I came across a very interesting/disturbing report today from the New York Civil Liberties Union entitled “Criminalizing the Classroom“. The following is an excerpt from the Executive Summary:
“Since the NYPD took control of school safety in 1998, the number of police personnel in schools and the extent of their activity have skyrocketed. At the start of the 2005-2006 school year, the city employed a total of 4,625 School Safety Agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to schools. These numberswould make the NYPD’s School Safety Division alone the tenth largest police force in the country – larger than the police forces of Washington, D.C., Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas.
Because these school-assigned police personnel are not directly subject to the supervisory authority of school administrators, and because they often have not been adequately trained to work in educational settings, SSAs and police officers often arrogate to themselves authority that extends well beyond the narrow mission of securing the safety of the students and teachers. They enforce school rules relating to dress and appearance. They make up their own rules regarding food or other objects that have nothing whatsoever to do with school safety. On occasion they subject educators who question the NYPD’s treatment of students to retaliatory arrests. More routinely, according to our interviews and survey, they subject students
to inappropriate treatment including:
• derogatory, abusive and discriminatory comments and conduct;
• intrusive searches;
• unauthorized confiscation of students’ personal items, including food, cameras and essential school supplies;
• inappropriate sexual attention;
• physical abuse; and
• arrest for minor non-criminal violations of school rules.
These types of police interventions create flashpoints for confrontations and divert students and teachers from invaluable classroom time. They make students feel diminished, and are wholly incompatible with a positive educational environment.
Statistical analysis shows that all students are not equally likely to bear the brunt of over-policing in New York City schools. The burden falls primarily on the schools with permanent metal detectors, which are attended by the city’s most vulnerable children. The students attending these high schools are disproportionately poor, Black, and Latino compared to citywide averages, and they are more often confronted by police personnel in school for “non-criminal” incidents than their peers citywide. These children receive grossly less per-pupil funding on direct educational services than city averages. Their schools are likely to be large and overcrowded, and to have unusually high suspension and drop-out rates. “
Having spent the last few years working around public schools in Chicago and Boston, I can’t say I’m shocked by anything that they’re reporting, either about the results of putting police officers in schools or the fact that schools in low-income, largely minority neighborhoods bear the brunt of the policing.
The obvious retort will be that those neighborhoods also have the highest crime rates and the most crime in the school, so of course that’s where the officers will go. Controlling the criminal element will help improve the school for the majority of law-abiding students, yada yada yada.
Well if you’re so fucking interested in improving the quality of education at the school, why not improve teacher pay, lower the size of the average classroom, buy up-to-date materials, or repair structural damage to the buildings? Even if police in the schools improves the quality of education for at least some students (and the NYCLU report suggests otherwise), there’s a reason why, of all the barriers to quality educaton at these schools, crime is the one on which the city chooses to focus.
The truth is that in many of this country’s largest cities (though thankfully I have not seen much of this trend in Boston), public schools are becoming terrifyingly similar to prisons. There are bars on the windows, metal detectors at the doors, police officers in the hallways, uniforms, randome searches, and security cameras.
These security measures take priority over such staples of education such as TEACHERS TO ACTUALLY TEACH THE FUCKING CLASSES. In Chicago, many of the most heavily securitized schools were so short in teachers that they would stick any warm body they could find in a classroom, and failing that, students would be herded into the cafeteria or somewhere else for an entire period where nothing was taught or expected of them.
A friend of mine who attended one such school in Chicago told me that her freshman year, her social studies class was without a teacher for SIX MONTHS! She was one of only about ten student, in a class of forty, to pass the test required for graduation. Thirty students were held back for failing a test on material they’d never been taught.
When the test results were announced, there was a small riot in the classroom, with students overturning desks and throwing chairs out of windows. This criminal behavior, of course, becomes a justification for all of the security. Anecdotes like this, and I’ve heard many, make it very clear to me that the purpose of some schools is not to educate but to warehouse the urban poor until they are old for prison, where many of them eventually end up.