How to Fix Our City Schools
Mental Health, Safety, and School Culture
Part 1: The New Normal
For many years, schools have employed metal detectors, “resource officers,” and even armed police. Yet, just in the last few weeks there were two more horrible shootings at schools. In one case, the 17-year-old student (gunman) was so dangerous that he was “under a school safety plan” that required him to “undergo daily pat-down searches” before he was allowed to enter the school.”[1] Today, that is the kind of crazy situation – the new normal – our public schools are expected to manage and our children and parents are expected to endure. But, does it have to be?
When I began my tenure with the Austin ISD in 2009, one of the priorities for the new superintendent was addressing disciplinary issues at several of the middle and high schools. As one of the first steps, a well-respected high school principal was promoted to Assistant Superintendent for High Schools in large measure because he was credited with “turning around” his former school – including successfully implementing a fair, consistent disciplinary plan. To be certain, AISD was not one of most “out-of-control” districts in which I have served. Yet, in spite of the administration’s efforts, in 2015 “AISD Police were called to more than 25 different middle and high school campuses because of gang activity at least once. In all, AISD police were called 120 times for gang-related activity.”[2]
Several years earlier, I had accepted a position with the Baltimore City Public Schools and one of my first school visits was to Frederick Douglass High School. It was after the final lunch period and I was in a classroom installing computer software. Suddenly, there was a blaring announcement on the classroom’s PA speaker: “This is a lockdown. This is a hall sweep. All teachers lock your doors.” I had no idea what was going on and I was a little concerned as the teacher dutifully locked his classroom door. The teacher later explained that the administration was trying to prevent kids from roaming the halls, avoiding class, and getting in trouble. The strategy was to lock all the rooms, not so kids couldn’t leave their classrooms, but so students couldn’t get in. With all the rooms locked, the administration and security officers would then “sweep” the building looking for kids locked out – i.e., those wandering or roaming or hiding in stairways, bathrooms, locker rooms, closets, boiler rooms, and so on. At the time, I was shocked by the prison-like tactic.
Several years later, I was fortunate to serve in another of our great cities – Washington, DC. Like most big cities, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) include several beautiful old school buildings. One of those is the Cardozo Education Campus (formerly Francis Cardozo High School). One afternoon, a few minutes before the final bell, I left the school and descended the concrete stairs in front of the building. As I looked down Clifton Street NW trying to locate my car, I noticed there were four or five DC Metropolitan Police (MPD) cruisers parked in front of the school. I asked one of the police officers standing nearby if there was some sort of trouble at the school. He shook his head and told me it was just the “standard operating procedure.” Every day when the students were dismissed, nearly a dozen MPD officers stationed themselves in front of the school to make sure things didn’t “get out of control.”
During my years in DCPS, I was one of six Assistant Superintendents who reported to the Chief Schools Officer (CSO). The other five were the regional Assistant Superintendents who supervised the school principals. One Thursday morning, the weekly staff meeting agenda included assigning a young woman to a new school. She was to be released from “Juvy” (i.e., the DC Juvenile Detention Center) in the next few days. To my amazement, almost 30 minutes were devoted to exploring options for the young woman. Among other things, she had been expelled (and adjudicated) because she had assisted several gang members in gaining access to her former school by propping open a side door. The gang members had then started a fire in a dumpster at the rear of the building as a distraction and made their way into the building searching for members of a rival gang. Multiple violent altercations followed before MPD officers arrived to assist the school’s “resource officers.” Now, the young woman was being released and DCPS was required to re-enroll her in a school. The biggest challenge wasn’t that she had made dangerous enemies in her former school. The biggest challenge was that she (like most DCPS students) required public transportation in order to travel from her home to school and several Metro bus and train routes were not viable options for her because they went through gang areas where she was not welcome and the Assistant Superintendents believed there was a very real possibility she would be seriously harmed if rival gangs knew her whereabouts.
At that point in my career, I had already worked in five school districts, including the St. Louis and Baltimore Public Schools, and I had heard a number of crazy stories. But, that day, I gained an even greater appreciation of the magnitude of the challenges our urban public school teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, and administrators are expected to manage.
These, of course, are individual anecdotes. However, district, state and national data show that they were not isolated events.
In 2007-2008, the State of Maryland used federal guidelines to label four Baltimore middle schools “persistently dangerous” including two schools the state closed. In 2012, two additional Baltimore middle schools were added to the list. “For a school to get on the list, 2.5 percent of its student body must have been suspended for arson, possessing a weapon or drugs, assaulting a teacher or other student, or sexual assault.”[3] To put that percentage in perspective, for a school of 1,000 students to have been classified as “persistently dangerous,” at least 25 of their students must have been suspended (at least once) for serious criminal offenses. And, these were middle schools!
A 2017 survey of NYC Public School students found that “82 percent of students in grades 6-12 said that their peers harass, bully, or intimidate others in school. In addition, over 17% of students in grades 6-12, disagreed (or strongly disagreed) that they felt safe in hallways, bathrooms, locker rooms, or the cafeteria of the school… while 23% of students… disagreed (or strongly disagreed) that they felt safe in the vicinity of the school.”[4]
Even more recently, Paul Vallas, one of the two Democratic candidates for Mayor of Chicago appeared on MSNBC and blamed the dramatic increases in crime in Chicago on two issues – only two. The first, according to Vallas, was closely related to the fact that “because of the pandemic, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had been closed for 15 months.” He suggested that because the schools were closed, many of the CPS students were out on the streets committing crimes. He supported his claims with a number of statistics about youth crime in the city over the last few years. Of course, youth crime did not begin with the pandemic and the school closures. Still, Vallas wasn’t wrong about the impact of youth crime on our cities and schools. For example, according to the Chicago Police Department, in 2021 there were over 1,800 carjackings in Chicago[5] and it is estimated that half were carried out by youth under the age of 17.
Nationally, an estimated 50-60% of urban youth are exposed to neighborhood violence. In some neighborhoods that number climbs to nearly 100% and one-third of urban male youth report being “the victim of violence including (being) beaten or mugged, attacked with a knife or stabbed, or shot by another person.” [6]
For most children, the transition to secondary school is difficult as they move from small protective environments to schools where they move from class to class independently. For kids in urban schools, the transition is particularly difficult. Many urban secondary schools are absurdly large – some middle and high school enrollments exceeding 2,000 or even 3,000 students. While some newer facilities have larger “footprints,” many older buildings are mazes of narrow hallways and stairways – hallways and stairways where almost one-fourth of the students don’t feel safe. About half of students in urban secondary schools report having gangs in their school[7] and three-quarters of secondary school students now think “a school shooting could occur in their community.”[8] “Among (all) high school youth (grades 9-12), 22.6% reported being in a physical fight, 16.2% reported carrying a weapon, and 7.8% reported carrying a weapon on school property” [9]
Academically, many students enter urban secondary schools as unprepared for the more challenging work as they are for their newfound independence and responsibilities. Many students have language/communication disorders, many have either limited English skills or are years behind in reading, and many still have not mastered even basic mathematics skills. Yet, with little or no remediation or support, they are expected to fully participate and succeed in several core and non-core courses.
This is the “new normal” in most urban secondary schools – woefully unprepared adolescents and young adults, with long histories of academic failure, trying to “manage” more demanding work while attending schools where gangs and bullying, threatening, and violent behavior are common, and where expectations for them are low. What could possibly go wrong?
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What can be done? The challenges of student’s mental health and disruptive and dangerous behavior require more than a one-size-fits-all solution. In next week’s newsletter, the goal will be to help school leaders clarify what is working, what is not, and, more importantly, what is possible.
Next Week:
Part 2 – Keeping kids in school… at all costs!
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Dear Subscribers,
I hope you find the information and ideas in my newsletters compelling and useful. They are informed by over 40 years of experience working with twenty superintendents, dozens of future superintendents, hundreds of senior administrators, and thousands of principals. On almost a daily basis, I listened to their hopes, doubts, complaints, excuses, and promises… and discussed and debated priorities, philosophies, theories, programs, and plans. (A short Bio is provided below.)
If you find the newsletters valuable, please share them with friends and colleagues. Only by informing school board members, educators, parents, and community leaders can we finally create the great schools every child and family deserves. If you have questions or comments, those are also very welcome.
Best Regards!
Bill Caritj
President
Capital Schools Consulting (CSC)
https://www.capitalschoolsconsultinggroup.com/
billcaritj@gmail.com
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Links to recent newsletters:
“Practical” turn-around strategies
(March 6, 2023)
The Most Important Things I learned in 2022
(January 26, 2023)
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize!
(December 27, 2022)
The Answer is… In Your Own Backyard!
(December 8, 2022)
Where is the Outrage?
(November 8, 2022)
Great Principals, Superintendents, and Board Members
(October 19, 2022)
Six First Steps (Starting with Early Literacy)
(September 16, 2022)
"Game Changers"
(September 3, 2022)
The Solutions are Simple, Change is Not!
(August 8, 2022)
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Bio/Introduction
For forty years, I was fortunate to lead the assessment, evaluation, and accountability departments of nine public school districts, including six of the largest in the nation – Washington, DC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Austin, Atlanta, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). In almost every instance, my position was relatively independent of the internal and external “politics.” As a result, I am not biased toward or against any particular specialty, theory, philosophy, or program. My only bias is to results.
Over the years, I have had a wide range of responsibilities including state and local test development, accountability, research and evaluation, standards alignment, school improvement, information technology, and instructional technology. From 2014-2021, I supervised the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Information Technology, Instructional Technology, Assessment, Research, Evaluation, and Data and Information divisions. Over that period, our teams were credited with restoring the integrity and public trust in the district’s assessment, accountability, and data and information systems after the cheating scandal of 2008. During the COVID pandemic, these outstanding teams also did amazing work to enable and support (and, in many cases, develop) the high-quality virtual programs provided each day to over 50,000 students who were forced to receive their daily instruction at home.
Since “retiring” from the Atlanta Public Schools, I’ve been very busy – working on a book, How to Fix Our City Schools, publishing a monthly newsletter (of the same name), and launching the Capital Schools Consulting Group (CSCG). CSCG services include executive coaching, training, evaluation, and data analytic services to district leaders and school boards. How to Fix Our City Schools is part memoir and part handbook and while I am very excited about finally completing a final draft, the process has made me even more acutely aware of the disappointment I feel about the missed opportunities and failures of the last forty years and my fear that they will continue indefinitely for future generations of poor and disadvantaged children.
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Capital Schools Consulting (CSC)
https://www.capitalschoolsconsultinggroup.com/
· Data analysis and reporting
· Board training – data analytics, planning, and goal setting
· Executive coaching for new school board members
· Executive coaching and support for new superintendents’ transition teams
· Planning and monitoring district reforms
· Logic model and strategy map development
· Major program implementation audits
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[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/23/us/denver-colorado-school-shooting-thursday/index.html
[2] Austin NPR station KUT, https://www.kut.org/education/2015-07-09/austin-isd-continues-effort-to-crack-down-on-gang-related-incidents
[3] Five City Schools Labeled Dangerous; The Baltimore Sun, Liz Bowie, July 26, 2007. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2007-07-26-0707260160-story.html.
[4] Safe and Supportive Schools: A Plan to Improve School Climate and Safety, NYC Comptroller, June 2018
[5] https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2022/04/12/carjackings-by-chicago-neighborhood
[6] CDC Youth Violence Facts at a Glance, 2016; https://voices.uchicago.edu/ccyvp/about/about-youth-violence/
[7] https://education.seattlepi.com/statistics-gangs-schools-2199.html
[8] https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP219.html
Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2021, Institute of Education Science, U.S. Department of Justice.
[9] Ibid, CDC, 2016.