National media still clueless about Chicago violence

AP Photo/Matt Rourke

The national media have descended on Chicago for the second time in two weeks.  Last week they came for the thrill of Olympic victory but left with a head-shaking defeat to mull over (and over) in the glare of the 24-hour news-cycle.  This time they are charged with the more somber job of assessing our “culture of violence” in the wake of the killing of Derrion Albert, who has unfortunately become the poster child for the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and for our city in general.

And yet the media is somehow missing the central question: when a school has a problem with violence, is it better to keep the students most responsible for that violence where they are, or would it be better to remove them to a different school?

Chicago teachers are so fed up with the constant mayhem inside and outside their classrooms that the teachers’ union (CTU) has proposed the creation of a special school for disruptive students.  Not students with severe disabilities or emotional disturbances, but the sort of unruly, uncooperative kids who drain their teacher’s time and energies, making it much more difficult for the rest of the class to learn. And they want a streamlined process for getting these kids out of their mainstream classes and schools, so the problems they create do not persist for half the school year while bureaucrats wrangle over paperwork.

CPS Chief Ron Huberman does not like this idea much, so we can assume that his boss Mayor Daley doesn’t either.  This is interesting, because many years ago (in 1995, before the mayor had much power over the CPS) Daley advocated a very similar solution to a very similar problem.  In April of that year The Sun Times reported the following:

Daley said Chicago public schools, which have the lowest expulsion rate of the five largest systems in the nation and in the state, should "isolate" troublemakers to reduce the dropout rate and prevent them from disrupting classes for students who want to learn.

But that was then, this is now.  Today, Daley’s handpicked schools chief, Huberman does not believe in the expulsion of disruptive students.

In an interview with [The Sun Times] schools CEO Ron Huberman rejected Stewart's idea, saying research done this year by CPS on troubled high schools points him in a different direction. Schools that successfully create what he calls a "culture of calm" do so by dealing with difficult students in-house, he said. Schools that are quick to suspend and expel -- effectively moving kids out -- have not fared as well, his data indicate.

Now, it was the newly appointed Huberman who carried through on the “turnaround” process for Fenger last winter, a process that removed practically all of the teachers and administrators from the school but left every student in place.  This makes Fenger’s restructuring different from earlier turnarounds in Chicago, and it may have been the critical factor in the afterschool violence that plagued the school from the first week of the new year.

But Huberman remains fully committed to the course he has set and his vision for curbing violence in Chicago Schools.  He is a data junkie who has just overseen a 6 month study of the pattern of violence in Chicago schools.

Armed with that data, Huberman recently laid out a $30 million plan to help 38 of the city's most unruly high schools by adding social workers, counselors, new discipline policies and more training for security guards, among other efforts. His staff, using a probability model, also has identified the 1,200 kids most likely to be shot over the next two years -- mostly low-performing, disruptive and chronically truant kids. They will be assigned 16-hour-a-week mentors.

The New York Times characterizes Huberman’s plan as an effort to identify the most “vulnerable” students and “saturate[] them with adult attention.  But local critics have labeled it a make-work scheme for community organizers, ministers and other neighborhood men who will be hired as the mentors.  And as for giving jobs to the “at-risk” students themselves, one long-time CPS critic has called this program “Jobs for Jerks” because it rewards some of the worst students in the school system with incredibly rare employment opportunities while leaving good students to fend for themselves.   

Maybe, just maybe, tackling violence is just not a problem the public schools can solve. Duncan said earlier this year that his attempts to curb violence were ineffective when he oversaw Chicago’s schools.

Duncan is to be commended for this honest self-assessment, all too rare among public officials.  But how much of the blame really belongs to him is an open question.  Today's Washington Post quotes a Fenger neighbor, Jessie Smith, 73 as saying

"It's the parents. There's really not much the government can do. You can't legislate a good heart."

No, you can’t legislate a good heart.  But school systems, city leaders and government appointees can protect the majority of their young people from the dangers posed by the relative handful of their troublemaking peers.  We do not have to keep them in the same classrooms as kids who want to learn and want to get along.  We should not need to provide police escorts for them to and from school either. 

If 1,200 kids really are identifiable as those most likely to commit or be the victims of violence, why should CPS commit so much money and so many resources to preventing them from harming others?  Let's at least talk about the teachers' idea to separate the good kids from those who do not care about their education or the safety of others.