This unauthorized post was removed from the home page of Public School Zero earlier today. It was supposed to be posted on the private “I Quit” page administered by the previous principal.
Editor-In-Chief School News Today
One of the factors driving the great resignation among teachers and causing a shortage of teachers in the US is violence against educators.
Teachers are routinely targets of violence and frequently don’t report it.
Often teachers blame themselves for violent incidents and a recent study shows that self-blame leads to underreporting. Note: self-blame is in itself a hallmark of abusive relationships.
Sometimes teachers don’t report because they fear retribution from the student or the parents.
But schools often block teachers from reporting violence for other reasons. Most damningly, schools want to avoid negative attention and the work that goes into reporting.
There is also a legitimate unspoken reason to avoid reporting classroom incidents: to shield children from the dire consequences of entering the legal and/or foster system after a report.
The student who acts out is most likely a traumatized child suffering multiple forms of abuse. Reporting that child adds another risk factor: the trauma of being placed in the system whether it is police custody, juvenile detention, or foster care.
Although statistics are assembled haphazardly and often suppressed, it is well known to teachers and administrators that children in the system are likely to be sexually, physically, and emotionally abused.
The result is that kids who need help often don’t get it and teachers are suffering.
Students in the classroom who witness violence and see it go unreported suffer too. They are internalizing a school culture of abuse which is an extension of endemic violence against women.
That abuse of teachers has become normalized is part of the gendered nature of educational labor. The public school teaching profession was built on cheap female labor under the assumption that women who were naturally suited to the work of childcare would leave the profession to have their own children before they qualified for expensive benefits.
It is no coincidence that the foster care system that intersects with schools is built on the same exploitation of women. Devalued domestic labor is the bedrock of a for-profit system that exploits low-wage workers to do the job of foster care. Children are pulled out of the system of poverty into the system of exploitation of poverty where their underpaid care enriches others.
Disrespect is a feedback loop. The underfunded work of childrearing in America leads to epic failures which rebound into violence against women in schools which creates an even more dangerous environment for children. Teacher burnout and turnover make it harder for both kids and their caretakers.
The crisis point we have reached since the pandemic is that many women have better economic opportunities outside of the home and the classroom. We are witnessing a massive walkout.
As Dr. Linda Eisenmann, Provost and Professor of Education and History at Wheaton College, explains, “Until the passage of Title IX in 1972, colleges and universities could legally keep women from enrolling in selected degree fields. Many did. This effectively maintained a pipeline of women towards a few, female-dominated professions, including teaching.”
Now that women have opportunities outside unpaid home labor and underpaid education jobs, the edifice of exploitation on which this abusive system is built is crumbling.
It is not surprising that this crisis is marked by violence in the classroom. But we must protect both children and teachers from the explosion of misery that is the result of an exploitative system.
While restorative justice programs show great promise as an alternative to punitive legal responses to discipline problems, those programs only work in schools where there is already a community of trust and care. As schools spiral downward, they are less able to support highly skilled labor-intensive progressive interventions. Ironically, schools that need these programs most are the ones with the least resources to make them work.
Justice for students and teachers goes beyond restitution and forgiveness in the classroom. The larger injustice is that children are growing up in poverty and deprivation and that teachers are bearing the brunt of their inevitable anger.
To work, restorative justice has to happen on the societal level.
Poor families need the money to raise their own children. Instead, we take their children away and ask impoverished parents to pay for their children to be raised by the state in for-profit programs ensuring they will never escape the poverty that caused their children to be snatched in the first place.
The lowest-paid workers are people of color, and they are disproportionately targeted by protective services to have their children taken away. Likewise, single mothers are five times more likely to live in poverty than married people and are vulnerable to predation from privatized foster care agencies.
Middle-class families also lack the economic and social stability to bring their children up with emotional security and positive mental health. Stress on the middle class shows up in classroom conflict and further weakens the educational bond.
Both groups of parents fight for the small resources allocated as temporary fixes to the larger problems. We blame the victims instead of the cause. We blame the children growing up under a draconian system and we blame parents for being lax. We let teachers blame themselves for these failings.
The victim-blaming is particularly sinister in the case of classroom violence. Both abused children and abused teachers are asked to take personal responsibility for social forces beyond their control.
All the while, the real problem is not Public School Zero, but in the enclaves of the rich whose children breeze through Richard E Rich Academy. If the companies owned by the very richest Americans paid a fair wage, and if the richest people paid the taxes they owe, there would be more than enough wealth for everyone to lead a comfortable life.
It’s not that complicated. Too much money is held by the 1%. The rich are the number one cause of poverty.
Violence in classrooms is a theatrical enactment of the inequalities in our nation with all-too-real harm to everyone involved. Casting children as the villains is just an excuse for the police state which marks the final fulfillment of fascism.
Do not argue for the brutal suppression of children in the classroom, a solution that only makes the problem worse. Look to the causes of our desperation.
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