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D.C. United Icon Ben Olsen To Retire
Bill Turque turns in a thoughtful piece in today's Post, examining the loaded dynamics behind disciplining students who attack their teachers. It may sound obvious - kids shouldn't get away with physical violence, ever - but tension between instructors and administrators, overcrowded or poorly-managed classrooms, and the difficulty of confirming allegations, complicate the discipline process. There are no definite statistics about assaults against D.C. teachers, but Turque interviews instructors at Woodson Academy who complain of being struck by books or shoved by students, and who feel that DCPS and their administrators have done little to address bad behavior.
Anecdotal evidence about verbal and physical assaults against teachers is common in DCPS, even if it is not always formally documented. (A former colleague of mine, who taught at the campus where Woodson Academy is temporarily housed, once had a student defecate and then throw it at her.) But Woodson Academy's principal told Turque, "the teachers were distorting the situation to deflect attention from their own professional shortcomings" - one of the teachers profiled is currently on a 90-day intervention plan for poor performance. Union officials dismiss that argument as "an example of blaming teachers for student violence." Some teachers claim that if they "complain or eject too many students," they are accused of being "weak in 'classroom management' by administrators determined to keep a lid on behavior issues."
But that's the thing - as Catherine Cullen points out at Fordham, "'Good' teachers are also 'good' at classroom management, and they don’t tend to have books thrown at their heads." At the most basic level, you can't teach if you can't control your classroom. And while the specific examples of incidents at Woodson may not be indicative of a District-wide trend, it's clear that the system needs a better way of supporting teachers when students really do get out of hand.
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I moved to DC from Wisconsin, and have also lived in Oklahoma and several other states away from the East Coast...and for whatever reason I've yet to nail down, public administrators at the local government level in this area, but most noticeably in DC, tend to be completely and totally inept.
I've read articles about how poorly run the ambulance and emergency response system in this city is; articles about how the schools are under-performing; a Metro that is laying people off and having multiple de-railings in a single month; and so on....
What is it about the District and other local governments in this area that causes them to be so horribly managed? Is it that people out here don't have the intelligence and capacity to do a job, and do it well? Is it something in the water? It seems to be like the "Federal City" should be the shining example of how a local government should be run, not the textbook example of every government failing a city/state can make... I mean really, these stories highlight DC Government and all of it's subsidiary agencies in their true light--full of crap and unable to perform basic public functions!
In Wisconsin public schools, this kind of crap would never fly, even in inner-city Milwaukee the school teachers would be better supported than what I'm reading about here. Never once have I been able to pass by a group of kids in DC without having some rude comment made to me or over stumble upon a problem scenario occurring--so it is just that people in DC can't raise their kids to behave? Is it the poverty? The demographic of DC residents and their kids?
Honestly, can someone please tell me why DC Government is a big corrupt flop?
Perhaps it's the disgusting culture that actually asks questions such as "Who's to blame when kids assault teachers?"
I've never seen such acceptance of dysfunction. Suggesting that anyone other than a violent human being is responsible for violent human behavior is one more example of this. The local culture is quick to make excuses for all sorts of nonsense, and slow to hold anyone accountable for his misdeeds. There's a convicted felon on the Council in D.C.; that cannot help matters.
Anyone who throws a book at a teacher and causes injury should be in jail. That's all.
It's easy to pretend that these poor deprived children can't help but misbehave when one hasn't been in that situation, but any of us who have studied in an inner-city school with 30 other kids in a class can tell you that it's perfectly easy to do the right thing and not commit crimes. Stop making excuses.
"The local culture is quick to make excuses for all sorts of nonsense, and slow to hold anyone accountable for his misdeeds." Truer works have not been spoken.
Agreed. One question mlswanso3470. You speak of "in this area", "and other local governments in this area", etc. but you only cite DC. I am in Fairfax County and I think it is a stretch to include Fairfax County with the District for your comments.
Agreed. One question mlswanso3470. You speak of "in this area", "and other local governments in this area", etc. but you only cite DC. I am in Fairfax County and I think it is a stretch to include Fairfax County with the District for your comments.
I blame the bus driver who assaulted McGruff. He did it in front of schoolkids!
Screw you, Henry Krinkle. If I was driving a bus and saw you on the curb, I'd come out and punch you in the dick.
--A True-Blue Murky Man
back to the real story, is it or is it not ok for kids to throw things at teachers and what are we to do about it?
Obviously when it's but one or two kids int eh classroom, you can usually deal. But what if you have 5 kids, or 10 kids or all the kids behaving that way?
I don't know, but i think when the system becomes so out of balance that the overall safety and health of the school is under assault, stronger steps have to be taken to enforce rules and create boundaries.
In a particularly rough school in Cleveland, they instituted school uniforms, extra security, harsher penalties for misbehaviour, an so on. It seemed to work. I supposed that reducing the class size is another thing that needs to happen, but how possible that is with the current budget...I don't know.
This is a complicated issue to say the least.
I used to teach in a school system that seemed to have many similarities to DCPS. Our school regularly had violent incidents against teachers. Based on my experience:
1. Bureaucracy is a big problem. Whoever said schools and school systems want to keep a lid on violent incidents is absolutely right. It may not be baked into the way incidents are reported and tracked, but I think there's very little movement to establish more effective tracking and resolution systems. For example, our high school used to regularly get students who had been expelled from other schools because they brought guns to school.
Not only is that supposed to be a mandatory one year expulsion, we also were not often officially notified about who these students were because it would officially admit that they had not followed mandatory policy. We would hear through the grapevine that these kids were coming, and that was about it.
Expelling too many kids creates state and federal funding problems, and admitting that you're not expelling all the kids who are supposed to be expelled creates a legal problem.
2. School systems with systemic violence problems often try to use certain schools as the hubs for students with violent track records.
This goes beyond "alternative" schools and involves what are supposed to be traditional educational environments as well. However, these schools are not set up to function in that manner--classroom sizes are too large, campuses do not have enough security measures, etc. Our school system "ran out" of expulsions (as in their policies didn't let them do any more) by end of October or so every year, and after that we started seeing all the kids who should have been expelled and weren't. It was an absolute shame for all the kids who came to our school as their normal school -- it became a much more dangerous environment for them as the year progressed.
3. Schools often group children with behavioral problems together to try to contain problems. While this has its benefits and drawbacks, it means that some teachers' classes are more likely than others to have violent incidents.
4. Often, these students are given to teachers who are newer to the school or newer to the profession. It's more often the case than not that veteran teachers will know which kids have a reputation for causing problems and which do not, so they will sometimes push to not have these students in their classrooms.
Many administrators already subscribe to the grouping idea, so it's either keep the veteran teachers happy or give an easier lot to the less experienced teachers. Given the turnover in urban education teaching and union pressures, they're usually going to give the traditionally more disruptive kids to the less experienced teachers.
Even aside from the turnover and union issues, many administrators also believe that they are sacrificing less in terms of kids' education to give the more problematic teachers to less experienced teachers who may not have their footing yet in terms of how to be an effective teacher anyway.
5. Less experienced teachers tend to know less about discipline. It's not blaming, it's just the way it is. Sometimes, it's because they actually try to concentrate on teaching more -- some (not all) veteran teachers in these environments are quite concerned with discipline at the expense of education.
6. These incidents -- against teachers in particular -- not violence in the classroom in general usually tended to happen because of an escalating challenge to authority and the teachers' responses to it. It's kind of a catch-22 -- if you back down to the kid, the classroom as a whole looks at you with less respect. If you don't, you put yourself in danger. If you ask security to help with every situation, either they'll stop responding to your classroom (assuming the circumstances enable them to respond at all) or the kids will hate you for turning the classroom into another zone where they always have to deal with "law enforcement" type situations.
7. Many of the kids involved in theses incidents actually have needs that could qualify them as special education students for behavioral reasons. These students are not often properly identified, and when they are, not properly supported. Traditional classrooms can be very tough for them, and without assistance, it's a bad situation waiting to happen.
8. Finally, violence against teachers is a problem, but it's not the problem. The problem is violence between students. Teachers often get hurt trying to stop these incidents, but more fundamentally kids who come to school should not have to fear their peers. Most serious forms of violence at school happen to the students who can't call the union, can't break it to the media, etc, and frankly can't quit their job to do something else. They have to show up and deal with it again and again day after day and have shamefully little choice or recourse in the matter.
Sorry for the long post -- this one just hits (no pun intended) close to home.