Once public school teachers learned they could be held personally liable for failing to follow ambiguously defined due process provisions when disciplining students, they worked through their unions to offload responsibility for these school functions. Union contracts would come to insist that teachers not be involved in maintaining order and discipline outside their classrooms. Teachers attempting to break up fights in many of today's public school have grown accustomed to the refrain: "Get your hands off me or I will sue you." While these legal threats are, of course, seldom pursued, what has changed is that the taken-for-granted assumption that educators had moral authority was significantly undermined.

In addition, schools facing the threat of litigation initially pulled back from strictly enforcing rules. Then as legislators, educators, and citizens grew increasingly concerned with school disorder and violence, administrative remedies were sought. Rather than restoring traditional discretionary authority to teachers and administrators, draconian school security measures, uniformed security guards, and zero-tolerance mandates were often imposed on local schools.

Well-intended efforts to improve youth outcomes through legal intervention into traditional matters involving educators, students, and their parents has produced a system of school discipline that is incapable of fostering the positive authority relationships necessary for youth to come to internalize and accept conventional societal norms, values, and attitudes. Worse still, public school students who had greater rights ended up not perceiving school discipline as fairer, but just the opposite. The more rights students thought they had, the more injustice they perceived in their everyday school lives. Students in Catholic schools, for example, who had many fewer legal protections than public school students, have in recent decades been significantly more likely to report that school discipline was fairer. And it turns out that students' perceptions of fairness -- not the level of strictness -- is what makes school discipline most effective at aiding youth development.

Today, while a new generation of school reformers tinker with curriculum, school size, testing accountability regimes, and other initiatives, this core contemporary problem of public schooling has been left largely unaddressed. To improve public schooling, one must recognize that positive relationships between educators and students are at the center of any productive educative process in formal schooling. Good luck with improving school performance by implementing a curriculum reform based on standards or accountability if you haven't first ensured that students respect the moral authority of public school educators so that the reforms have a chance to succeed.