You have read the note from school again. Disruptive. Defiant. Acting out. You have watched a teacher’s face change when your child’s name comes up, and felt the label settle onto your child like a coat two sizes too heavy. You have tried the rewards, the consequences, the long talks in the car, and the behavior keeps coming back. Here is what almost nobody tells a worried parent. A child who acts out is not broken, and they are not choosing the chaos. The behavior is a message, and the message is that something underneath has gone unmet.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Education Edition with Dr. Sherry Rochelle:
Common questions from parents
Does removing a disruptive child from class actually help?
My child acts out at school. Could a learning struggle be the real cause?
Is my child choosing to misbehave?
How do I find out if a learning struggle sits under the behavior?
A new bill wants to move disruptive kids out of class. The APA found in 2008 that removal does not work. The acting-out kid is usually the one struggling to read the worksheet.
A New Bill Names the Right Problem, Then Reaches for the Wrong Tool
South Dakota House Bill 1017 would let administrators and local school boards move disruptive students out of the regular classroom and into “alternative instructional settings,” which in the current draft often means home or a separate room. Educator Dr. Sherry Rochelle gives the bill real credit for two things. It says out loud what teachers have watched for years, that behavior has grown more intense and started younger, and it tries to protect learning time for the rest of the class. Then she names the hole in the middle of it. The bill never defines what alternative instruction is, who supervises it, or how it gets funded, often arriving in the same season as cuts to the support services these students rely on. A separate room with a packet and no supervisor is not instruction. It is a holding pattern with a nicer name. Removal sounds like order restored. For the child being removed, it is the opposite of help.
This is not a new question with an unknown answer. Back in 2008, the American Psychological Association’s Zero Tolerance Task Force reviewed years of data and found that removing disruptive students does not reduce misbehavior, does not make schools safer, and is tied to higher dropout. The tool has been studied for nearly two decades. It does not do what it promises. When a policy keeps failing and the system keeps reaching for it, the problem stops being the children and starts being the design.
A meltdown is not a verdict on your child’s character. It is a snapshot of a skill that has not finished growing.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
“Bad Behavior” Is Almost Always a Missing Skill, Not a Bad Choice
Psychologist Ross Greene has spent decades studying children the rest of the system gave up on, and his core finding is short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. Children do well when they are able to. If your child were able to stay calm, wait their turn, or absorb the frustration of a worksheet that made no sense, they would have done it. Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model points to lagging skills as the engine of hard behavior: flexibility, frustration tolerance, problem-solving, and emotion regulation. The brain builds those skills slowly, the same way it builds the inner manager that plans and pauses, and some children reach them late.
A meltdown is not a verdict on your child’s character. It is a snapshot of a skill that has not finished growing. The brain region that handles planning, pausing, and impulse control keeps developing well into the twenties, so a nine-year-old who erupts when a task overwhelms them is not behind on willpower. They are on schedule for their wiring, and that wiring keeps changing with the right kind of practice. Once you see the behavior as data instead of defiance, the question changes from “how do I make this stop” to “what is my child telling me they have not learned yet.” That second question is the one with an answer.
Key takeaways
- Behavior is a message: A child who acts out is signaling an unmet need or a missing skill, not choosing chaos.
- Removal was already tested: The APA found in 2008 that exclusionary discipline fails to reduce misbehavior or make schools safer.
- The acting-out kid is often the struggling learner: Reading delays at ages nine to eleven raise the odds of externalizing behavior more than fourfold.
The Child Who Acts Out Is Often the Child Struggling to Read the Worksheet
Here is the overlap the bill steps right past. Learning struggles and behavior struggles travel together. A correlational meta-analysis in Annals of Dyslexia found that children with reading delays around ages nine to eleven were more than four times as likely as their peers to show acting-out behavior, and researchers point to a plain mechanism: a child who meets failure every time the reading or the math comes out grows frustrated, and frustration finds an exit. Remove that child from instruction and you remove the one place the underlying gap could close. You also confirm the story they have started telling themselves, that they are the bad kid rather than a learner who has hit a wall.
The relationship runs both directions. Failure feeds frustration, frustration feeds disruption, and disruption pulls a child out of the same lessons that would build the missing skill, which deepens the failure. It is a loop, and removal spins it faster. The repair is the opposite. It looks like figuring out which skill is missing, then building it alongside the child rather than around them. Greene’s own data shows that solving problems together teaches the missing skill at the same time it settles the behavior. If you suspect a learning struggle sits under the acting-out, or trouble with reading, focus, or memory, a screener is a useful starting point, not a diagnosis. For formal support through an IEP or 504 plan, or if you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, a professional evaluation is the route.
Remove a struggling child from instruction and you remove the one place the underlying gap could close.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You want your child to walk into a classroom and feel like a learner, not a problem to be managed. What stands in the way is a system that reaches for the label and the exit before it reaches for the cause, that finds it simpler to move a child than to ask what the child needs. You are the one who refuses that trade. Nobody will ever advocate for your child the way you will, and that is exactly why the next move is yours.
Learning Success All Access gives you the tools to find the skill hiding under the behavior and build it at home, one short session at a time. But a struggle like this rarely travels alone. A child who acts out of frustration with reading often shows signs of trouble with focus, working memory, or processing as well, and those overlapping gaps feed one another. All Access covers the whole picture instead of one slice of it, so the behavior and the skill behind it get addressed together.
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Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
