*  *  *

One can learn a great deal about a society by the way in which it treats its youth.  It is often said the youth are the future.  While often minimized as a cliché, a society that attacks its youth has no future.  In the United States, there are unprecedented attacks to education, with massive cuts to funding.  In addition to this, there have been massive cuts to social services in general.  Unemployment among the youth, including college graduates, continues to rise as does the student loan burden.  Concomitant to these developments are massive increases in police presence and methods in schools, where schools are filled with spy cameras, with some districts having cameras in every classroom; many schools now have metal detectors and armed guards.  Police raids of schools, where youth are attacked—showed to the floor and handcuffed, threatened with weapons—are becoming common.  Mere suspicion that a crime might be committed is justification for school officials to call the police.

Over the last few decades, several approaches have been developed, aiming to prevent violence and making schools safer.  Whether one examines anti-bullying measures, so-called school security initiatives, or violence prevention programs, one finds that the main theme is the need to “stop the problem before it starts.”  This is the notion of prevention.  Its content is similar to the notion of pre-emptive war.

Since all students are “potentially violent” they must be “screened” and “managed.”  Contrast this with the notion of safety, where people are protected from the arbitrary use of force by their government.  Two examples standout for analysis, namely the Secret Service’s “Safe Schools Initiative,” and state anti-bullying laws.  These examples reveal the role of the state in criminalizing the youth, and efforts to bring about new arrangements where the democratic norms are eschewed in favor of “security”.

The Secret Service’s “Safe Schools Initiative”

Ostensibly in response to the disturbing number of school shootings, beginning in 1999 the Secret Service, in a joint effort with the U.S. Department of Education, carried out what it calls its “Safe Schools Initiative.”  Over the course of four years, the Secret Service published three reports on what it calls “targeted school violence.”  Summaries of these reports have been widely disseminated in newspapers, on websites for educators, and in professional and scholarly journals.  Dissemination has emphasized the notion of identifying and stopping “potentially violent” youth.

The Initiative “examined school shootings in the United States as far back as 1974, through the end of the school year in 2000, analyzing a total of 37 incidents involving 41 student attackers.”  There are over 50 million students attending K-12 schools in the United States.  The Secret Service notes that almost all those convicted in school shootings have said they felt alienated, that nobody cared about them or listened to them.  Most experienced severe depression, with many (although exactly how many is not known for sure) were being treated with psychiatric drugs, and were at the time of the shooting experiencing a sense of great loss or personal failure.

A key component of the Initiative is the application of the Secret Service’s “threat assessment model” to schools.  Taking as its starting point the already widely opposed practice of “profiling,” the Secret Service says this is no longer the preferred method for evaluating “risk.”  The Initiative adds, “Until recently, most law enforcement investigations of violent crime have been conducted after the offense has occurred” [emphasis in original].  In popularizing this notion, the monopoly media is working to normalize the arrangement where police function not as law enforcers, but as a force to arbitrarily interfere with the human person in the name of prevention.

This so-called threat assessment is described as a “set of investigations and operational activities designed to identify, assess, and manage persons who may pose a threat of violence to identifiable targets.”  The main task of threat assessment is to look at “pathways of ideas and behaviors that may lead to violent action.”  The Secret Service says that “the question in threat assessment is not ‘What does the subject look like?’ but ‘has the subject engaged in recent behavior that suggests that he/she is moving on a path toward violence directed toward a particular target(s)’?”  The Secret Service also says to “watch out” for youth interested or involved in “extremist” groups without offering any examples or guidelines for identifying such groups.

The monopoly media fails to point out that the whole approach challenges existing U.S. law, where only an act can be judged, not intent: the notion of “potentially violent” is arbitrary and illegal.  Any one, particularly police and school officials, can brand a student’s behavior as “on a path toward violence” and thus call for their quarantine.  For example, an honor-roll high school student in Kansas was suspended for writing a poem entitled “Who Killed My Dog.”  A kindergartner in New Jersey was suspended from school for saying “I’m going to shoot you” on the playground while playing cops and robbers with his classmates.  A sixth-grader in Texas was put in juvenile detention for writing a Halloween essay (assigned) about a student who kills fellow students and a teacher.  Also in Texas, school officials disciplined students for wearing black armbands to mourn the victims of Columbine and to protest overly restrictive school policies. 

This claim to be “on a path to violence” also is used to criminalize dissent.  On April 23, 2004, U.S. Secret Service agents were in Prosser, Washington to interrogate a 15-year-old art student about political drawings he had turned in to his high school teacher as part of a class assignment.  The student was interrogated by the Secret Service and branded as being a threat, but then not arrested.  The school district did discipline him, but district officials refused to say why and what the punishment was. Youth at the school said the student was expressing his views against the war in his art, which is his right.

The student turned in several sketches opposing the war on Iraq and the war on terrorism.  One drawing showed a man “in Middle-Eastern-style clothing” with an AK-47 rifle and was deemed “most controversial” by school officials.  The man was holding a stick with the oversized head of President Bush on it.  The student said the head was enlarged as an effigy.  The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.  Another sketch showed Bush dressed as a devil and launching a missile.  The caption read, “End the war on terrorism.”  Another drawing urged votes for then Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. 

Revealing that school personnel are increasingly being drawn into profiling and attacking youth who oppose U.S. wars of aggression, the teacher reportedly turned the drawings over to school administrators.  The administrators called in the police, who brought in the Secret Service, all with no crime committed and no threats of any kind made.

School officials and police justified arbitrarily silencing the youth by simply asserting that the student’s drawings were not “political cartoons.” Instead, Superintendent Tolcacher insisted “it was not a freedom of speech issue, but a concern over the depiction of violence.”  Trying to normalize police profiling of youth based on their views and what police claim to be their intent, Wallace Shields, special agent in charge of the district explained: “If we get what someone reports to be a threat against any person or place we protect, we investigate it.”  “The drawing in itself is not the threat,” he said, emphasizing that it is “the intent behind it and the capability of the person to act upon it.”  The Secret Service, police and school administrators provided no explanation as to how the student’s intent was determined.  Note that the Secret Service is known as the President’s personal police force, an organization whose first director—a vigilante famous for attacking immigrants—had inscribed on his badge, “Death to All Traitors.”   The Secret Service is the same federal agency conducting live exercises in mass pre-emptive arrests and confining protesters to “protest pens.”  Invoking the “logic” of the “war on terrorism,” the Secret Service district office in Washington State said its actions in Prosser were not out of the ordinary.  “This is not something unique to Washington, and this is not something unique to the times that we live in,” said Shields.

States Make Bullying a Crime

The second example concerns so-called anti-bullying measures.  With these developments, social problems like bullying are made into “law and order” issues.  The actual problems are ignored.  In addition to specifically criminalizing behavior rooted in social problems, so-called anti-bullying laws and school security initiatives render youth as criminals on the basis of intent in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act defines terrorism based on intent.

Under the guise of preventing school violence, many states across the U.S. have or are considering adopting or modifying laws making bullying in public schools a crime.  At least 18 states now make bullying a crime, according to news sources.  (See http://www.bullypolice.org/ for updates.)

In Georgia earlier this year, the House passed a “tougher law on bullying,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The measure would expand the current law to cover elementary schools as well as middle and high schools.  As with many recently passed or proposed laws making bullying a crime, it calls on parents and students to make anonymous tips to their local schools and would require that all reports of bullying be investigated.  The news sources do not report who is responsible for carrying out the investigations.

Significantly, the new law would change the definition of bullying, which is now defined as a student’s “willful attempt or threat to inflict injury,” or an “intentional display of force” to provoke fear.  Under the new definition, bullying would be defined as “any pattern of written or verbal expression or any physical act or gesture that is intended [emphasis added] to ridicule, humiliate, intimidate, or cause measurable physical or emotional distress upon one or more students in the school, on school grounds, in school vehicles, at designated school bus stops, or at school activities or sanctioned events.”

In Indiana early this year, Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed actively backed a bill that would “require Indiana’s 293 school districts to adopt rules prohibiting bullying,” according to the Indianapolis Star.  “The bill,” the Star says, “would provide a better legal definition of bullying.” Senate Bill 231 defines bullying as “overt, repeated acts designed [emphasis added] to harass, ridicule, intimidate or humiliate another student.”  Indiana Legislatures are promoting the bill as an “alternative” to increasing funding for education, especially full-day kindergarten.  

In New York State, proposed changes would present an exceedingly broad and subjective definition of bullying.  Section 2803(D) of the proposed Senate Bill defines bullying as “threatening, stalking or seeking to coerce or compel a person to do something; engaging in verbal or physical conduct” [emphasis added]. 

The laws generally require that any “tip” be investigated by state authorities, thus immediately bringing state authorities into the picture even if no problem, let alone a crime, exists.  They also make determination of “bullying” a completely subjective matter of whether an administrator or teacher or parent thinks an individual intended to be bullying.

Discussion

It is important to recognize that this notion of safety is a “police” notion, where the issue is given as the need for safe schools. The question is of course safe from what?  According to the view of “safe schools” students make schools un-safe.  This notions of safety is informed by the aim of protecting the state or “national interest”.  As an example, the national organization of school resource (police) officers has recently sworn allegiance to the President and declared support for the war on terrorism.  This blocks people from recognizing that bullying, for example, is a social problem, not a question of national security.  This “prevention” approach actually blocks parents, students and teachers from uniting and working out together real solutions to the problems the youth and society face.  Instead, students’ behavior is criminalized, as all are labeled “potential” threats, and everyone is to be afraid of everyone else, secretly reporting on everyone else.  Teachers are to become informants and enforcers for the police.  This is a recipe for disaster, not a solution!

Equally important is this: the notion of prevention justifies attacking students rights and the basic democratic premises of innocent until proven guilty, due process and habeas corpus.  How so?  If prevention means “stopping people from committing acts of violence” logic holds that one must be able to identify the person who will in the future commit a violent act.  On this basis, the arbitrary notion of “potentially violent,” the notion that youth have a “propensity to commit violent acts” is popularized, normalized and justified.  Unless one believes in clairvoyance, determining those who will commit violent crimes in the future is impossible, and inherently arbitrary.

The notion of “potentially violent” serves as a justification for using force against students who have committed no crime, violated no school rule. This of course violates all three of the basic democratic premises listed above. The claim to be able to “identify potentially violent youth” is in fact a justification for impunity, where school officials can suspend and expel students at will under the guise of solving the problem of violence.  Now, similar actions are to be done in the name of “school security,” and “preventing terrorism.”

[NOTE: this is an edited version of a paper presented to the Halifax International Symposium On Media And Disinformation, June 30th – July 4th, 2004, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.]

Related posts

• Ten Years After Columbine: A Letter to A Principal After Virginia Tech (0)
• Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence (0)
• Veteran Chicago Teacher & Former Director of Safety Speaks Out on the Impact of the Recession, Ducan Policies (0)

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech has raised in me a profound desire to act so as to stop things from “going from bad to worse.” For years I have studied school violence, and for years, I have witnessed the same misguided reaction to each violent incident. I have calmly explained to my son my opposition to the growing policing and surveillance of our children and youth (in the name of their security) and explained to him my understanding that such policies only serve to reinforce in the youth a sense of powerlessness, a sense of criminality that they do not deserve. How can the youth be held responsible for a world not of their own making? (I would be amiss if I did not commend you for not overreacting to the recent toy BB gun incident.)

I have, in my years of study, found absolutely no evidence that the typical security measures adopted by our schools have assisted the youth, teachers or administrators in contending with the growing social breakdown that is evidenced in mass killings of youth by youth.

School “lockdowns” are among the commonly adopted measures, and in this way, you can see that the immediate impetus for this letter arises in response to your April 23 notice to parents explaining the measures you have chosen to take … to make our children safe. You outlined the lockdown procedures and assured parents that instruction will continue during the lockdown.

With all due respect, I do not believe that quality instruction will be possible under conditions of lockdown. Such a practice sends a confused message to students and teachers: you are potentially under attack, but you should proceed as normal. How is this helpful? The notorious nuclear drills of the 1960s come to mind, exercises that had a negative impact on the socialization of Americans (not to mention ineffective in the event of a real attack). The young men and women at Virginia Tech were instructed to duck and hide, as they or their friends were picked off one by one. How is training our youth to be passive in the face of attack helpful? Can we do nothing but pull down the blinds? I can’t help but see such procedure as metaphor for how we relate to society.

While I suppose we could have a reasonable argument about what security drills are most useful …, the real issue, I think, is this: the President of the United States has publicly stated that the events of last Monday are impossible to understand. If such events are “impossible to understand,” how is that so many officials move so quickly to propose solutions—such as lockdowns, more surveillance, more ID cards, more police, more restriction of movement, more restrictions on rights—while admitting no understanding of the cause of the violence?

Violent acts of this type have only increased in the last three decades, amidst all the so-called security measures. I say so-called because the reputation of our schools as prisons speaks to the fact that these efforts have not make our youth safe—but they have made them more and more into criminals. This is of the utmost concern to me as a parent and teacher. Our youth are made to silently walk in lines, like inmates. Our youth are denied the right to talk during lunch, like inmates. Our youth are ruled using the means of collective punishment, like inmates. This is unacceptable and I encourage all school administrators to discuss alternatives to these strategies for addressing the issues of violence our youth and teachers face.

There is one thing that is constantly avoided in discussions about Monday’s tragedy: social responsibility. We are to debate the role of technology, the guns, movies and video games. Yet, when the FBI interviewed living perpetrators of school violence, all said the same thing: they were ignored and ostracized (and medicated). It is now evident that officials at Virginia Tech ignored faculty and student efforts to secure assistance for Mr. Cho. This is not a security problem. It is a problem of our social institutions refusing to take up their responsibility. It is a problem that will not be solved by lockdowns, ID tags or cameras.

Why not organize forums … that involve all concerned in discussing how we can help address the problems while avoiding the iron cage that is called security. It is clear that at Virginia Tech, the students and faculty had taken the lead in identifying Cho as in need of help and had begun to organize to provide it. Activating the initiative of students and faculty are key for addressing the current crisis we face. They should be fully involved in efforts to address the situation.

In closing, let me say that I think we should reject the notion that we should get back to “normal”. There is nothing normal about what happened, and there is nothing normal about the conditions that are the genesis of the tragedy. I think we educators have an important role to play in countering the destructive path we are heading. We should be leading an open and honest discussion about how we relate to one another, about our humanity, about our society.

To you I sincerely offer my assistance, as both a professor and parent. I am more than willing to help organize the above-mentioned forums, and work with you, the PFA and other school staff in figuring out how we can best contend with the present situation. I may be reached anytime.

Respectfully,

Mark Garrison

[NOTE: The name of the principal and school were removed for this public presentation, along with some identifying comments]

Related posts

• The Disinformation of “Violence Prevention” (0)
• Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence (0)
• Veteran Chicago Teacher & Former Director of Safety Speaks Out on the Impact of the Recession, Ducan Policies (0)

Given the recent discussion in media outlets on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine, it seems useful to reprint my review of Julie Webber’s (2003) volume Failure to Hold: The Politics of School Violence (Rowman & Littlefield).

What makes the book stand out from other recent work on school violence (e.g., DiGiulio 2001; Newman 2004) is the author’s starting point. With her focus on problems of Western political philosophy, Webber links the analyses of school violence, popular culture and the hidden curriculum (given as rules about the nature of conflict and its uses) to a state policy of “containment” and the crisis of Western democracy. Emphasizing public schools as citizen-building institutions, she asks: “Why do they [student shooters] take their rage to school and direct it at students, not teachers, not administrators, but random students?” (p. 8). Extent analyses fail to explain, “how the acts are meaningful in the context of the culture and why they commit acts against fellow students, as if they were, literally, infrastructure” (p. 10).

Webber does not seek to explain school shootings as such (though in effect she does offer a theory) a fact one is alerted to early on. “The reader looking for a simple answer will find only a meditation on citizenship as it relates to educational experiences in the wake of traumatic events in public schools…” (p. 2).

The book is broken into two sections. The first section offers “readings” of school shootings in West Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon, all having taken place prior to Columbine. Webber focuses on the public and media’s reaction to the shootings. With a mix of interesting details about each case, these chapters offer nuanced thematic conjectures, queries and observations. With them Webber aims to demonstrate “some of the fallacious reasoning that is behind the formulations of school policy” where she is critical of the “public’s willingness to believe that popular culture and armaments are directly correlated with school violence” (p. 12).

For example, the West Paducah case is used to critique the “violent [or predatory] culture” argument. Ignoring the known concrete psychological suffering of students at school, where the hidden curriculum imposes impossible expectations of identity and performance, Webber says: “the public chose to pin the motive for shootings on a blank form of violent culture that is not tied to any specific generative source or responsible party.” This, she contends, completely ignores the obvious message in students shooting up their school. “School violence” is a term the literal meaning of which is consistently denied: the school itself is given no role in triggering students’ shooting rampage (p. 146). We are left with a generic notion of culture, which “somehow ‘gets violent’, sometimes with the help of Hollywood, but usually all by itself” (p. 21). Webber discusses the impact of television on youth, insisting that it makes little sense to blame the media separate from the public when the media has become the public sphere, the social. She claims that censoring violent media without broader social change may actually escalate the problem, because students are denied “fantasy spaces” to act out their rage (p. 160).

This raises one notable weakness of the volume: the under-theorizing of the significance of the public/private distinction for U.S. political thought, and the role “school safety” initiatives play in eroding (or transforming) the public. It is not that the media has become the public sphere but rather that the monopoly media and its disinformation have worked toward demise of a public sphere in the sense outlined by Habermas’ (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

As another example, Webber uses the Jonesboro case, to critique school safety advocate Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. It is only at this point, on page 48, that the significance of the book’s title is addressed. Thomas Hobbes’ argument that the protective layer of inhibition is regulated by government is contrasted with Grossman’s notion that “holding” is a physical component of the brain, which is natural but has been corrupted by the “leakage” of military technology to the general public. Imparting an authoritarian structure to this brain, Webber sums up Grossman: “Traditional authority, he argues, was based in positive social values such as respect for the law, worship of heroes who saved the day, responsible programming, and fiction that refrained from using realism as a symbolic or literary device” (p. 48).

In discussing bullying and rage in this chapter, Webber suggests that the failure of U.S. democracy to bring about real equality be considered a source of violence. “The pretense of democratic equality and the equalization of all social values give students the impression that [students] deserve prestige and power at the school,” an expectation which is unfulfilled in practice. “Raging boys” want respect of a leading clique or to take its place. “The public does not give them a chance to see how they might unite against the society in order to change it in constructive ways” (p. 58).

The second half of the book argues out in various ways Webber’s theory of school violence, which in a nutshell is caused by a kind of social repression fomented by a hidden curriculum that denies conflict and identity formation and imposes hegemonic norms that are in decline.

Chapter four, one of the most interestingly odd chapters, explores the school prayer movement that uses the shootings to bring “the Christian God back to school,” where God, and not adults (parents), will protect the young (Webber points out that turning children against their parents and families is a hallmark of fascist regimes). Webber brings out how this movement, whose practice requires holding prayer sessions while standing around a flagpole hoisting the flag of the United States “binds prayer to American citizenship” (p. 95). It also serves to further obscure the lines between the private and public. Chapter five, the most abstract chapter of the book juxtaposes the writings of Nietzsche with those of Dewey in an attempt to present a theoretical model to understand school shootings and the contradictions of democratic citizenship as developed in the West. The chapter focuses on the existing political model’s difficulty in publicly dealing with trauma, which results in “bad conscience” (ignoring life’s experiences and the conclusions drawn from them). She writes that the “Deweyan model of experience” denies the “reality of conflict and resentment in public life” and this denial “leads to Nietzschean resentment and bad conscience on the part of the public” (p. 190). Chapter six attempts the same, but on the psychological plane, using the psychoanalytic insights of child psychologist D. W. Winnicott.

The book is peppered with this psychoanalytic perspective. Chapter seven explores pedagogical problems occurring in schools as they respond to fears and concerns generated by “school violence,” and the philosophical stances needed to help create safe spaces, in the nonphysical or social-psychological sense. The concluding chapter argues that responses to school shootings are predicated on the Cold War policy of “containment”. Webber points to the threat this poses for American democracy “as we know it” with its links to freedom of expression and the right to privacy. “Containment” response to school violence are in fact a form of violence, Webber argues, denying students the necessary experience required for developing mature democratic citizens.

Importantly, Webber does not deny a role for weapons and violent media. For example, she points to the “fetishism of stockpiling,” where there were 200 million guns in private hands in 1995, where the top 20 percent of private firearms owners possessed 55 percent of privately owned firearms (p. 35). That the public and media often downplay the stockpiling behavior of school shooters suggest an effort to conceal just how “normal” such “fetishes” actually are among men. Violent media (popular culture) is not so much indicted as it is analyzed in terms of its role as fantasy in “holding” students. “As long as the fantasy holds them, they will continue to do in line with the hidden curriculum…” She continues:

But once they are deprived [note that this is a root meaning of the word private] of fantasy and give way to the realization that expectations set by the hidden curriculum will not be met, or even compromised partially, another mode of existence takes hold of them. They are then led to the space (conjuncture or rupture) between the Real and Fantasy. That nothing holds them means that nothing sustains them, except an automatic reversion to type, an enhanced or hypermove to practice. Knowledge is now on the side of doing. The ethical gap maintained by fantasy has closed. And, as Jean Baudrillard states, “We have passed from the Other to the Same, from alienation to identification” (p. 7).

The logic that fantasy leads to practice is used by the Secret Service to arbitrarily target all youth as “potentially violent” in an effort to “prevent violence before it starts” (Borum and Vossekuil 1999; Vossekuil et al. 2002).

Despite some difficulties, on the whole Webber’s analysis is fresh and full of insight. But it is also a book that requires a great deal of patience and work on the part of the reader. It is best treated as a conversation, working through the numerous themes which, because of their breath, are necessarily incomplete and call upon the reader for elaboration.

References

Borum, Randy, and Bryan Vossekuil. 1999. Threat Assessment: Defining an Approach to for Evaluating Risk of Targeted Violence. Behavioral Sciences and the Law 17 (3):323-337.

DiGiulio, Robert C. 2001. Educate, Medicate, or Litigate? What Teachers, Parents and Administrators Must Do about Student Behavior. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Newman, Katherine S. 2004. Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. New York: Basic Books.

Vossekuil, Bryan, Robert A. Fein, Marisa Reddy, Randy Borum, and William Modzeleski. 2002. The Final Report and Findings of the Safe Schools Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Department of Education.

Note: Edited from the originally published version appearing in the June 2005 edition of the Newsletter of the New York State Foundations of Education Association.

Related posts

• The Disinformation of “Violence Prevention” (0)
• Ten Years After Columbine: A Letter to A Principal After Virginia Tech (0)
• Veteran Chicago Teacher & Former Director of Safety Speaks Out on the Impact of the Recession, Ducan Policies (0)

“My speculation is that the damage this recession will do to kids’ education prospects is far more than the positive good most changes in educational policies can produce.” – EDDRA email listserv participant.*

Since the research basis for our sharings here requires some credentialing, allow me to post the following as (now retired) “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member (at the time) Chicago Teachers Union as well as my current work as editor of Substance.

During those years I worked in that capacity, I organized a great many programs and events to further the union’s objective of neutralizing the impact of Chicago’s massive drug gangs on the city’s public schools. Therefore, you can assume my expertise in these matters I speak of below, since our work almost always overlapped poverty and drug gang problems.  

Some “educational policies” furthered over the past decade and likely to grow under Arne Duncan will do much, much more harm against these backgrounds of poverty and the destruction of the so-called “safety nets” over the past two decades. One will be hunger. The other will be the expanded impact of drug gangs within our cities (and in some cases, our more impoverished suburbs). Let me suggest two that may be going national out of Chicago now that Arne Duncan is CEO of the Education Department (in Chicago, the chief of the schools has not been a “superintendent” since 1995, when mayoral control became law; we have a “Chief Executive Officer”).  

1. School closings for “failure” (“underperformance,” “underutilization”,  etc.). Duncan has already suggested that he will be pushing the Chicago model of school closings for “underperformance” nationally. In Chicago, that has generally meant that schools described as “underperforming” (they stopped using “failing” here about five years ago) are closed and (usually, but not always) privatized. Invariably, those schools are (no surprise here, I’m sure) serving the most impoverished children (often schools with a 100 percent  “free and reduced lunch” rate) in completely (in Chicago, that means 90 percent to 100 percent black and/or “minority”) in the ghettos and barrios. For many of these children, the closing of their schools is the last straw, the destruction of the final stability in their lives. At one of the schools that Duncan proposed to close for “underperformance”  this school year (Holmes Elementary, the closing of which was rescinded by Duncan’s successor), teachers who organized against the closing (it was slated to be a “turnaround” which is Chicago for “reconstitution”), teachers  now report that homeless families of their children await the disposal of the garbage from (free and reduced price) school breakfasts and lunches. As a result, the school’s staff has asked that the food be separated before being placed in the dumpsters, so that the families that are waiting to salvage the uneaten food don’t have to sort, say, cartons of cereal from a spoonful of milk-and-cereal.  

2. Massive increase in gang violence. Once the final prop of stability is removed from these children’s lives (i.e., the now privatized public school where all the teachers who knew the community have been fired), the remaining locus of stability in many of these communities is the drug gang. In Chicago, which has the largest drug gangs in the USA (organized into two “nations” called the “People” — five-pointed star as main symbol — and “Folks” — six-pointed star as main symbol), the expansion of these drug gangs, and the highly publicized teenage body count that has followed from it, is partly caused by the school closings policies that Arne Duncan will soon be trying to bring to a school district near you.  Five years ago (June 12, 2004) I was still working as “Director of School Security and Safety” for the 35,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. My job at the time was to organize and train teachers to utilize union resources to counter the drug gangs in the schools here. In June 2004, Arne Duncan proposed the first “closing” of public high schools (later to be flipped into charter school hands) against Calumet and Austin high schools. I organized the testimony in opposition to those closing, and everyone who testified about the proposal said that one of the main results would be an increase in gang violence. The reason? In Chicago, gang members identify young people as being members of one gang or the other by virtue of their neighborhood. Therefore, any student who goes to another general high school after having attended Calumet High School would be identified as being a Black Stone (“People”,  five-pointed star) and an enemy (if the other schools was “Folks” — six pointed star).  That is precisely what happened. One of the main causes of the huge increase in the number of gang shootings of young people has been the policy of CPS in closing (and usually charterizing) traditional public schools, excluding the kids who had gone there and forcing them, if they want to attend public school at all, to attend a school outside their community. (Charters in Chicago utilize and elaborate application, lottery and elimination process to get rid of undesirables, with KIPP just being the most well known nationally).

That’s enough sharing for one morning. The impacts of poverty will go well beyond the disruption or destruction of once stable families. When corporate “school reform” polices such as those practiced by Arne  Duncan in Chicago are added to the mix of the economic downturn, the results can  be not only more suffering for children (hunger, dental and medical  neglect, etc.), but actual death from the increase in drug gang violence.  If you have seen The Wire (HBO) you have a sort of sense of what Chicago  has been facing with the drug gangs that I once organized against. But  Baltimore is child’s play compared with the fully developed drug gang empires of  Chicago and Illinois. If you are interested in more details, you can get “The  Gang Book” from the Chicago Crime Commission. Note only that those vast maps  showing areas of Chicago’s South Side as being controlled by the Gangster  Disciples or Latin King street gangs are realities in the lives of thousands  of black and Hispanic children and families.  And Chicago has let those realities proliferate as a matter of public  policy neglect for more than 30 years.

George N. Schmidt Editor, Substance

http://www.substancenews.net/

* Copied from the Education Disinformation, Detection and Reporting Agency email listserv managed by Gerald Bracey on April 30, 2009.

Related posts

• Alan Singer: Charter Schools Don’t Do Miracles (0)
• Charter Schools/Market Violence/Disruptive Innovation: Student Beating, Paying the Rich, and the Irrelevance of Facts (0)
• Think Tank Review: Report on Impact of Charters Overstates Results (0)
• “Uncommon Schools” Charter School Executive Will Be NYS Education Deputy (0)
• Duncan’s Bribe Reveals Where Demand for Charters Originates (0)