Violence Persists in Philadelphia Schools! A Tradition?

Another two years gone, and still the same old song in 2010.

The Philadelphia Inquirer of August 28, 2008 reported that the State of Pennsylvania identified Vare Middle School as “persistently violent.” When I attended the then called Vare Jr. High in 1955 and 1956, I saw a kid’s hand run into a bandsaw by the resident gang members. I and my buddies paid extortion fees every day at lunch to the same thugs right under the noses of the teachers. Also, the same hoods forced us to run naked through many a gauntlet of wet snapping towels -- and an occasional belt -- in the locker rooms.

I graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1960, also listed as dangerous in the 2008 article, and saw little violence personally. I was in the Academic Track and somewhat isolated from most of the school. But I did see a teacher, with great deference, carry the books of the son of a local judge. The son was driven to school on occasion in a limousine, became a State legislator in his adulthood and spent some time in prison for various offenses. A high-class hood.

Also on the list of persistently violent schools was Edison High, where my wife in 1966 witnessed a boy being dragged down a corridor spraying blood from a neck artery. My wife spent part of her career in several other of the listed schools and ended up in Frankford High School, also on the list of dishonor. She took early retirement three years ago rather than continue to work where her car was regularly vandalized, the principal’s leg was broken by a student and reports of fire-fights – with real bullets -- were not infrequent.

Seventeen other schools were listed. What is most curious is that over the years from 1955 to 2010 many a new superintendent has come and gone: each time with great fanfare and newpaper reports of high promise. Each one has left, with overweening praise for his or her accomplishments filling the local papers. And yet these same papers, clucking and mooing loudly, seem not to tire of reporting how student achievement is falling and violence is rising.

Can school systems deal with such things? If not, why pay superintendents such high salaries? Why cover it up in the newspapers?

To examine these issues further, see School Violence, Punishment, and Justice

Cordially

-- EGR

Computers: Magic Wands?

A local factory whose manager is a friend of the principal, gives fifty brand-new state-of-the-art computers to a junior high school where student achievement is low, attendence is irregular, and vandalism is rampant.

The computers are housed in a room fortified against theft and vandalism with extra locks, screened windows and a full-time classroom monitor to assist teachers who bring their students to this “Computer Lab.”

Why the gift? Don’t ask.

(“Gift horse. Mouth and all that,” teachers are admonished.)

But there were hopes…

(Whose? Shhhh!)

that student achievement …

(Don’t say it out loud! Salagadoola, mechikaboola, bibbidee bobbidee boo. Fingers crossed!)

might go up, attendence would improve and vandalism disappear.

Within a month the majority of the computers have been trashed: parts broken or stolen. The Lab is not usable as a place of learning.

The anguished cry goes up, “Animals! Criminals! Sociopaths! Naughty, naughty!” Teachers are reassigned, lab assistants fired, students suspended, the general populace of the school crammed into the auditorium for threats and scoldings and short naps. The factory manager lets the principal know that before another gift from his company is forthcoming, the Devil will be relaxing in a tub of ice.

What went wrong? What happened was that, initially, some school realities were disregarded as unimportant:

a. most of the kids had little or no experience with computers; few even knew what they were good for;

b. some of the teachers insisted, before anything else, on teaching programming in BASIC;

c. computer equipment could be sold on the streets to engage the extensive drug culture of the neighborhood;

d. bullying of the more school-involved kids was rampant and discounted as a school problem

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For more on these issues see The Teacher as Technician: Will Technology Improve Schooling?

Cordially,

-- EGR

Sacrifices to Parental Ambition and Pride: the new molechs?

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech… -- Leviticus 18:21 (KJ)

Many parents, feeling that it puts their kids on the "fast track," support school policies that turn the children’s education into counterproductive drudgery. How much more convenient it is to have the school dump hours of homework on our kids than to have to deal with them ourselves in our otherwise ever more scarce "free" time. Why not rid the curriculum of art, music, drama and recess in order to prep the students for standardized testing?

But what is a kid’s childhood worth if it pleases our own ambition to destroy it? The kids, of course, resist our subversions by cheating, plagiarizing and turning off in even the “best” schools. So far as their education is concerned, they are “burned out” before they finish adolescence.

In Genesis 22, Abraham is commanded to, then restrained, from offering Isaac as a burned sacrifice. Some biblical scholars take this story to indicate the renunciation by Israel of the ancient practice of child sacrifice, commonly done in times of extremity by a variety of peoples.

We have reverted to that ancient practice of child sacrifice; not physically, perhaps, but psychologically and spiritually. But the gods we sacrifice our children to are unworthy ones: our own ambition, our own self-aggrandizement, our own reputation.


To continue this train of thought, use this hyperlink Tracking in Schools

Cordially

--- EGR

Cultural or Ethnic Difference: which is more easily tolerated?

It is difficult to spell out what cultural difference is, yet cultural difference is not the same as ethnic difference. African-Americans, for example, are not culturally homogeneous; yet in some politically important respects they are different from both Anglo Whites and African-Hispanics.

But upper middle class English-speakers have much more in common as a class than a difference in ethnicity, Black, White, WASP, Polish, Irish, etc. might suggest. Ethnicity is a socially acceptable form of cultural difference because it involves little if any real cultural difference.

Ethnic leaders are leaders precisely because they have been assimilated enough to want to trade off cultural difference for a piece of the social pie. To the extent that other members of their groups are willing to make similar compromises and get involved politically, to that extent will their group achieve ethnic status.

The alternative is to risk being treated as deviant beyond the range of acceptable variation and, like the Amish, or any number of small religious sects, invite the importunities of the State.


To examine these issues further, see Edward G. Rozycki, " Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance. Why public schools fail.

Cordially,

-- EGR

Abetting Fraud in School Systems and Universities

School systems, colleges and universities across the country get billions of dollars from the federal government on the strength of their accreditation by various professional and state organizations. Accreditation is taken as assurance that the school has met certain standards.

Federal false claims legislation has been used to penalize colleges and universities who have acquired accreditation by hiding their failings from accrediting organizations.

But often, the accrediting organizations are in cahoots with the institutions they accredit. They overlook severe deficiencies, if they even bother to note them. Members of accrediting site-visiting teams are colleagues, even friends, of faculty and administration of schools which are candidates for accreditation.

The track to accreditation has been greased by all of the following:

a. schools providing luxurious hotel rooms demanded by visiting teams well-stocked with expensive liquor;

b. six week’s advance receipt of the examiner’s questions so that “spontaneous” answers might be prepared, and skeletons locked away in hidden closets;

c. visiting team members who were students or friends of faculty in the candidate schools;

d. faculty threatened with dismissal or non-promotion should they bring up program violations of the schools under consideration for accreditation;

e. interference from local politicians to ward off disaccreditation when malfeasance was discovered;

f. direct interference in state-level agencies to block disaccreditation because of felonious activity by school administration, e.g. selling drugs.

Faculty in candidate schools seem to be (or pretend to be) unaware that their personal efforts in disregarding published school procedures, or hiding embarrassing violations, will have abetted a fraudulent claim when -- seldom, if -- their institution makes application for federal funds.

This misfeasance at some of the country’s biggest universities persists unchallenged by federal authorities for two apparent reasons:

1. many schools are seen to have formidable legal protectors, especially universities with law schools;

2. many investigators do not understand how responsibility is situated in the university and what might be indicators of violation -- often overlooked by otherwise highly competent lawyers with organizational experience only in the business world.

To examine these issues further, see Combatting Educational Corruption

Cordially,

-- EGR

Staff Development: Bibbidee, bobbidee, boo!

A Soviet-era Russian joke: The workers’ paradise -- we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

A related hypothesis: any occupation where it is not clear what is being produced, or how what is produced is to be evaluated, will have someone whose job it is to provide “staff development.”

If you release me from my job responsibilities to sit and jawbone about peripheralities and, especially, to “open up” and “confess” how I “feel” about them; then, I might well join in and pretend that you, too, are earning your keep.

To examine these issues further, see How Not to Develop Staff

Cordially,
-- EGR

Romantics and Idealists Promoting Service Learning

The majority of educators I have worked with have been optimists; even more, they have been – much in the traditional literary sense of the word – Romantics.

Romantic n A person who, rather than seeing the glass as half empty, insists on seeing it as half full; even when it is only a quarter full.

This is probably the source, not only of their optimism, but of the substantial nurturant generosity they possess.

Many, many educators are also – in common parlance – Idealists.

Idealist n a person who is willing to forego the appreciation of a job well done for the right to complain that it was not done perfectly.

The virtue of Idealists is their continual striving for betterment.

The promoters of service learning tend to be both romantic and idealistic: service learning will bring our now apathetic students back into civic engagement. And what is “service learning?” There is little agreement on the many variations discussed. And, in addition, there are the political problems.

Service learning is as likely to help revitalize civic commitment on the part of our children as is health education about diet likely to reverse obesity. Not that it's a bad idea, but a lot is against it.


To examine these issues further, see Romantics, Idealists and True Service Learning


Cordially,
-- EGR

Violence in Philadelphia Public Schools: Old News?

There has been much concern recently about violence in the Philadelphia public schools. Having spent more than thirty-five, generally worthwhile, even enjoyable, years of my life in the Philadelphia public schools, both as student and teacher, I can assure you that violence in the schools is not the problem. There has always been some violence, often very extreme, in some schools. The basic problem is victimization.

In reality, the School District of Philadelphia, by means of its policies and practices, supports and protects those students who have developed into habitual predators. The victims are neglected. Coverup is standard practice. The violence that has erupted so vehemently in recent months is, as often as not, the attempt of victims to take back some control over their bodies and their personal dignity from the predators the schools pretend are not there.

Little will likely be done because any effective measure to reduce violence is likely to provoke vehement protest. And those who provoke vehement protest -- no matter how ill conceived that protest may be -- risk their administrative careers.

To examine these issues further, see A Letter About School Violence (circa 1993)

Cordially

-- EGR