Teachers strike back at disruptive students

Insight on the News, Dec 4, 1995 by Stephen Goode

A growing number of educators is advocating a fresh 'get tough' approach: Kick violent and disruptive students out of the classroom and put them in alternative schools that specialize in rehabilitation.

His message is clear -- and harsh. American classrooms these days too often are combat zones where teachers perform under combat "conditions," says C. Stephen Wallis. "Before we can improve our schools, we are going to have to make them safe."

Wallis, an assistant principal at Howard High School in Howard County, Md., speaks frequently to parents and teachers and at think tanks such as Washington's Heritage Foundation about the disorder he finds pandemic in America's public schools. "We now accept behavior we would not have tolerated only a few years ago," says Wallis. Many students regularly carry guns, knives and other weapons. Drug and alcohol abuse are rampant. "Every day we steal from time that should be devoted to their instruction [because public schools] lack the order necessary for learning."

The statistics that Wallis and others cite from a number of sources support their dark prognosis:

* The National League of Cities reports that school violence in the past year resulted in student deaths or injuries in 41 percent of American cities with populations of 100,000 or more.

* An estimated 900 teachers are threatened each hour of the school day with bodily harm, and almost 40 teachers are actually attacked.

* Nearly 40 percent of public-school students consider their schools unsafe.

From coast to coast, in elementary schools and high schools, students and teachers are touched by violence in one form or another. At Florence Nightingale Middle School in Los Angeles, first-year principal Marylou Amato held meetings with students and parents in October after a 3-year-old girl was murdered near the school and her 2-year-old brother wounded. In Tavares, Fla., groups of volunteer parents patrol school hallways since a 13-year-old was shot to death. The school offers a hotline through which students can report violence anonymously.

What to do? School administrators are hiring more security personnel and installing metal detectors at entrances. But more importantly, teachers unions are urging schools to adopt strict behavior codes -- and enforce them. In some places, teachers have taken disruptive students to court and persuaded judges to fine the students and their families as well as have the students expelled from school.

This fall, for example, the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, began a nationwide campaign for what the 875,000-member union calls "commonsense change." it wants school districts to develop explicit codes of student conduct. "Unless you have order . . . not much learning will go on," says AFT President Albert Shanker.

In late September, teachers in Florida asked a state Senate committee to give them the right to expel disruptive students without the elaborate process and administrative paperwork necessary in most districts. In St. Louis, a task force investigating violence in the city's schools suggested that assaults on teachers be regarded as an automatic felony, similar to assaults on police officers. The Seattle public-school system has adopted a "zero-tolerance" approach to violence, as has the whole state of West Virginia. Students who attack teachers or bring weapons to school in these jurisdictions are expelled automatically.

What all this amounts to, says Wallis, is a new attitude toward discipline, once frowned upon as abusive and restrictive. More and more educators are viewing discipline "as a kindness on the part of teachers, a necessary part of growing up, as necessary to personal growth," says Wallis.

For many teachers, however, the most aggravating aspect of school violence and disruption is that they get little or no support from school administrators who "fear lawsuits from irate parents" more than they care about teachers, says Deborah Sanville, a teacher of government at Hayfield High School in Fairfax County, Va.

Sanville made education history this year when she took a disruptive student to court -- and won a ruling that banished the student from the school for a full year and fined him $100. The student, loud-mouthed in class and verbally abusive toward Sanville, had raised an arm to strike her when a male faculty member stepped between them and received the blow.

Sanville regards the court's decision as a victory for teachers -- who have been ordered by courts to accept abusive students in the past far more often than they've been relieved of them. "I pressed charges immediately," she tells Insight. "I told the school that day [that she was going to take the issue to court regardless of what school officials wanted]. It was behavior that was illegal. It was behavior that would not be tolerated at a mall. Why should it be tolerated in school?"

The court order also called for the student to enroll in an anger-therapy program. Indeed, even tough-sounding educators such as Wallis do not want expelled students stranded without the possibility of guidance and genuine help. Wallis argues the need for "transitional schools [that] aren't a joke," where the behavior of incorrigible students can be monitored by professionals.