“the students have become empowered by the lack of consequences for negative behavior”

Education Week reprints an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Violence targets Teachers, Staff.” It is appalling, and I remember when I lived in Philadelphia I used to blog about the mind-numbing array of articles about school violence. Not only has nothing changed, but the situation seems to have only gotten worse:

Veteran Philadelphia school teacher Lou Austin endured 40 minutes of terror as the 15-year-old ninth grader jabbed his index finger into Austin’s temple and threatened to kill him while swinging a pair of scissors menacingly.

Austin didn’t even know the youth, who ransacked his classroom–flipping desks and attempting to set fire to books–at Lincoln High School in Mayfair on Valentine’s Day. He’d merely asked him to step away from his classroom door and go to his own class when the youth exploded.

Austin’s experience illustrates the dangers and frustration that teachers in Philadelphia public schools face daily. During the 2009-10 school year, 690 teachers were assaulted. Over five years, from 2005-06 to 2009-10, more than 4,000 teacher assaults were reported, a yearlong Inquirer investigation has found.

And that doesn’t include incidents of threats, disruption, and utter disrespect.

“All I could do was to stand there with my hands behind my back, accept the abuse, and hope this did not infuriate him even more,” said Austin, a Philadelphia teacher for 15 years who graduated from Lincoln in 1984.

His story also illustrates how teachers must cope with violent, disturbed students with little backup from the district.

The problem is that even though a minority of students commit most of the violent acts, the schools cannot expel them: 

….special-education students accounted for just 14 percent of the city’s school enrollment, yet committed 43 percent of the 7,547 assaults on staff during the previous five-year period. The numbers haven’t changed much. From September through February of this school year, 1,628 assaults have been reported in the district, and about 39 percent included at least one special-education student as an offender, School District spokeswoman Shana Kemp said. About 14 percent of the student body is in special education, excluding gifted students.

The 2007 investigation also found that the district routinely failed to provide services to special-education students, and therefore felt it could not follow through with discipline if the students assaulted a staff member.

In the case of the Lincoln student, Kemp said a suspension would not have been appropriate.

And she said that even though the youth faces a criminal charge, he could end up back at Lincoln–his neighborhood school–because of his status as a special-needs student. The district would make a decision along with other behavioral and mental health agencies after his case was adjudicated, she said.

“The young man had emotional disturbances. We can’t refuse a student entry into a school based upon that situation,” she said.

Austin learned that the teen had been allowed to enroll at Lincoln in January without teachers’ knowing his history. He was perplexed.

Kemp said the district–by law–can’t release medical details about the student to staff.

In the Lincoln incident, the teen initially was charged with aggravated assault, criminal mischief, possessing an instrument of crime, terroristic threats, simple assault, and recklessly endangering another person.

On Feb. 25, he made an admission to simple assault and terroristic threats charges, both misdemeanors. Disposition of his case is pending.

After the teachers’ union squawked, teachers were finally permitted to use reasonable force to defend themselves against violence. But are students? I doubt it. Most likely, any student caught defending himself would be considered just as guilty as his attacker. I feel sorry for teachers who have to endure these attacks, but imagine being a student. 

Sending a kid to a school like that constitutes child abuse.

And no one in his right mind would want to be a teacher.

One of the teachers quit in despair, and wrote to President Obama!

Another who quit was former Beeber Middle School teacher Lynn Larrick.

A 6-foot-2, 250-pound eighth grader told her he would have his mother “f- her up” last school year. When she went to document the threat, he taunted: “I probably have about 10 pink slips, and I’m still here.”

Another day, he grabbed a girl’s notebook and jumped up and down on it. When Larrick tried to send him out of the room, he told her he had been suspended earlier in the day anyway. As he left, he aimed his finger at her and pretended to shoot her.

There were other incidents, too. Her blood pressure climbing high, Larrick decided to leave the district on her doctor’s advice.

Unable to get satisfaction from the School District, she wrote to President Obama.

No word on how that turned out.

And there’s no word on whether teacher Lou Austin (mentioned at the beginning of the piece) ever wrote to the president, but he did look on in horror:

Austin could see that the teen who confronted him that February day had major problems and didn’t belong there. When Austin closed his classroom door, the teen paced angrily outside the room for 20 minutes, peering in the window. He rushed in at the end of class when Austin opened the door. “He got in my face . . . trying to bait me into a confrontation,” Austin recalled.

Austin raised his hands to protect himself. The student slapped them down and struck a boxer’s pose, he said. He asked a colleague to call for security.

The teacher watched in horror as the student for 15 minutes flipped desks, attempted to set fire to books, took items out of Austin’s desk, and hurled them against the wall. It was in the desk that the teen found the pair of scissors he began to wave at Austin.

“Throughout his violent outburst, he repeatedly referred to being ‘put away for three, then four, years but not again,’ ” Austin said. “When help finally arrived, he threatened to stab anyone who approached him.”

The principal, school police, and Austin had to wait for Philadelphia police to arrive.

In the aftermath, Austin worried for his safety, wondering if the student would try to retaliate.

Austin tried to go back to school two days later but couldn’t.

“I had a dream about school. It was a chaotic atmosphere where I had no control over what was happening,” he said. “It made me feel very anxious.”

He returned a week after the incident.

His was the fourth teacher assault at Lincoln in two weeks, he said.

Conditions have worsened as the central office pressures schools to lower out-of-school suspensions without viable alternatives, he said.

“The school environment continues to decay because the students have become empowered by the lack of consequences for negative behavior,” Austin said.

So much for our endless mythological narrative of childhood innocence. In an email exchange the other day, I reminded a friend that according to every teacher I have talked to, there is no way to discipline or get rid of these hopelessly violent and disruptive students because their parents or activist groups would sue, and I suggested that it might require amending the Constitution to change the situation. 

If a small minority of “children” (another weasel word) are dispruptive and violent, why allow them to stay in the schools and ruin things for everyone else? Why not simply get rid of them? If the legal system will not allow it, perhaps the legislature could step in — and if that fails, the Constitution should be amended — simply conditioning the right to an education on good behavior by the student.

Is education a right? Or is it a duty? It strikes me that some kids clearly don’t want to be in school in the first place, and they’re most likely the ones making the trouble. So what is the philosophical basis for keeping them there? Is it really to “educate” them? I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s because society wants them kept off the streets, and by functioning as daytime holding facilities (but police live in fear of 3:00 p.m.), schools are seen as a de facto part of the crime prevention industry. If that’s what they are, maybe we should dispense with the “education” euphemism and simply hire more guards.

Oh the hypocrisy.

MORE: The disgusted teacher who wrote a letter to President Obama might be interested to know that his is administration planning a crackdown — on school discipline! They’re investigating schools to determine whether school discipline has a disproportionate impact on racial minorities.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The United States Commission on Civil Rights announces that it will hold a briefing on the Department of Education’s initiative to investigate school districts for disparities in discipline rates among racial and ethnic groups under Title VI, a statute that bans disparate treatment.  The Department has announced that it intends to initiate compliance reviews based on a disparate impact analysis in an effort to find districts that have such disparities.

Joanne Jacobs quotes a school teacher who is threatening to resign:

Allen Zollman, a teacher of English as a second language at an urban middle school in Pennsylvania that he did not name, said he . . . is opposed to having to give “a thought to disparate impact” if he needs to remove a disruptive student from class, saying he views it as a constraint on effective discipline.

Should his school require such a policy, Mr. Zollman said, he would respond in one of three ways: disregard it and continue to refer whatever students he sees fit for disciplinary action, do nothing and tolerate chaos in his classroom, or take an early retirement from teaching.

And who could blame him?

I can’t think of a better way to get conscientious teachers resign.


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4 responses to ““the students have become empowered by the lack of consequences for negative behavior””

  1. Kathy Kinsley Avatar
    Kathy Kinsley

    I’ll admit, I hated school. Had I a choice, I never would have attended. (I’d probably have learned some anyway – I could read by the time I was in kindergarten (that was because my mother read to me with the book – and me on her lap, though – fairly sure most of these students never had that advantage).
    But what would I have learned? I liked novels until I learned some science/math/English/history. I’d have known who Titania and Oberon were. I probably would have learned some from Heinlein and Doc Smith and Campbell and others – and maybe (only maybe) I would have wanted to learn facts because of them. If I could have stopped reading “Glory Road” or “Farmer in the Sky” or “Skylark whatever” first. Not sure I had that discipline.
    So, I’m conflicted here – between my 10 yr old self and my adult self. Who was FORCED to learn.
    One thing I do know is that our teachers had paddles. Big ones (M. Simon’s comments about PTSD from getting your knuckles rapped notwithstanding – and I never knew any rappee’s – and not knuckles in my school – who had that problem). We behaved. We hated school. But we learned what they had to teach us. And I think, in the long run, that’s a good thing.

  2. Kathy Kinsley Avatar
    Kathy Kinsley

    Oops – just to clarify – I STILL like novels. It’s just not all I read anymore.

  3. John S. Avatar
    John S.

    By definition, government education can’t be a “right,” because someone else has to give it to you. One certainly has the right to educate one’s self, of course, but government-supplied education is simply an entitlement.
    You quoted Shana Kemp as saying, “The young man had emotional disturbances. We can’t refuse a student entry into a school based upon that situation,” she said. Like hell you can’t, Shana. The other students’ “right” to an education trumps the perp’s “right” to act up in school. If his presence disrupts the learning process for the others, then get him out of there. She’s probably right that suspension would not have been appropriate–they should have chosen expulsion instead.

  4. Veeshir Avatar

    And then there are Zero Tolerance Schools where honor students are expelled for having a butter knife in their cars or where 6 year olds are suspended for having a 2 inch plastic gun for a Lego figure.
    As someone at Doubleplusundead said, Western Civilization is going to fall under the weight of its own absurdities.