Recent Violence in Balt City Schools

Hi all

Wanted to let you know that this week we are going to be talking with students, administrators and teachers about this issue. Anything specific you would like us to bring up? We'll be bringing those interviews to you very soon.

My partner has been working in Baltimore City Public Schools as a teacher for the last 7 years in two different Middle Schools. Over the years we have received death threats at home from angry students (the Principal's response was to mock him for being scared when he asked for security to walk him to and from his car). His car has been also been vandalized. Several students have verbally threatened him and just last month a student threw a rock at his head. The list goes on and on. Every year he says he wants to leave, but then every year he knows he makes a difference in many children's lives and stays on another year and tries to be optimistic. He doesn't want to give up on these kids who need dedicated teachers. The job isn't easy without the violence. He puts in 10 -12 hour days and the pay is laughable - but he's there - where many fear to tread.

His heart is in the right place - as are the hearts of most of the teachers with whom he works, but the Administrators are failing to support the teachers by failing to inforce policy or report student on student violence or student on teacher violence or assault. Some Administrators feel their hands are tied by the limits on expulsion and by No Child Left Behind - (funding). On the other hand Administrators don't want to put the kids into the juvenile justice system which just seems to create tougher rougher kids. My partner was given the option to press charges against the child who threw the rock at his head and declined as he didn't want to put this small child in to the system which would only feed the child's violent tendencies but it was a difficult decision and he wonders if it was the right choice.

Parents and the families of violating students (if they have families - many of his students live in group homes and do not have familial support) mock and contradict teachers on a very regular basis. And we have witnessed parents beating students for getting in trouble for being violent... It's a cycle and community of violence and neglect and NO ONE seems to really want to look at the truth of the situation. This filmed beating is just the tip of a very deep sad iceberg.

It breaks my heart and scares me to know that teachers are being beaten in school and it infuriates me that Administrators blame the teachers when student violence escalates. The teachers have no recourse. Please help.

School violence is as inevitable as concentrated urban poverty. Both are preventable but neither is without the other. I wrote the following article in Nov. 2006. I think it is relevant.

November, 2006

Vision and the Fight for a New World

Education in a cooperative society

BY MIKE BRAND

Throughout the US, poor students are systematically deprived of education. Hundreds of thousands of students who live in poverty fail to become educated. It was recently reported that large numbers of high school graduates cannot do college-level work. Community college graduates are often barely literate and high school students are far worse off. At one Baltimore high school, only 3 percent of the students could pass the simple required state test in math and only 8 percent could pass the English test. Sadly, these results are not unusual among students from poor neighborhoods throughout the country. Millions of poor youth are uneducated and unprepared to function in society. Why?

Official explanations blame combinations of students, parents, teachers and schools. Education is held out as the way to escape poverty. When poor students fail, their continued poverty becomes their own fault. What a lie! Rationalizations and 'edu-babel' abound. But, neither teachers, students, parents nor education administrators can make the education system work. We support their efforts to do what they can to improve education delivery, but they are constrained by the system within which they work. The problem is greater than the way things are taught. It extends to the system of private property, itself.

So, why do poor kids get such low scores? One reason is money. "Money talks" as the saying goes, in education like anything else. Just ask Bill Gates. His Microsoft Corp has designed an ultra-modern high-tech high school for a few hundred poor kids in Philadelphia. It's cost is $84,000 per student, considerably more than the amount spent at a normal public high school! The hundreds of thousands of students not chosen for this experimental project will go without, unless a fight is waged for their right to be educated. That fight must be carried out. Our children deserve no less. If Bill Gates' school is worthwhile for some, then it should be demanded for all.

That struggle must be waged but it will not solve the problem so long as students live in hopeless poverty which, of course, is growing. The reason is that education is not a social isolate. It is connected to the economic environment. Students cannot eliminate the effects of poverty on education without eliminating poverty itself. In a cooperative, prosperous society based on human need rather than maximum profit for the corporations, education would break out with wonderful effects on the students and all of society. After all, our youth are intelligent creative people. Removing the barriers to education would result in a fully educated and cultured population. Art, science and culture, mathematics and poetry would all flourish. We would become a dynamic intellectual place, more and more exciting to live in. We can only imagine the boundaries which would be crossed. It is certainly an exciting society to work for.

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This article originated in the People's Tribune
PO Box 3524, Chicago, IL 60654, 773-486-3551, info@peoplestribune.org.
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I think I initially posted this in the wrong section, my apologies.  Reading through the Sun's coverage of the assault on Jolita Berry, I saw no mention - by school representatives or by the education "experts" - of the school's failure in its responsibility to create an aura of authority around and by the faculty.  Authority is different from power - which schools seem to have abdicated as well by shying away from reporting and punishing violent crimes by students - in that authority involves persuasion of students that it is in their interest to respect teachers.  This requires school administrators to back teachers and to offer clear, consistent consequences for unacceptable behavior, regardless of whether such behavior could be partially explained by home environment.  (If that is the case, the school needs to provide an alternative to the home environment.) It also requires modelling of expected behavior.  While I agree that in retrospect Ms. Berry could have handled the threat differently, I was appalled by principal Jean Ragin's comment that Ms. Berry invited the attack with "triggering words."  I do agree that it is important to learn to read cues and de-escalate conflict, but the assumption that violence is a given is dangerous.  Psychiatric residents are taught similar de-escalating techniques meant to be applied to ill, hospitalized patients.  The expectation for students' behavior in school should be far different.  The de-escalation strategies proposed by the "experts" are essentailly strategies of harm reduction, an approach some of us in the medical profession view as therapeutic nihilism.  In other words, as long as violent kids are expected to be violent, these behaviors will persist.  Teachers will be forced to flee, and the vicious cycle will continue.