At lone last, the nation's public schools arc moving on the problems of defiant - sometimes dangerous - youngsters who keep others from learning. It's happening coast to coast.
Under growing public pressure, communities across the US are mounting a fresh attack against disorders that are disrupting classes or threatening life in thousands of public schools. In one district after another, parents, teachers, and now students themselves are demanding and often getting firm enforceable rules.
The North Carolina legislature has passed a law making it a crime for students to fight, to provoke violence by gestures or words, or to ignore an order to leave the buildingin short to do anything which "disrupts, disturbs or interferes with the teaching of students in any public or private educational institution." Maximum penalty: six months in jail and a S 500 fine.
In San Francisco, a new policy requires automatic suspension of any youngster carrying a weaponeven a first grader with a knife because of armed attacks in schools. Uniformed hall guards, which had been dropped because of funding problems, had to be rehired quickly when disorders multiplied.
Two fatal shootings persuaded the Detroit board of education, after long debate, to allow armed police patrols in and around troubled schools.
Chicago is spending nearly 3 million dollars on school security after an elementary-school pupil shot a principal to death and 1,300 verbal and physical assaults on teachers were reported. In Pittsburgh, federal funds are being used to expand the school guard force to 185 men. New York City's school board is planning to spend 10 million dollars on school guards, special aides and expensive security equipment.
Despite worries about turning schools into armed camps, most parents and teachers say that the crackdown is long overdue.
National Association of School Security Directors reports 8,568 rapes and other sex offenses, 11, 160 armed robberies, 256,000 burglaries, and 189, 332 "major assaults" in schools in 1974. Various kinds of school crime have increased 58 to 117 per cent since 1970 and only about 1 out of 20 incidents is reported to police.
For the last six years, parents repeatedly have ranked lack of discipline as the No. 1 problem in public schools, according to Gallup polls.
Many teachers must work in a state of fear and be subjected to continuing assaults, harassment, intimidation and insults. The scholastic crime wave is spreading all over the countryboth in urban and suburban areas. Recent drug crackdowns at well-to-do high schools brought out unruly crowds of students who broke windows and pelted teachers and police with missiles ranging from rocks to apple cores.
Children of the most highly educated parents were the worst drug abusers. And in California a recent study found that more twelfth graders had tried marijuana than had smoked tobacco.
Parents, students, teachers and administrators all blame each other-for-failing to meet the problem sooner. Citizens accuse educators of being too idealistic to deal firmly with disruptive childrenor too afraid. Many teachers admit chronic fear, but insist it is justified.
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Unruliness begins at home, teachers insist arising sometimes from permissiveness of parents or perhaps from hostility or indifference. And school officials say the parents who demand stricter measures against everybody else's children are the first to accuse teachers of unfairness when their own offspring are involved.
Lawsuits against educators accused of violating students' rights have multi-plied.
Now school officials are worried about new challenges that might be spurred by recent US Supreme Court decisions upholding the right of children suspended from school to demand due-process hearings and to sue for damages.
Officials will be less likely to resort to suspensions because now they will have to confront the student and give him a chance to defend himself, knowing that the courts can get involved.
In response to desperate pleas from teachers and parents, school boards in some districts have reinstated wooden paddles or have given educators a freer hand in using them. Only a handful of States and a few of the nation's biggest cities ban spanking outright. But even teachers who want to have the threat of the rod may be reluctant to use it for fear of physical or legal retaliation.
The trick, according to many teachers, is knowing which students you can boss around and which ones have to be handled more delicately to avoid a confrontation that will destroy the teacher's authority.
Many believe that pressure to keep slow-witted or rebellious youngsters from dropping out has aggravated the discipline problem.
The National Commission on the Reform of Secondary Education has urged lowering the mandatory-attendance age to 14 and providing jobs, so frustrated young people can get out and go to work. Compulsory enrollment does not work anyway, the Commission argues, because, "in many of the large city high schools, fewer than half the enrolled students attend regularly."
Not only is truancy rising but harried educators have been
throwing troublesome students out of school at what some experts
consider an alarming rate.
A new federal study encompassing half the nation's schoolchildren shows 930,000 suspensions and 37,000 expulsions in one year. Critics say it is not only unfair but dangerous to put so many angry and undereducated young people out on the streets, especially with jobs so hard to find today. One educator said: "We could be creating a social H-bomb."
When violence goes unchecked, it can plunge a school or even an
entire district into a downward spiral.
Aspects of education arc suffering because principals spend more than 20 per cent of their time on disciplinethree times as much as they ought to.
However, some communities report at least limited success in
dealing with hard-core troublemakers either through stern measures
or by paying special attention to their problems. A junior-high-school
teacher in New York City recalls:
"Last year, our school was a hell hole. A few teachers got physically hurt, but no punishments were really handed out because of fear. The board of education quieted it down so the news didn't get out."
Finally, he says, parents let it be known they wanted disrupters dealt with, and some students who were caught marking up the school were quickly suspended. After that, the teacher reports, "the rest of the kids finally realized that the school meant business, so they cut it out."
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Other districts are setting up special schools or classes for unruly
children, despite occasional complaints of "exile" and "segregation".
The idea, proponents insist is to help kids with regard the traditional curriculum as useless or frustrating instead of just throwing them out They are taught a wide range of skills from art to auto mechanics under a less rigid class schedule with more private attention.
At New Rochelle High School outside New York City, disruptive
youths attend evening classes along with night students who are
taking extra courses and jobholders who won during the day. This
extended-day program is not a traditional night school, but a bona
fides portion of the day.
Even without big changes in procedure, occasional success stories in unlikely places show that the discipline problem is far from hopeless. And often good teachers are the key.
In LosAngeles, for example, LeConte Junior High School sits in a neighborhood that is studded with "nudie" bars and has a transient enrolment of 1,670 studentsmore than one third of them immigrants from 53 different countries. But there are no security guards and virtually no discipline problems, because many of the teachers are outstanding.
More and more schools are trying to encourage self-discipline by
easing what students call "Mickey Mouse" restrictions. Officials
estimate, for instance, that one third of the nation's high schools now
allow student smoking. Another example: High schools in
Birmingham, Ala., are allowing students 20 absences a year without
explanation or excuses from parents. Attendance rose after the
experiment began.
What it all adds up to is this: Parents want more structure, and
students do, too. There is always a minority that feels any rule is bad.
But more and more are realizing the needin school and in society
for rules.
L.G.Pamukhina, T.G.Shelkova
/from the book A Way to Debating/
