Making Safety a Piece of the Pie

In Philadelphia last week a teacher named Frank Burd wound up in the hospital after two students assaulted him, apparently because he had confiscated an iPod during class. After class, according to a report on NBC news, the two students were waiting for Burd. One punched him and the other pushed him. As of Friday night (February 23), he was still in intensive care with two broken bones in his neck.

Mr. Burd’s experience may seem like an aberration, but actually, it is only a slightly more extreme example of the kind of violence, crime, and general incivility that teachers and students confront in schools all over the nation. Here in NY, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s Preliminary Management Report showed a 21-percent increase in felony crimes committed in the city's schools between July and October 2006 compared with the same period the previous year. And according a February 23 article in The Chief, “Major crimes rose from 287 to 348, other criminal reports increased from 820 to 983, and additional safety incidents climbed from 1,614 to 1,926, according to the Mayor's report.

What’s more, according to the same Chief article, the United Federation of Teachers (New York’s teacher union) has reported that between Sept. 5, 2006 and Feb. 9, 2007, there have been 704 assaults (511 of them were against teachers), 117 larcenies, 44 robberies, 46 sex offenses, 99 incidents of menacing, 861 of verbal harassment, 668 of physical harassment , and 536 wreckless endangerments.

And that's just what got reported.

These are grim statistics, and they reflect incidents targeted at teachers, primarily, but also at students. Teachers will tell you that these are the statistics that matter most in schools, far more than the blips and glitches of the standardized test scores, and they will also say that we cannot seriously address student achievement until we address school culture. The frequent assaults, and the even more frequent incidents of low-level aggression and incivility – threats, belligerence, verbal harassment – wear teachers down and disrupt student focus. Incivility is the backdrop against which all teachers teach, new or experienced, weak or strong, in “good” schools, or in “bad.”

It doesn’t have to be this way, but here in New York’s public schools, the Department of Education does not seem to believe that either teachers or children are worth the effort it will take to make them safe. Safety is an afterthought in our schools, as becomes obvious when we look at the professional development teachers receive (none or almost none on safety); the size of the classes in middle and high school; the priorities principals exhibit in their funding decision (test prep over suspense rooms; test prep over guidance counselors); the tasks assigned to high-priced consultants (cut the buses, figure out the best arrangement of the student desks); and the priorities of Chancellor Joel Klein in his latest gambit to reconfigure the schools.

It is Klein’s plan that is the most telling, of course, because as the plan goes, so go the schools. But look at the plan. For all Klein’s talk about accountability in that plan, there is no talk about holding anyone (least of all himself) accountable for the safety of students and their teachers in the schools. Accountability for Klein means only one thing: test scores. In fact, 85% of his accountability pie is made up of test scores. That leaves safety buried somewhere in the other 15%, along with all the other things the chancellor doesn’t care about: parent satisfaction, art and music classes, and “quality” reviews.

Here’s the chancellor’s pie, in which he describes his “Balanced View.”




That’s the pie. Never mind that test scores can never significantly improve so long as schools are not truly safe and orderly; never mind that the public schools have a basic, moral obligation to ensure that children and employees are safe; never mind because in the chancellor’s new accountability plan, safety doesn't even make its way into view.

So, what I keep wondering, when I look at this Klein’s pie is this:

What would a school (not parental) accountability pie look like if teachers designed it?

Or if you prefer: Create a Klein pie. For what should Joel Klein be held responsible, and by what percents?

I invite your comments, though I don’t expect too many. This is – starting today – a brand new blog!