City School Stories

Notes from the Field

Submitted by Frank Murphy on September 20, 2011

In late March of this year, a seven part investigative series on school violence, titled Assault on Learning, was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  This report provided a comprehensive and balanced looked at the problems created in classrooms across the city as the result of the disruptive and sometimes criminal behavior of a small group of juvenile offenders.

Throughout this series, the reporters did a good job of describing what school violence looks like to the people who inhabit our public schools. They provided a variety of examples of its ill effects on students, teachers and parents.  They also identified the schools having a large number of incidents of school violence.

In addition to detailing the extent and types of serious incidents that have occurred in the district during the last five years, the journalists also attempted to delve into the root causes that contribute to violent student misbehavior.  Poverty, hunger, drug abuse, parental neglect and crime were some of the major factors that they identified.  These societal problems have overwhelmed the communities in which some of our most troubled schools are located.  Interestingly, nearly half of the district’s violent incidents occurred in a total of 46 schools that enroll less than 25% of the city’s public school students.  The schools that serve these children struggle to provide a safe and secure environment for their students.

In Installment Six of this series, various programs were examined that can assist in abating the kind of student misbehavior that frequently escalates into serious incidents of violence.  The effective anti-violence, anti-bullying strategies identified by the reporters when properly implemented, can positively redirect children and help them to develop non-violent conflict resolution skills.  However these efforts require additional school funding and personnel, something that is in short supply in the School District of Philadelphia.

The balanced reporting that these journalists demonstrated in describing the complex nature of school violence was laudable.  It was refreshing to read this thoughtful and well-researched account prepared by the mainstream media.  Unfortunately, the recent opinion piece regarding school violence published by the editorial board of this same newspaper was less than inspiring.  It half heartily urged Acting School Superintendent Leroy Nunery II to implement the recommendations of a blue ribbon task force regarding eliminating violence in the school district.

Of  the various suggestions made by this task force the newspaper board focused primarily on the idea that district police officers should be the persons who decide which events are serious enough to be reported.  Currently, this authority resides with a school’s principal.  The reasoning behind this proposal is that there will be more “accurate reporting” of school violence if school police officers are the reporters.   Implicitly inferred in this reasoning is the belief that school principals under report serious incidents.

The creation and use of detailed reporting systems has been the favorite activity of the No Child Left Behind school reformers. The primary objective of this strategy is to label schools as failures and to impose harsh sanctions upon them (loss of Title One funds, reconstitution of school personnel, conversion to charter schools, etc.).  Increasingly, critics of this approach to school reform have pointed out that it does little to provide the supports that children need in order to achieve academic success.  Similarly, what benefit will a change to the system for reporting serious incidents provide to the well being of our local school children?  More than likely a more detailed gathering of information about school violence will only be used to impose sanctions upon schools rather than to assist them to obtain the resources they need to be more effective.

According to the data base constructed by the Inquirer’s own reporters, more than 30,000 violent incidents have taken place in Philadelphia schools over the last five years. Clearly, there is a major violence problem in our schools.  And what this information makes most apparent is that there are a disturbingly large number of troubled children in our schools in need of intensive supports.  So why should we focus our attention on revising our incident reporting procedure as suggested in the Inquirer editorial?  Wouldn’t our energies be better utilized in finding viable solutions for this problem?

The Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Inquirer could better serve the needs of the children of Philadelphia by advocating for additional resources from our city and state governments in order to address the social and economic issues plaguing our most impoverished neighborhoods.

A much better focus for an editorial would be to urge Governor Corbett to spend more on public health and social services programs and less on the building and operation of prisons.  By diverting taxes dollars away from incarcerating large numbers of non-violent criminals, we could more efficiently utilize these funds to finance violence prevention and conflict resolution programs for those youth who are most in need of these services.

Wouldn’t such an approach go a long way in making our schools much safer places?