The New York Post recently ran an article about overt aggression in a school called Origins High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. against a Jewish female teacher as well as threats to Jewish students at the school. The high school has 40% Muslim students, and the swastika is being posted around the school to send a message of hate to Jewish students and faculty. Threats are being made daily. Homosexual students are also being threatened at the school. Students are not being punished by the acting principal for defacing property with swastikas or for shouting “heil Hitler” in the Jewish teacher’s face. By the end of the article, we see that the principal, who is depicted by the harassed teacher and by community leaders as negligent and as perpetuating anti-Semitism by her failure to call students to account, has received many compliments and much recognition for her leadership as an educator.
How is it that she is so praised for her “leadership” while the horrors of anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi acting out grow exponentially in that high school? The answer lies in the breakdown of discipline in the NYC public schools, which breakdown has been in place for decades. Principals are rewarded for their ability to maintain irresponsible levels of poor behavior while pretending education is moving ever upward to the benefit of all involved. In this respect, Origins High School, along with so many schools in NYC, is putting on a big charade pretending that order is still in effect and that learning (sic) is still improving. To the extent that a principal projects this false view, he is deemed “successful.”
This writer taught social studies for 21 years in NYC public high schools, and substituted occasionally for two years before that full-time tenure. My first five and a half years were taught in a “hellhole high school.” Some of the behaviors that are included under my “hellhole” rubric are as follows: students taking 10–20 minutes to pass between classes, toilet seats set on fire using fluid from lighters; students slashed with razors while changing classes, with the razors then thrown out the windows; weapons being brought into school even after metal detectors and electronic wanding of students was implemented; and oral sex in stairwells. One student asked me if I wanted to see the Glock in his bookbag.
I asked one student to stop chasing Tameka around the room and take his seat so I could begin the lesson. He was so incensed by this request that he began scraping the veneer off the top of his desk with his fingernails. Security was called eventually, and he was removed from the class. A 10th-grade girl, who I later was told was regularly taking drugs with her friends, went over to the window, lifted it up, and jumped out. We were on the first floor, but it still was an eight- to ten-foot drop. One day she introduced me to a grinning guy who, she said, was the father of a baby she had aborted two years previously. On another occasion, during a social studies computer lab session set up by a teacher and his cousin, who had come in on a few weekends to do the wiring, students were pouring crazy glue into some of the keyboards. The teacher did not even send the students to the dean, knowing that no punishment would be administered. On one occasion, I gently told one girl to move her cursor a little to the left, and she stood up suddenly, tipping over her chair; yelled, “F--- you!” to me; and stormed out of the room.
As a new teacher, my teaching was to be observed and evaluated by the principal. When the bell to begin the class rang, a fight broke out between two students, and one was pounding the other to a pulp on the floor while many rushed into the room to cheer the fighting. Finally, security (there were 18 security guards assigned to the school and two full-time police officers) arrived to break up the carnage. The principal was there with security, and after 20 minutes of this mayhem — with blood spattered on the floor — he told me to begin teaching and that he would observe me. Ho, hum, just another day in a classroom in New York City!
It turned out later that the student who was beaten badly later died as he ran for the high school’s track team. He had a congenital heart disease that had never been diagnosed. In retrospect, we understood that he could have died in the classroom fight that day. The student who beat him was the same one who volunteered to show me his Glock, but even after this fight, he was not suspended, arrested, or sent to another high school. Only after this violent and pathological student tried to burn down a historic building on the center of the campus (where Alexander Hamilton had studied during the colonial period) was he transferred to another high school. He was not incarcerated despite the egregious action regarding the building and his history of violent, antisocial behavior.
I also substituted in a couple of hellhole schools before going full-time. Discipline for acting out and bad behavior were generally poor. Once, when I subbed at a middle school, a student tried kicking me in the legs while the class stood on their desks, and some shouted for him to kill me. I stood up and slapped the kid hard (I could have hit him harder) across the face twice. He ran out of the room and threw a trash can across the room and reported me for hitting him. I had to go to a hearing and by the skin of my teeth did not lose my license. Nothing happened to the student.
The incident had nothing to do with Jew-hatred, but it just shows that student aggression and bad behavior are tolerated. He wasn’t suspended for even one day and did not have any after-school detentions. His parents were not called in, nor was there any mention of removing him to a juvenile detention facility. That was 33 years ago. So the tolerance of student violence and acting out is within the context of the schools simply not punishing students for egregious behavior.
Of course, the anti-Semitism in the Origins H.S. article here makes it even worse, but it is within a context where malicious, cruel, antisocial, pathological behaviors are generally not disciplined aggressively. That’s why the DOE is indifferent to clamping down on the principal. She is actually under a policy of not implementing severe punishment in all violent circumstances, not only those involving anti-Semitism. Sadly, the Jewish teacher will probably be forced to transfer to another school where there are fewer Muslim students.
This “tolerance” of bad behavior is a policy that is decades old. It is part of the breakdown of law and order and of public policy that no longer sees the building of character as central to the educational process.
E. Jeffrey Ludwig is a Harvard master teacher who was selected four times for Who’s Who among America’s High School Teachers. He served on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review and was nominated to serve on the College Board. His book The Catastrophic Decline of America’s Public High Schools: NYC, A Case Study is available here.
Image via Pexels.
The Long, Horrifying Collapse of Discipline in NYC Public Schools
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03.03.2024
The New York Post recently ran an article about overt aggression in a school called Origins High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. against a Jewish female teacher as well as threats to Jewish students at the school. The high school has 40% Muslim students, and the swastika is being posted around the school to send a message of hate to Jewish students and faculty. Threats are being made daily. Homosexual students are also being threatened at the school. Students are not being punished by the acting principal for defacing property with swastikas or for shouting “heil Hitler” in the Jewish teacher’s face. By the end of the article, we see that the principal, who is depicted by the harassed teacher and by community leaders as negligent and as perpetuating anti-Semitism by her failure to call students to account, has received many compliments and much recognition for her leadership as an educator.
How is it that she is so praised for her “leadership” while the horrors of anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi acting out grow exponentially in that high school? The answer lies in the breakdown of discipline in the NYC public schools, which breakdown has been in place for decades. Principals are rewarded for their ability to maintain irresponsible levels of poor behavior while pretending education is moving ever upward to the benefit of all involved. In this respect, Origins High School, along with so many schools in NYC, is putting on a big charade pretending that order is still in effect and that learning (sic) is still improving. To the extent that a principal projects this false view, he is deemed “successful.”
This writer taught social studies for 21 years in NYC public high schools, and substituted occasionally for two years before that full-time tenure. My first........
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