Last week began with Democratic mayoral candidates calling for a kid-glove approach to chaos in New York’s public schools — and it ended with videos of rolling corridor fistfights at Murry Bergtraum HS in Lower Manhattan once more making their way onto the Internet.
A disconnect there?
Not if you buy into the notion that there’s no such thing as a bad kid — and that the Department of Education’s insistence on suspending disruptive students amounts to an explicitly racist, go-directly-to-prison policy that dooms thousands to lives of hopeless poverty.
Oh, and by the way, to hell with the kids who behave themselves.
That’s all nonsense, of course. But it resonates in a city like New York, with its politics of group identity and its perverse impulse to excuse — and thus effectively encourage — socially destructive behavior in its schools and on its streets.
And so last week two Democratic mayoral candidates — ex-comptroller William Thompson and his successor, John Liu — were at City Hall to endorse what would amount to an end to disciplinary suspensions in city schools. Two others — City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — sent supportive notes.
Condensed to its core, their contention is that because some minority groups (African-Americans in particular) account for disciplinary suspensions out of proportion to their presence in the classrooms, the system is by definition racist. And, because students who get suspensions tend eventually to land in jail in disproportionate numbers, New York City isn’t running a public school system so much as it is a pipeline to prison.
Or, as Liu colorfully ( if a little incoherently) put it, the education department comprises a “criminal-industrial complex.”
But all this is less an argument than it is an assertion, and it fails on several levels.
Urban schools have always been tumultuous places, and New York’s are no exception. Murry Bergtraum, where hallway brawling is common, is not atypical, and administrators need a full range of sanctions to keep minimal order.
Fistfights aside, chaotic classrooms are also the norm in far too many city schools. True, few want to say so out loud, or in any detail — though not even the advocates try very hard to dispute it. They just want suspensions done away with, no matter what.
But that skirts the core issue, which is that only the willfully self-deluded really believe that teachers can teach, and that kids can learn, amid constant disruption.
And what of the serious students? You’d be hard-pressed to find any sympathy for them in New York, nor even an acknowledgment that a problem exists. But a Wisconsin think-tank offers this spot-on analysis:
“Misbehaving students undermine the basic norms that are conducive to school success,” reported the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute two weeks ago. “A [school] district that is plagued with disorder, significant teacher and principal time-demands for activities unrelated to student learning and constant stress caused by numerous disruptions will struggle to build a successful school culture.”
The study of 424 Wisconsin school districts found that fully half had classroom-discipline problems, and estimated that reducing disruptive behavior by just 5 percent would boost reading and math proficiency by 3.5 and 5 percent respectively.
Would those prescriptions increase the abysmal 35 percent college-readiness rates of New York City’s high-school graduates? Simple common sense instructs that calmer classrooms would produce more accomplished graduates.
Certainly further restricting the sanctions available to administrators is no prescription for tranquil classrooms — especially on the grounds that students who have discipline issues in school may or may not go on to have problems with the law later on in life. Maybe they’re just bad kids to begin with.
Yes, the Department of Education has some obligations to anti-social students. But its chief responsibility is to ensure a clean, safe learning environment for all of the city’s students. That’s not the case now, and it never will be if school suspensions are abolished. Or even substantially restricted.
That the four Democratic mayoral candidates have difficulty grasping this is distressing — for one of them is odds-on to be running the Department of Education come January.
So here’s an idea: Next time, why don’t they just skip the City Hall blatherfest, hike the four blocks to Murry Bergtraum and ask about life in a high school hell-hole?
The new normal? That’s almost certainly up to one of them.