but influential group of scholars have shown about school discipline policies, student codes of conduct, and how these frameworks disproportionately harm disabled and neurodivergent students. It draws especially on the work of Catherine K. Voulgarides, Russell J. Skiba, Daniel J. Losen, David Osher, and Edward Fergus. Where possible, citations…
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Pacific Heights Elementary School (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
The Pacific Heights Elementary Code of Conduct positions the school as a community of “learners (curiosity, humility, engagement, wonder, delight, creativity, collaboration, passion)” and emphasises “care for self, others, and the environment,” framing positive relationships as “foundational to learning.” This aspirational preface signals a relational ethos. Yet the operational sections reveal a blend of restorative…
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North Surrey Secondary (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
North Surrey Secondary’s 2024–25 Parent/Student Handbook presents itself as a practical guide to daily school operations, but its conduct code reveals a disciplinary framework anchored in behavioural control, punctuality, and compliance. Its language reflects a pre-neuroscience understanding of student behaviour, one that frames regulation as obedience, distress as misconduct, and support as conditional upon conformity.…
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Why the evolving understanding of childhood terrifies systems built on scarcity
Children now arrive at school shaped by homes that honour physiology over performance, autonomy over obedience, and co-regulation over fear, and this shift grows from a decade of relational neuroscience, trauma literacy, sensory understanding, and disability justice that families have absorbed far more quickly than schools, which leaves discipline ideology standing on crumbling ground because…
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Neural evidence exposes the steep cost of sacrificing vulnerable children to punitive myths
Neural evidence from Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder offers a precise account of how punitive school discipline collides with the neurodevelopmental profiles of vulnerable children, because the study shows that punishment learning relies on the anterior insula’s capacity to transform discomfort into behavioural adjustment, and this capacity expresses irregular patterns in the children…