How liberals put teachers in the line of fire - teachers and school violence

Washington Monthly, June, 1994 by Adam Marcus

Item: In the Bronx's DeWitt Clinton High School, a student described as "emotionally disturbed" was caught in school with a four inch knife. The weapon was promptly confiscated, but because the student was in special education, he could not, according to the school system's rules, be suspended. Because the knife's blade was not longer than four inches--and therefore not considered a weapon under New York State law--he could not be arrested. The student was transferred only after the teachers' union threatened to publicize the episode.

Item: In 1992, a 13-year-old boy in Northeast Washington, D.C., was allowed back in school less than a month after being arrested for firing a gun on the playground. Convinced that the student was capable of further violence, the principal, teachers, and the Parent Teacher Association all protested his reinstatement and pushed to have him transferred. In a Washington Post article, a spokesperson for the D.C. school system, Cheryl Johnson, explained the decision to ignore the protests by stating that a 25-day suspension was the school system's policy for a first gun offense.

No one cognizant enough to have read a newspaper in the past few years needs to be convinced that violence in our public schools is an epidemic. A 1991 National Institute of Justice survey of selected students in 10 inner-city public schools across the country found that 22 percent of students reported owning a gun, one third of whom said they carried a gun to school "regularly or occasionally." According to American Educator, 36 percent of inner city junior high school teachers report that they have been threatened by a student. Eleven percent of suburban teachers and 7 percent of rural teachers say they have been threatened.

Conservatives hear these wearying numbers and talk about more metal detectors and larger security forces. Liberals hear the same news and think of savage inequalities and root causes. Both have a point. But as the items above hint, the wound of public school violence is, to an alarming degree, the kind which neither battalions of cops nor Great Society programs can fully heal. A growing number of laws hamstring teachers and administrators from dealing forcefully and freely with violent and emotionally disturbed teens. For any teacher or principal looking to remove a troublemaker, there are batteries of forms to be filed and endless judicial hoops to jump through.

These bureaucratic hurdles merely codify a deeper, fundamental flaw in our thinking about public schools: namely, that they are supposed to not simply educate our youth, but reform the violent and heal the deranged. That's an order too tall for any institution, let alone the perennially under-funded, overextended schools charged with shaping the hearts and minds of our children. It's become a cliche to say that there is no job more important than educating our kids. Yet we have hopelessly complicated that job by demanding that teachers take on the additional roles of police officer, physical therapist, counselor and baby sitter--a bit like asking your dentist to be able to fix your teeth while he gives you a heart transplant and shines your shoes.

There are some mental blocks that need busting here, mental blocks built on the firmest of ground--good intentions. In recent years, the courts, Congress and groups like the NAACP and the ACLU have moved to broaden and protect the rights of students. At the same time, it has become received wisdom that our public schools should be required to "mainstream"--that is, place in a regular school classroom--all comers. Now, protecting students' rights makes eminent sense, but it has become so difficult to remove the chronically unruly that the pace of learning in many classrooms has slowed to a glacial crawl or been stopped altogether. And as for taking all comers, well it's hard to argue with the spirit of that ethos. Many who care about education--including this magazine--have urged public schools to stop "tracking" students (segregating them into accelerated and slow classes) because often this practice causes differences in ability rather than merely reflecting them. The distinction to keep in mind is between students who want to learn and those who don't: Including slower students doesn't stop a teacher from teaching, whereas having violent or disturbed students around does. That's why a tracked student and one who tries to strangle a teacher shouldn't be confused--the former should be mainstreamed, the latter should be expelled and charged with assault. It's time to learn the difference.

Christine Carnes understands this lesson only too well. In May 1993, when Carnes was a teacher at San Francisco's McAteer High School, she was attacked by an emotionally disturbed student wielding a chair. "He was saying 'I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill you' and I believe he would have," says Carnes, whose arm, back, and neck were damaged in the attack. She and three other teachers are now filing a grievance against the San Francisco Unified School District on the grounds that they were not sufficiently protected. "I'll never go back to teaching," says Carnes, a 25-year veteran of the public school system.