Thursday, October 13, 2011

The biology of a bashed-in skull, aka just another day in school

I had intended to write something about my man, Herman Cain, and my new man, Newt Gingrich, but as I scanned the headlines an item about a fight in a Chicago high school caught my eye. Actually, it wasn't a fight at all. It was a beatdown. Another student filmed the attack with a cell phone.

A pair of sisters, one 17 and one 18, are punching the 14-year-old victim and slinging her around their Biology classroom. The sisters are both large; even in a 'fair fight' with only one of them as an opponent it's doubtful the younger girl could have prevailed. She is clearly just trying to stay on her feet. The sisters are using her long hair to hang onto her and, at one point, smash her head and face into a lab table. According to the news report, the victim sustained a concussion, a neck sprain, and multiple scratches and contusions. Unless it went unreported, there was no concrete reason for the sisters' animosity; the victim says that they told her she'd 'better answer them if they asked her a question,' and the victim's friend says, "they got angry and went ghetto on her."

The news report included an interview with another student who criticizes the teacher for failing to stop the assault, but it should be noted that the teacher appeared to be far smaller than the sisters and, one presumes, not in the habit of settling things with violence. She hovers briefly at the edge of the altercation but indeed doesn't try to stop it, and it's rather hard to blame her. A determined effort to break things up would almost certainly have resulted in physical injury to herself, and probably wouldn't have been successful, anyway. I broke up a couple of fights in my career by physically getting between the combatants, and realized when it was over that I was very fortunate not to have been hurt, possibly seriously. One incident left me with a grapefruit-sized bruise on my thigh.

There are too many issues here to count--race, possibly (the attackers were Black, the victim Hispanic) what's going on in classrooms that something like this could escalate to such a point in the first place, how the obvious lack of student and teacher safety affects learning, and so on. But ultimately, the only thing that really matters is how to stop it. Compare the following statements:

The victim's best friend, a freshman at the school, to NBC Chicago on Wednesday: "Every day there's a fight. Today there was a fight in Algebra."

Chicago Public School spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus, responding to reporters: "Chicago Public Schools does not tolerate violence among students in any way. The safety and security of our students is a top priority and we will take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that schools remain a safe environment for learning."

"Remain" a safe environment?? Sounds like that horse is already out of the barn. Whose view do you think is more accurate--a kid who is actually in school for seven or eight hours a day, or some (probably highly-paid) bureaucrat who spends most, if not all, her time in an administrative office? 'We do not tolerate violence among students in any way'? That's school bureaucracy speak for you. Clearly they _do_ tolerate violence because if they didn't, there wouldn't be so much of it. The reality is that in most places, to be actually expelled (and then it's often only for the year) a student has to bring a gun to school or get caught selling drugs. Even if a violent assault like this results in criminal charges, the student still comes back to school!

In the big picture, particularly when it comes to large, urban public schools, society is going to have to make a hard decision. Are the schools really in their stated business, or are they holding areas because we don't know what else to do with kids who are either uninterested in, or unable to benefit from, a genuine education?

If the answer is the first, then simply paying lip service to the idea of zero tolerance for violence must stop. A well-intentioned desire to 'keep kids in school' has resulted in this attack and way too many like it. No matter how egregious some kids' behavior is to others, no matter how egregious their disrespect and contempt for their teachers, they get to stay. So what happens? Their behavior and disrespect become even worse. Truly, I am sympathetic to the question of what happens to the kids who get kicked out, because in many cases their unacceptable behavior has been encouraged by becoming completely 'lost' over the years of their supposed education, and that is not their fault, but the system's. (One wonders about these two sisters--17 and 18 in a class that is usually freshman level--note the 14-year-old victim and her freshman best friend--but is required for graduation.) Nonetheless, that problem can't be solved by allowing chronic troublemakers or those who commit savage assaults to remain in school putting others at risk. Their prospects shouldn't trump those of the non-violent kids who could certainly thrive in a better environment.