The politics of school violence

Public Interest, Summer, 1994 by Jackson Toby

ON JANUARY 23, 1986, eighteen-year old Eric Hawk, a student at the senior high school in suburban Surrattsville, Maryland, was waiting in the school parking lot to board his bus at the end of the day. Another eighteen-year old student, who had quarreled with Eric before, challenged him to a fight, and, while Eric was removing his coat, stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver that he had stolen earlier in the day from the art room. Eric went into convulsions and died almost immediately. Both Eric and his murderer were black males.

The attack would have resembled many everyday school assaults had it not ended in death. Both the victim and the perpetrator were students who had previously quarreled. (Teachers and other staff members are much less frequently victims of attacks.) Second, both the victim and the perpetrator were males, a perpetrator-victim relationship much more frequent than females attacking females or males attacking females. (Cases of females attacking males are almost nonexistent.) Third, the violence was intraracial rather than interracial. (The majority of attacks are of blacks on blacks or of whites on whites, although when interracial attacks occur, the bulk of them are of blacks on whites.) The social characteristics of victims and perpetrators of robberies, the second most common form of school violence, are similar.

One consequence of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was that school administrators in newly integrated schools had to cope with more frequent violent misbehavior of black than of white students. They found themselves in a touchy situation. Despite efforts to increase educational opportunities for black students, despite statements of regret for past injustices and insensitivity, white teachers and administrators were suspected by black students of insincerity when they suspended or expelled black students more frequently than white students. Indeed the more militant black students accused them of being secret racists.

For example, Professor Gerald Grant of Syracuse University studied the evolution of the leading high school in a northern city from 1953 to 1985. "Hamilton High" changed between 1966 and 1971 from an elite high school with an overwhelmingly white student body and an all-white faculty to a more pluralistic school with about 8 percent black enrollment and several black teachers. Some of the black students were from essentially middle-class backgrounds; others came from disadvantaged neighborhoods of the city. Grant reports that black student leaders questioned the principal's commitment to racial justice when he insisted on disciplining several black students who, after a memorial service for Martin Luther King, "rampaged through the school, breaking equipment in a physics laboratory and tearing into the library, where they overturned tables, swept books off the shelves, smashed windows, and tore up floor tiles." In a large meeting with students in the high school auditorium, the principal attempted in vain to convince black students that he was punishing rule violations, not the race of the perpetrators.

In point of fact, racial disproportion in suspensions characterizes not only Hamilton High but secondary schools throughout the United States, as has been repeatedly documented by national surveys conducted by the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. Thousands of school districts report in detail the racial and ethnic composition of the students in their schools and the racial and ethnic composition of suspended and expelled students. These proportions are carefully compared by staff members of the Office for Civil Rights for indications of statistical disparities and thus for evidence of possible discrimination. The critical question, however, is not whether minority students are subjected to school discipline at a higher rate than white students; it is whether the discipline is meted out fairly by a color-blind standard. One may argue that black and Hispanic students in the United States, Jamaican students in England, Arab students in France, and Maori students in New Zealand misbehave to a greater extent than majority-group students in their respective societies because of the disadvantaged family situations and neighborhoods from which minority students come. But whatever the explanation for misbehavior, schools quite properly must deal with it.

However, it is not easy to convince advocates of greater social justice for minorities that disciplining black students at a statistically higher rate than white students is justifiable. They often believe that white teachers have residual prejudice against minorities that leads them to make unfounded charges. This is somewhat similar to the argument that the police, the prosecutors, and the courts discriminate against minority suspects, thereby explaining the disproportionate representation of minorities in American prisons.

In short, questions of what causes school violence and how it can be most effectively controlled are difficult enough. And these difficulties give rise to honest intellectual differences among social scientists. But in addition to the scientific questions are political differences arising from the fact of more frequent disciplinary measures taken against blacks than against whites to control school violence. This political reality has colored the congressional response to public concern about school violence.