More School Chaos
Anew Manhattan Institute report confirms the widespread fears about Mayor de Blasio’s school-discipline reforms: They’re exposing kids and teachers to greater danger. Max Eden, an MI senior fellow, looked at the city’s own data — NYC School Surveys of teachers and students — and found clear signs of rising violence and other woes.
This is not some oddball measurement: United Federation of Teachers head Michael Mulgrew has pointed to these “school climate reports” as a reliable way to judge the success of the reforms.
Like an earlier easing of discipline codes under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, de Blasio’s changes have brought about 16,000 fewer suspensions, for a total drop of nearly half from the 2011 level.
But the de Blasio shift has seen a marked rise in trouble in the halls, as observed by the teachers and students at city middle and high schools: more physical fighting, drug/alcohol abuse and gang activity.
Eden might have found even more signs of trouble — but Team de Blasio eliminated many relevant questions from the survey.
Even so, the school-by-school picture is disturbing — not least because trouble is rising disproportionately at schools that mainly serve minority children.
Yes, those are the kids supposedly harmed by the “excessive” suspensions that the reforms eliminated. But entire schools are harmed by rising chaos. In short, as Eden notes, “a policy intended to help minority students has hurt them the most.”
Restrict the ability of teachers and school staff to discipline kids — indeed, send the message that “too much” discipline is a problem — and you give disruptive students license to act out and ruin the classroom experience for good students.
Eden warns that school order isn’t dependent on “the number of students suspended but rather on classroom culture.” The student surveys, he notes, reveal that kids perceive “discipline to be more unfair now than five years ago, when there were nearly twice as many suspensions.”
In short, de Blasio delivered the worst of both worlds: more chaos, and less justice.