Schooling IV: Defiance

This installment of 'Schooling' was prompted by a teacher at the middle school where I am vice principal. She was compelled to rant after being faced with yet another bout of in-your-face student defiance that occurred during her lunch duty. Willfull disobedience disobedience best describes it. My collegue was justly exasperated from it. This problem can be so pervasive in some schools that it takes on a subculture of its own and it can be difficult to discern. It occurs all over the public school landscape, but it is a particularly a troublesome phenomenon on the middle school level when adolescent children began to assert their will more stridently. Teachers are mostly caught off guard despite the lessons on adolescent development we should know. Now let me not approach this topic sheepishly.

If it is true that public schools in general get a bad rap, then it is especially true that "urban" schools get maligned for the failures they manifest. Dozens of movies have been made with the theme that goes..."Predominatly Black and Hispanic schools are out of control." Dangerous Minds and Lean On Me are two of the most memorable examples of cinema depicting urban schools that are all but unsalvagable. Recent documentaries on Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore Maryland, and Little Rock High School in Arkansas remind us that the problem is not purely ficticious. In fact the issues are prevalent and real. At the core of problems in most of these schools, weather they are large metro schools in Los Angelos or Chicago, or small urban villages such as the middle school where I am assistant principal, is an entrenched subculture of apathy and disrespect for authority connected to poverty.

Sometime we conveniently refer to a variety of societal factors in order to obsolve students for not engaging opportunities that public schools still hold for them. However, few people discuss the impact of individual will on a student's achievement or failure in school. I contend that the law of attraction manifests in school frequently. Just as water and dust find their own levels and collect to create a dominant environment, so to do poverty and apathy. People often over look, or disregard the fact the public school districts are the major employers -- if not the only employers in many low income communities. Consequently, the contrast between community norms and common middle class expectations of most America schools becomes blurred.

In as much as I am an adminstrator of public schools, and a Black person, I am not given over to apathy on the subject, nor am I motivated by self-loathing. Instead I feel compelled to explore answers to these all too familiar phenomenon, and address myself to their installation when I can. That brings me back to my collegue. When there exists in schools an unbridled inclanation by many students to do as they please, without regard to authority, your school has been seriously undermined by social norms that make educational success a virtual impossibility for the school's majority.

When aggregated, student defiance of routine direction from teachers, and their antipathy for rules constitute the majority of infractions in most schools. However, when schools are sizable and obstinance is so frequent that it demoralizes teachers, it can create a stagnant pool for negative norms to culture and grow. Norms that burden a school with the invisible pull of their gravity. In affect, it becomes likely that only a fraction of your most fortuitous students will succeed on par with pupils in schools where a traditional learning environment prevails. Until administrators hold truely high expectations for both the routine and infrequent conduct of pupils, and stand against the enabling behavior of some parents and staff, more lofty aims for academic achievement will be weighted under by a culture that works against them. Novel prescriptions like school uniforms and affirming speeches will never be more affective then a persistent expectation for mutual consideration and respect.