Thursday
October 18, 2007
In a familiar turn of events, No Child Left Behind has designated a certain level of violence that constitutes an official “Dangerous School,” but left each state to determine its own criteria. And it will shock nobody to hear that Illinois, like many states, is using the most stringent standard, expulsions, rather than police incident reports. According to this month’s Catalyst:
Under the Illinois criteria for designating a school as dangerous under No Child Left Behind, not one CPS building has ever received the label, even though numerous campuses have problems with violence year after year.
Not only does using expulsion statistics underestimate the volume of violence experienced in some schools, but I believe it misrepresents the type of violence. I don’t have statistics to back me up here, so chime in if this doesn’t match your experience. I think most violence in schools, even violent schools, is pushing, shoving, and yelling - not shooting - and it’s based on the most mundane of things. Misunderstandings, jealousies. Every school has these, but violent schools have an incredibly high volume of them every single day. They grind down students and teachers’ nerves, leaving everyone feeling anxious, tired, and angry.
A group of students from Chicago’s Mikva Challenge Youth Innovation Fund (a group I helped launch in 2003) recently released a report outlining what youth think should be done about school violence. Their recommendations thoughtfully consider some of the root causes of the violence, suggesting things like better security guard training, better lunch options to avoid hunger-based frustration in the afternoons, and organized social programming to help break down barriers between students.
These recommendations might not prevent major gang warefare, but could they help diminish the sheer mind-numbing volume of he-said-she-said pushing matches? Sure. The full set of recommendations is here. I’m sure the students from Mikva would be interested to hear teachers’ perspectives on this.
Labels: Conversations
As a teacher at a school labeled failing because of Illinois’ choice of the ACT in the PSAE, I am glad we are using a stringent criteria when it comes to school violence. Our school doesn’t need another bad label when it is similar to every other high school around. I do agree that schools need to work on ways to decrease the kinds of violence noted above, but I don’t think broadening our criteria will do anything except provide the press with more ways to attack public schools.
Just a thought: For high schools at least, research done by James Garbarino among others has demonstrated that school size plays a role in the level of violence in a school. Smaller schools are better in this regard. Working toward schools sized to insure that all students are known to adults would be one way to go.
“One study of high school violence concluded that the first step in reducing school violence is personalizing large schools by creating smaller communities to combat anonymity (Toby, 1993, as cited in Klonsky, 1998). Along the same lines, Cornell University Family Life Development Center’s director, James Garbarino, listed smaller high schools as his first recommendation for reducing violence among adolescents (Klonsky, 1998).”
For more on this see
http://www.unitela.com/slc/html/research.html
