Category: Culture

The other day I wrote about the question of school security. I argued that no reasonable person would want our kids to go to schools that were equipped to repel any possible invasion by a hostile adult.

But there are other ways to make ourselves more secure, and improve our schools at the same time.

A recent article in The New Yorker (“Adaptation,” Jan. 7, 2013) brings together research that urban planners are using to make cities safer. The most shocking research was done in the aftermath of the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed 739 people. When researchers compiled the data, they found that the deaths were largely concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, which was unsurprising. The surprising thing was how neighborhoods with very similar demographics fared so differently.

“Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two adjacent neighborhoods on the hyper-segregated South Side of Chicago, were both ninety-nine per cent African American, with similar proportions of elderly residents. Both had high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime. Englewood proved to be one of the most perilous places during the disaster, with thirty-three deaths per hundred thousand residents. But Auburn Gresham’s death rate was only three per hundred thousand, making it far safer than many of the most affluent neighborhoods.”

The neighborhoods that fared better had far more interconnected communities. Individuals did not solve their problems on their own; they relied on their community to provide support, while they provided support to others.

Our public schools have largely become like the neighborhoods of Chicago where elderly residents suffered and died alone. Where once schools were used as community centers and viewed as central meeting places for neighbors, now in the name of security the community is locked out of schools. Where once parents were considered part of a community that educated children, now parents are on the outside and are brought in only to meet with the professionals whose job it is to teach the children.

The more locked away our schools have become, the more inaccessible and remote, the more they have been seen as “the other” by members of the larger community. Most of the news about schools is negative. People whose children don’t go to the local schools are likely to have a vaguely negative opinion about them. There is no sense that our schools are part of our community, functioning to help create more productive members of our society. The punitive testing environment created in the last 12 years has nurtured a sense that our kids are running behind in a race and will never measure up, and that our teachers are lazy slackers who are taking advantage of taxpayers.

In this time, violence in our schools has risen while violence elsewhere in our society is falling rapidly. We live in the safest time ever to be a human being, yet we feel anxious and fearful for our kids’ safety. In this post-9/11 society, we see security being increased everywhere, and it seems natural to call for an increase in security in our schools.

But as The New Yorker article points out, this increase in security measures has not increased our actual security—our safety on a day-to-day level.

“Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times. Contrast this with our approach to homeland security since 9/11: the checkpoints, the bollards, the surveillance cameras, the no-entry zones. We do not know whether these devices have prevented an attack on an American city, but, as the sociologist Harvey Molotch argues in “Against Security,” they have certainly made daily life less pleasant and efficient, imposing costs that are difficult to measure while yielding “almost nothing of value” in the normal course of things.”

Bullet-proof doors and electric fences will not solve the problem of violence aimed at our schools. We can’t fortify ourselves against an unknown enemy and still go about our business in a comfortable, socially healthy manner.

What we can do, however, is learn from the past in order to find what really will bring positive benefits to our society. In the case of school security and improving education, we can bring our communities back into schooling. We can not only welcome but expect that community members would want to take part in the education of a new generation. We can make our schools places where caring adults interact with needy children.

In “Why You Truly Never Leave High School” (New York Magazine, January 20, 2013), writer Jennifer Senior points out that teenagers of the past were not separated from adults and made to feel like “the other” in our society:

“Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults.”

Over the last century, we have grown a new teenage culture due to the fact that teens spend so little time with adults and so much time getting “socialized” into a culture that is a parody of adult relationships. We expect our kids to get excited about STEM careers, but they’re spending most of their time with people who are excited about playing video games. We expect our kids to develop kindness and empathy, but they are spending most of their time in “Lord of the Flies”-like mini-societies where kid rules trump anything the occasional adult may teach them. Sure, you can have anti-bullying campaigns and rules enough to fill a 3-inch binder, but if you don’t have enough adults to model what it is to be a scientist, a business owner, a nurse, or simply a mature, productive adult of any profession, how do we expect kids to learn these things?

Learning happens when the learner sees a purpose for the learning. Security happens when we connect with each other and care about the connections we make.

Opening a school back up to a community model will not fortify its walls against an intruder who bought a hand grenade from someone he met at a shooting range, but it will make our schools safer and more effective, nonetheless. We all need to feel that we have a stake in how well the next generation is educated, and once we do, we’ll also feel that we are part of a safe and interconnected community.

 

I sat in recently on a conversation about school safety that was sparked by the school shooting in Connecticut. Administrators, principals, and parents sat around a table talking about security and what it means to them.

The most striking aspect of the conversation was how personally each one of these people who work in our public schools took this tragedy. For the rest of us, this was a horrific event. For them, each death could have been a life they had been in charge of caring for. They would have been the teachers sheltering kids behind them. They would have been the principal running to help.

That’s why I can’t fault them for wanting to make sure that they had the safest schools possible. And I can’t fault them at all for how they talked about it: there was no suggestion that we make our local schools, known for their laid-back feel and friendly atmosphere, into locked down facilities where parents aren’t welcome.

But I can’t help but think that when talking about school shootings, we are having the wrong conversation. When you take the problem of school security to its logical extremes, it’s clear that the problem is not so simple as “making schools safer” sounds. First of all, all of us—from superintendents through principals down to teachers, parents, and students—have no interest in making schools unhappy places. Current research just confirms what anyone who has worked with kids and really paid attention knows instinctively: kids learn best when they’re happy. In fact, when you teach a specific skill to someone who is unhappy and experiencing stress, the likelihood is that they’ll learn nothing at all.

So we try to figure out how to stop the violence in reasonable ways. But people who enter schools with the intention of killing children are well beyond any state of mind that a reasonable, sane person is able to access. People who kill children just because they can are in a mental state that no school official can match. They are willing to do things that no parent can fathom.

Certainly, we could fortify our schools, send teachers to school with guns, raise our kids in a state of fear where they instinctively dive for a closet at any loud noise. But no reasonable person wants this. We don’t want our kids going to school in a hermetically sealed environment where everyone is under suspicion—some kids in this country do in fact experience this every day, and no one involved is happy about it. (And, not surprisingly, these schools are the ones where kids are learning the least.)

So when it comes down to it, we have to admit that we are not willing to go to the lengths we’d need to go to in order to “secure” our schools. We might lock our doors, but the guy with the gun feels no hesitation at blowing the lock off the door. We might require background checks for everyone we allow into a school, but the guy with the gun isn’t going to bother to show any credentials. We can train staff and parents to question anyone who looks suspicious, but the guy with the gun isn’t going to hesitate just because someone says, “Can I help you?”

There’s also the matter of how increased security actually escalates violence. This is from security expert Bruce Schneier:

“We defend airplanes against certain terrorist tactics: shoe bombs, liquid bombs, underwear bombs. These measures have limited value because the number of potential terrorist tactics and targets is much greater than the ones we have recently observed. Does it really make sense to spend a gazillion dollars just to force terrorists to switch tactics? Or drive to a different target? In the face of modern society’s ambiguous dangers, it is flexibility that makes security effective.”

In other words, escalating security just tempts the bad guys to be more ingenious in their methods. In fact, no one has any solid data that unreasonable airport security is making us any safer.

Translated to school security, you can see where we’d be headed. Yes, we can turn all our schools into locked facilities. But Sandy Hook was locked. Yes, we could make the glass in the front door bulletproof, but what about the football field? What about the school auditorium that has a back door? What about the schools in my local community that are largely built as collections of small buildings all open to the outside?

Someone who is already insane enough to want to shoot up a school is not going to be stopped by reasonable security measures. And unreasonable security measures make our public schools even less inviting, in a time when many parents are trying to get their kids out of the public schools that are failing them in other ways.

Reasonable school security is fine. But at what point are we going to descend to asking 500 parents to take off their shoes and be frisked by an expensive machine so they can go see a school play? At what point are we going to see that no reasonable measure is going to stop an unreasonable person from finding a way around what we’ve done?

I believe that most of us are reasonable, and rational, and we know that this sort of security will not make our children safer. But if we’re not going to lock our children in padded cells, how do we solve this problem?

Perhaps we need to take a good, long look in a mirror held up to our culture and finally have serious conversations about who we really are and what we want as a nation. School security comes from our culture at large, not from a lock on the door.

Next: How strengthening our social ties will improve our schools and make them safer.

Last weekend I went to an educational conference held by the California Association for the Gifted. The conference is for educators, psychologists, and parents of gifted children. It’s heavily weighted toward public school teachers, but in general there’s something for everyone in the field.

One morning I sat down with my wonderful publishers, Jim Webb and Janet Gore, to chat, and we ended up sitting next to a teacher who struck up a conversation with us. I didn’t get her name or the district she works in, but her story is, right now in California, a very common one.

She told us that she works in a heavily Latino district, and that most of her students are English language learners. Everyone who has studied ELLs knows the facts: On average, they take a few years to come up to speed in English. Their test scores during this period are awful, of course. Then eventually, if given the right educational opportunities, their knowledge of a second language becomes an asset. Please notice the big “if” in that sentence.

This teacher told me a story that I’ve heard in my home district as well. Labeled by No Child Left Behind as a “failing” school, they were put under the ill-named “Program Improvement.” Under PI, all control over what happens in the school is taken over by the state. Teachers have no choice in what to teach when – they actually have to follow a script each day.

These were things that I knew, but here are some more things she told us as we listened, horrified:

Teachers at her school have been ordered to remove all art from the walls. No creative work is to take place in the classrooms. They are directly forbidden from teaching any sort of drama or visual art. They get unannounced visits by the principal and others to ascertain whether they are following the script. Her students, who live in an insulated, Spanish speaking community, come to school knowing not a word of English; yet they are only spoken to in English only.

This teacher told us that she has one goal in her teaching: Not to directly hurt her students. Other teachers in the school, she said, place no such restrictions on themselves. She tries to make her classroom a happy place, and whenever possible, she tries to “sneak” real learning into their day.

She told us with some irony that her students get great test scores – she does her job well. But she knows that she is not able to educate them, just to prepare them to fill in bubbles. For personal reasons, she really needs her job and can’t take the risk of moving. She said that the older teachers in her district are retiring and being replaced by young teachers who have never known anything different than this script-based classroom.

Why, you may ask, was she at a gifted conference? Clearly, although giftedness transcends all racial and socioeconomic barriers, she was going to get no support from her principal to teach to those students.

She said she was gathering ideas that she could “sneak” into her script, things that would look enough like test prep, and wouldn’t resemble creativity in any way, so that she wouldn’t get in trouble with management.

I hardly knew what to say. She spoke very simply and eloquently about her situation.

“You need to start an anonymous blog,” I told her. “People need to hear these things. They need to know what’s being done to children in service of test scores.”

She pondered that, seeming like she was interested in the idea. Then she got the clouded look of someone who lives under Big Brother. “I’m sure our district tech guy would find me out,” she said. “I can’t afford to lose this job.”

And that was that. She went off to gather little bits of inspiration to brighten up the days of her creativity-forbidden students, and I went off to learn more about what we can do to serve all the needs of gifted children. Or rather, what we could do, if we actually cared enough.

Our society doesn’t care enough. Sure, I hear lots of parents complain about the tests. And I know a lot of parents who have escaped testing by choosing private or home school. But I have to wonder why we aren’t doing anything about this in any meaningful way. Why are we allowing politicians to make decisions based on advice from businessmen, faulty assumptions about why children do and do not succeed, and political convenience? This is a democracy. Why aren’t we all complaining about this? Why aren’t we instructing our children to go to the tests, sign their names, and then sit on their hands?

I know the answers: We support the politicians for other reasons. We figure they’re only doing this stuff now, but that they really do agree with us that it has to change. We support our individual schools and our individual teachers because they are, by and large, people like this woman, their hands tied by policy made by non-educators. Sometimes the best you can do is to do no harm. Sometimes the best you can do is crouch in the one corner where the telescreen can’t see you and write in your diary, “Down with Big Brother.”

Another teacher at a different time this weekend said to me, without irony, “We know that No Child Left Behind was designed to destroy our public schools.” She didn’t ask my opinion; she figured that anyone who had looked into the situation had to agree. What other possible reason could there be for it? A hundred years from now, looking back at this period in history, how will students of history be able to construct any other narrative?

It is clear that what is happening in classrooms across our state – and our country – where students don’t perform well on tests is nothing like education. Educators, neurologists, and psychologists actually know what works to create well functioning, educated people, and reading to them from scripts is not it. What’s being done to these students is some sort of peculiar torture that we as a society are accepting, condoning through our silent acceptance.

Shame on us. And thank you to those teachers who are trying, against all odds, to do no harm.