How Liberals Put Teachers in the Line of Fire
Marcus, Adam
How Liberals Put Teachers in the Line of Fire If we really want to give public schools a chance, we can't expect teachers to teach and be cops and social workers all at once BY ADAM MARCUS Item:...
...Code 42-1983 states that anyone acting "under the color of state law" can be sued for violating another person's civil rights...
...But we were wrong—dead wrong—to dump the violent on the public schools...
...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...
...Both have a point...
...The group has consistently argued—in amicus briefs and public awareness brochures—that metal detectors, random searches, and mandatory expulsion for weapons possession in school infringe on a student's constitutional rights...
...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...
...He used to say things like 'I'm going to get you' in front of the whole class...
...If the time limit expires before the board meets, the case is dismissed...
...I had to spend the whole period going over simple repetition just to keep them under control," says Frank...
...I'll never go back to teaching," says Carnes, a 25-year veteran of the public school system...
...The kids who want to learn shut up for fear of getting pummeled...
...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...
...Conservatives hear these wearying numbers and talk about more metal detectors and larger security forces...
...Adam Marcus is a staff writer for Prince George's Journal...
...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...
...As Saunders wrote, "Now city parents ought to worry not only about who will protect their children from students who pack weapons, but also about who will protect their children from school administrators...
...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...
...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...
...The genesis of San Francisco's head-in-the-sand attitude can be traced to 1975, when the Supreme Court, in Goss v. Lopez, decided that public school pupils had to get a hearing for suspension terms longer than 10 days...
...Indeed, the number of expulsions has fallen by 65 percent in the past three years, down from 143 in 1991 to 50 last fall...
...Carnes reported every incident to school administrators, and each time the boy was returned to her classroom and a note was added to his personal file which read, "Conference held with student...
...Teacher's Pests The damage from the prolonged, tortuous proceedings which leave dangerous students in classes isn't measured simply in battered teachers or overburdened administrators—it is also measured in under-educated students...
...In recent years, the courts, Congress and groups like the NAACP and the ACLU have moved to broaden and protect the rights of students...
...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...
...Jonathan Frank found himself dealing with so many non-stop disruptions that he resorted to what teachers call "drill and kill...
...This office then holds a hearing to decide whether or not to recommend action against the student, and then, if the unit feels the recommendation has merit, passes on its findings to the Los Angeles City Board of Education...
...Does this leave us with the problem of what to do with the behaviorally disturbed...
...Last December, for instance, the board had so many cases in the pipeline and delayed hearings so long that two cases of possession of a knife, one case of brandishing a knife, and one possession of a dangerous object were neglected...
...Yet the sum total effect is to create a public school classroom that is so hellbent on inclusion and so obsessed with students' rights that the point of school—learning—ends up getting short shrift...
...That same year, Congress' Education of the Handicapped Act set up additional obstacles by mandating that handicapped students cannot be suspended or expelled if their offense results from the nature of their handicap...
...It's tempting to see this as a pedagogical version of white flight, but for many in the profession the point is that in private schools they get to teach...
...There were 63 knife-related expulsions in 1991 and just 10 last fall...
...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...
...How Liberals Put Teachers in the Line of Fire If we really want to give public schools a chance, we can't expect teachers to teach and be cops and social workers all at once 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...
...In those schools where minority students receive a disproportionate percent of a school's suspensions, organizations such as the NAACP have cried foul...
...Christine Carnes understands this lesson only too well...
...Meanwhile, the children of many of the well-intentioned folks whose good intentions brought disruptive and violent behavior to public schools—the children of lawyers, lawmakers, and judges—are safely ensconced in private schools where students who can't behave are wisely, swiftly ejected...
...And does that mean we will have a very difficult problem, one that will often be heartbreaking, left to deal with...
...reprimanded and counseled...
...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...
...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...
...Eleven percent of suburban teachers and 7 percent of rural teachers say they have been threatened...
...Obviously, this could lead to a situation where a minority student who deserves to be suspended isn't disciplined because doing so could put the school over its "quota" of minority suspensions...
...A growing number of laws hamstring teachers and administrators from dealing forcefully and freely with violent and emotionally disturbed teens...
...Debra Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has been watching the city's school district board closely and believes that the board's strategy to reduce in-school violence is pretty simple: ignore it...
...I hated it, but it was the only way...
...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...
...The ACLU, for its part, hasn't helped matters much either...
...In the following decade, courts began to apply civil rights doctrine to school disciplinary cases...
...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...
...Of course it does...
...The idea is to make the school system seem safer by reporting fewer violent incidents...
...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...
...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...
...Board members make the final decision, but here's the catch—every case has its own statute of limitations...
...While the most egregious incidents (often those involving guns) get handled first, usually that simply means frightening cases get pushed aside so that the board can handle really frightening cases...
...As a result, the Department of Education can require school boards to demonstrate, based on numbers alone, that they are not discriminating by race...
...What public schools need is what private and parochial schools already have—the option of real discipline for first time offenders and expulsion for the incorrigible...
...Everyone's heart is in the right place, no one's intentions are easily impugned...
...limitations set...
...Of course it does...
...He beat other students, one so brutally in December 1992 that he was arrested and received a five day suspension...
...Liberals hear the same news and think of savage inequalities and root causes...
...As part of the settlement in a lawsuit brought by the NAACP in 1984, the school system is being monitored by the courts to ensure that suspensions are proportional to the number of black and white students...
...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...
...And as for taking all comers, well it's hard to argue with the spirit of that ethos...
...I couldn't continue...
...In Virginia's Fairfax County public schools, on the other hand, any recommendation for expulsion must travel four rungs up a bureaucratic ladder before action is taken...
...Public school officials, of course, act under color of state law and therefore fall under the law's scope...
...According to Linda Wilson of the Student Discipline Proceedings Unit, if the board cancels a meeting, as it sometimes does, review of some serious cases can be delayed until past their expiration dates...
...According to Charles Kolb, deputy general counsel at the Department of Education during the Reagan administration, this law was "a chilling factor which prevented principals and teachers from taking disciplinary action against unruly students...
...That is exactly what seems to have happened at San Francisco's McAteer High...
...Additional reporting was provided by Stryk Thomas...
...There are some mental blocks that need busting here, mental blocks built on the firmest of ground—good intentions...
...The student was transferred only after the teachers' union threatened to publicize the episode...
...In 1993, for example, the Southern California chapter condemned the Los Angeles school district's policy of automatic suspension for bringing both real and toy guns to school as something just short of "academic capital punishment...
...But if we don't get the violence out of the public schools, we will continue to get the inferior education...
...Had I stayed in public schools, I'd be burned out and in another career by now," says Linda Preuter, a 5th grade teacher at Georgetown Day School, who took a 30 percent pay cut when she left her public school job...
...And it is time to admit our error before we let it destroy one of democracy's greatest institutions...
...It's become a cliche to say that there is no job more important than educating our kids...
...please keep parents posted...
...This will doubtless seem too draconian to all the liberals who have taken their children out of the public schools because of fear of violence and inferior education...
...Let's give the public school teacher a fair chance to do the job right...
...Jonathan Frank, a former teacher at the school, believes that the reduction of suspensions has come about because most of the students being suspended are minorities and school administrators have decided that minority suspensions are, in his words, a "political hot potato...
...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...
...More recently, in response to pressure from minority groups, the Department of Education has turned school discipline into a numbers game...
...With school systems facing the prospect of this kind of court oversight, administrators act preemptively...
...It was too stressful...
...In Los Angeles, to suspend or expel a student a principal must submit a recommendation for action to the school system's Student Discipline Proceedings Unit...
...It's time to learn the difference...
...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...
...The Cincinnati public school district is getting acquainted with the absurdities of this kind of policy...
...2000 U.S...
...So the ACLU worries about unlawful searches and seizures, the NAACP frets about discrimination, the courts try to protect students' rights, and Congress pushes for more democratic schools...
...Indeed, there's less and less actual teaching in public schools these days—so much less that many teachers are willing to take a cut in pay to get work in a private school...
...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...
...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...
...Emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children can have the same effect on a classroom because they demand far more time and energy...
...The upshot, as Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, puts it, is "You don't help the bad kid, and you've effectively destroyed the environment for the other kids...
...inevitably, there are opportunists inclined to take advantage of the chaos...
...The effect of this ruling was to turn every principal seeking disciplinary action into a prosecutor saddled with the time-consuming responsibility of amassing evidence and building a case...
...There should not be a right to appeal with the threat of limitless hearings and paperwork that the appeal process imposes on the teacher and the principal who initiate the expulsion...
...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...
...According to American Educator, 36 percent of inner city junior high school teachers report that they have been threatened by a student...
...When a principal and faculty member agree on an expulsion on the ground that the student involved disrupts classes and interferes with the ability of the teacher to teach and of the other students to learn, that should be the end of it...
...Carnes remembers the student calling her "bitch" and "lesbian" to her face...
...This is a decent idea on its face, until you realize that Christine Carnes' student could argue that he attacked her because of his emotional handicap...
...The student-attacker had already demonstrated what could politely be described as "behavioral problems...
...He had no regard for teachers and no fear of being disciplined...
...When one bad guy gets away with disrupting a class, it's a green light to those on the behavioral margins who might otherwise be stopped in their tracks...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 6
