School Safety: The Truth
Nicole Malliotakis, the Republican challenger to Mayor de Blasio, was perfectly right to slam the mayor last week for unwisely pulling metal detectors from city schools and for his ideologically driven softening of school discipline. But that barely scratches the surface of the problem of a failed system.
In fact, metal detectors are an admission of defeat: If you’re reduced to that to keep some bare minimum of safety, you’ve already failed.
Simply pulling them, of course, is just a denial of that defeat — even if the central office does announce anti-bullying, teacher-training and counseling programs in the name of facing the problem.
Awell-run school will be safe, even in the toughest neighborhoods. But New York’s system is set up to frustrate efforts to run a school well, because it’s designed to serve its adult “stakeholders” — not the students.
Get a critical mass of concerned parents with the time and energy to beat the system into submission, and you can get a good school. But the system won’t do the job without that pressure.
Training and counseling have an important place in a well-run school, but safety and decorum are core to its culture and structure. From the principal on down, every adult embraces the duty of communicating and enforcing standards. Teachers and staff are outside for the start and end of the day, and in the halls between periods. Even the janitors are part of the team — more eyes, more role models. The team gets parents involved when there’s a problem, and to share good news of progress.
Central administrators back up the school leadership, offering advice and support where needed — and watching for signs that they have to intervene with a principal who’s failing.
None of this describes the city’s system. The bureaucracy (the state’s as well as the city’s) and endless union rules are poison to a good culture.
Pre- and after-school duty, and even hall monitoring, are strictly limited by union contracts — and teachers who want to step up can face peer pressure not to make their colleagues look bad.
Principals aren’t even allowed to monitor classrooms regularly — and many across the system stick to their offices rather than roam the halls.
The central office doesn’t so much support or oversee school leaders as tell them what they can’t do, or what boxes they must check to come off OK — or sometimes send in consultants to offer more of the same. And they don’t intervene until a scandal hits the newspapers or a child winds up badly injured, or worse.
A few metal detectors or shifts in official policy can’t alter this recipe. It’s a system guaranteed to deliver failure, one that will keep on failing at least until it’s rebuilt from scratch.