Courting disorder in the schools - lawsuits against schools

Public Interest, Summer, 1999 by Abigail Thernstrom

When twelve students and a teacher were shot dead in the Columbine High School massacre, public alarm (abetted by the media) was inevitable. In a Newsweek poll immediately following the killing, 63 percent of Americans said that it was "very or somewhat likely that a shooting incident could happen in their schools." In fact, however, such shootings remain rare - and thus newsworthy. Fewer than 1 percent of homicides involving school-age children actually occur in or near schools, according to the Centers for Disease Control. When kids are killed, it's almost always elsewhere. "Have you ever ... had a weapon such as a gun or knife, pulled on you at school?" California students were asked in a 1998 survey. Only 2 percent answered yes.

Nevertheless, schools are hardly islands of tranquility. In that same California poll, students were asked to name "the most important problem" facing their local school; 32 percent said "crime/gangs/violence/drugs." just plain disorder, incivility, and disobedience should have been added to the list. In the academic year 1989-90, New York Newsday's education reporter, Emily Sachar, taught eighth-grade mathematics at the Wait Whitman Intermediate School in Brooklyn, New York. Many kids, she discovered, had never been taught how to sit still, how to control what they said, how to behave. Her students called her "cuntface," told her "to fuck off," spat in her face, played radios during class, and threw chairs at one another. Even if a majority wanted to learn, a small group of troublemakers could turn the room upside down in minutes. Sachar's story is hardly unique. A parent participating in a Public Agenda focus group in the winter of 1997-98 reported after visiting a Cleveland middle school: "I didn't want to go in.... The school was a madhouse; it was filthy. Who's in control here? The kids?"

Such stories (easy to come by) are supported by some data. In a 1991 survey, 58 percent of secondary-school teachers said they had been verbally abused at some point in their teaching career - 23 percent in the four weeks prior to the poll. Where there is verbal abuse, there are usually fights, vandalism, gangs, and drugs as well. The point is a variation on James Q. Wilson's well-known "broken windows" thesis: Ignore the small stuff, and serious crime gets a green light. If the national picture is consistent with that in California, only a small percentage of individual students (across all grades) have actually had a knife or gun pointed at them. But other data suggest that only a minority of schools are entirely crime free. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) surveyed schools in the academic year 1996-97; 57 percent reported at least one crime to the police. Since rapes, robberies, physical attacks or fights involving a deadly weapon, and other forms of serious crime - at least some of which goes unreported - seldom occur in elementary schools, the secondary-school picture must be considerably worse than the 57 percent total suggests.

The headline-grabbing shootings in Colorado, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oregon in the past two years have all been in suburban schools, perhaps, in part, because they had not installed the extraordinary range of security measures one finds in many urban schools - photo ID cards worn around the neck, video cameras, undercover and regular police, drug-sniffing dogs, and, of course, metal detectors. But such measures are concentrated in inner-city schools because the problem of crime - to say nothing of disorder - is indisputably greater in urban settings, particularly those with high numbers of minority students.

Thus, in the 1996-97 school year, the rate of serious violent crime was 19 per 100,000 students in 95 percent white schools, but 96 in schools with at least 50 percent minority enrollment. A fall 1996 survey found that 41 percent of black high-school students, as compared with 27 percent of whites, felt that disruptive students were a "very serious problem" at their school. The disparity is important because, on average, black and Hispanic students are academically far behind whites and Asians. Violence and disorder surely affect the level of learning. "Serious and nonserious offenses [are] negatively related to gains in achievement," a 1998 Educational Testing Service study concluded. Parents and teachers put the matter more simply. "My kid hates the school. She is scared," a mother of a tenth-grader at the overwhelmingly black Dorchester High School in Boston reports. Scared kids who hate school are not likely to learn much. And teachers who must deal with even a small minority of disruptive students are not very effective. In 1997, a new and frustrated Los Angeles high-school teacher described her English class as "nine-tenths policeman, one-tenth educational."

Everyone has lawyers

Every teacher knows that students cannot learn in chaotic and threatening classrooms. Why, then, is the problem not more effectively addressed? A parent in Haddonfield, New Jersey, had her own answer: "They're terrified of lawsuits."