So yes, fighting was not only rife in high schools in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was worse than it is now.
Personal anecdotes are exactly that. Moreover, “I didn’t see any” is not the same as “there wasn’t any”. Just because somebody did not see fighting at their high school, or does not remember seeing fighting attheir high school does not mean that it wasn’t happening.
However the data is pretty clear - violence between kids in high school is far lower than it was in the early 1990s.
The only type of violence that has increased in the USA in schools are school shootings.
Well, I’ve got a million of them, stories that is. I grew up in a large diverse city and went to public schools. This city practiced race-integration busing in an effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools.
So, let’s just say fights, fights with weapons, before, during and after school were extremely common. Fights are quite rare nowadays, at least in the burbs here.
Calling 911 in that area would involve at least a 10 minute wait, if police even bothered to show up at all. I actually called the non-emergency police number a few minutes later and no one answered.
Just read an article about teacher shortages across the US. One reason why teachers have left is the abysmal student behavior coupled with lack of administrative back up. I saw this at the end of my career before retiring a few years ago. Administrators are afraid of the parents and have adopted a “customer is always right” attitude, never supporting the teacher against unreasonable parents, even to the point of ordering grade changes for students who put out ZERO, ZERO effort.
My former colleagues tell me that the number of school fights, which used to be exceedingly rare in our HS, have become very common.
That is something that is a problem not only in high schools but also in colleges. It is something that goes hand-in-hand with the administrative bloat and the feeling that so many administrators have that they are not administrators of the school, but the teacher’s bosses.
This also has to do, most of all, with the attacks on the public school systems by political and financial interests. Too many schools are constantly in fear of having their funding cut if they don’t keep the parents happy, or have their enrollment cut, and politicians make careers from attacking school systems.
To begin with, schools should have shared governance. Teachers should have a say in how the school is run.
There should also be a lot less parental influence. Parents should not decide on the curriculum. It is parental influence that resulted in evolution being cut from biology, any mention of racism being removed, half of the most influential political figures being erased from history books, and too many teen pregnancies, because schools are not allowed to teach kids the basic facts of life.
While the numbers are still lower than they were in the 1990s, we may be seeing a phenomenon that is similar to what we see in multiple places following the pandemic, and the political chaos. I mean, if their nice middle class suburban parents are punching flight attendants or mall personnel in the face for being asked to put on a mask, why should the kids behave any differently?
It’s more like - people will go to the doctor or lawyer and say “well, they know what they are doing, so I’ll listen to them”. For teachers it’s “I don’t understand teaching, but I’ll tell the teacher what they should or shouldn’t teach, and how they should do it”.
I’m assuming we live in the same state due to your user name. And while in some cases administrators are risk-averse, NOT dealing with discipline problems is also a risk. I work closely with many administrators and the issue is not that they WON’T take disciplinary actions, it’s that they are prevented from doing so by DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education). While DESE’s intentions were to reduce inequitable disciplinary actions, reduce out of school suspensions that were disproportionally assigned to BIPOC and SPed students, and push schools to develop intermediate disciplinary procedures, the initiate ended up tying the hands of administration.
My frustration with the entire situation is that we set up a model starting in elementary school of just throwing our hands up and saying “well we can’t do anything” or implementing punishments that often make teachers feel better but that serve no purpose and then wonder why there are discipline problems in the high school. We CAN do something and it starts with changing the culture of our schools starting from the beginning. For example, our school district has a restorative justice program in the high school that’s a joke. It’s not a joke because I don’t believe in restorative justice. It’s a joke because no one utilizes it. Both parties must seek it out and that basically never happens. They have no idea what it is and even if they do, they don’t trust it or want to go through the process. Restorative justice is something that should start in kindergarten. You trash the classroom, we’re going to help you come up with some problem solving skills, but FIRST, you’re going to pick this all up (with our help if needed) because it is up to you to restore the environment for yourself and your peers. You got in a fight with your 3rd grade classmate? You’re going to be meeting together and learning skills that are obviously lacking. If there is something you need to do to restore that relationship, we will help you do that. If restorative justice starts early, it becomes the culture.
I agree that sometimes it’s a parenting issue and kids aren’t getting these skills at home but I think we assume this way too often and use it as an “easy out” to not examine our own responsibilities and failures. . I know quite a few families that have 2 kids that are polar opposites in terms of behavior. I know many of these parents and would not find fault with their parenting. If the assumption is that kids aren’t getting these lessons at home, that’s even more of a reason WHY we need to teach these skills in school. I don’t view teaching these skills or facilitating restoration as “yet another responsibility of teachers”. I view this as teaching developmentally appropriate skills that also happen to contribute to a safe and respectful classroom environment. Too many kids view school as something that happens to them rather than something they have a stake in. Waiting until high school to try to tackle the disciplinary issues is like using a garden hose to put out a forest fire. An even better analogy would be to ignore thousands of little brush fires and only decide to fight the fire once it’s a raging inferno.
Full disclosure: One of my kids is in public school. One is in a private school with a robust restorative justice program. I teach in a public school in a neighboring school district and also am a former school committee member in my home district.
In my son’s kindergarten classroom (California) there was a very disruptive student. The kids were scared to go to school. I have no idea what was done or not with this student in terms of supporting and/or disciplining for a couple of months but he ended up physically injuring a couple of students after throwing chairs during an outburst. We never saw him again after that incident. My son was pretty traumatized by his kindergarten year and after he wrote an essay about this experience in 8th grade I began to wonder if I had done the right thing to have left him in this situation for so long. The two kids that got hurt (stitches on heads) left the school district and there might have been some legal settlement too.
The flagpole was the normal meeting place for a fight when I was growing up, and word would spread and there would be a huge crowd. Of course, we didn’t have cell phones back then to video it. Inevitably at some point one of the teachers would come along and break it up and disperse everyone. Most of the fights weren’t too violent. I do remember one time when I was in high school that 2 boys were going to fight after school, and they were going to meet down a rural road. A huge crowd showed up and we were watching until the cops showed up and everyone scattered. One of the guys apparently had brass knucks and broke the other boys jaw, which had to be wired shut for several weeks. This was a small rural school and I graduated in 1991.
Many people will spend time finding the right doctor and the right lawyer. Most kids in the public school system are assigned a teacher. And woe be to the parent that complains and asked to switch instructors, or heaven forbid schools.
I didn’t see much fighting going on growing up, but I admit I was also clueless about a lot of things. H on the other hand, fighting was common. He was in many of them. It was something boys did. In high school, he had a PE teacher who, when boys started fighting, he would give them boxing gloves and tell them to go at it. He graduated in 1986.
H is the one - and ironically not the school resource officer - who is called to break up fighting and remove kids from the classroom. Throwing chairs, breaking computers, tearing stuff up is not uncommon at all at his school. Hasn’t been for 30 years. But this was the first year he got thrown to the ground trying to break up a fight. He does teach elementary school, but he has several kids over 200 pounds and plenty in the 150 range. Now I’m starting to worry about his safety. I know a few resource officers who are permanently disabled from breaking up fights at the high school
I applaud Toledo for her reaction. I hope I would have had the guts to do the same thing. I know H certainly would
There was fighting and bullying with me a frequent victim when I was a student in the 60sand 70s. They even had a gang war over me. I was told to show up but no one told me where so I never attended.
Social media has definitely escalated some problems with so many people choosing to watch and film instead of trying to de-escalate things.
Good job to those who help defuse these destructive situations. I’m not sure our schools and teachers are taught enough on how to help defuse and de-escalate.
Why? In our schools the SRO is a cop. Why shouldn’t they be the ones called to break up a fight. They would be the ones expected to do it anywhere else.
My school system has discussed restorative justice. But, just as you said, it’s not a comprehensive program which starts with the youngest students. Another problem brought up is the use of PBIS (Positive Behavioral Incentive System). The feeling amongst many teachers is that the students know it’s discipline not applied evenly, it’s time-intensive for the teacher, and the students it is used on know they can still misbehave. Teachers don’t feel supported by administrators. I understand that it can work, but only in certain situations (small classes, for one thing). It is one way to try to reduce the discipline incident disparity between subgroups of students, which is tracked by the state. As long as the discipline numbers look good (or better) on paper, that’s all that matters.
Having been privy to an insider teacher FB group these past few years, my eyes have been opened. Teachers (and other school staff like busdrivers) have had to tolerate way too much. No wonder teachers are quitting in large numbers.
They are not cops in our schools. Just regular people. The one at H’s school is older than him and not very strong. The high school does have 1-2 cops in addition to the SROs. But I don’t think they are there all day and maybe not even at all now. My youngest graduated 3 years ago.
When a fight breaks out it needs intervention “right now” - things can escalate within a minute or two between the two fighting - or grow the fight to more people.
S is a middle school teacher. There was a fight or two that broke out just after the final bell rang at the end of the day outside of the school, but on school grounds. It wasn’t a severe fight but S was the only one (teacher/adult) around to get in the middle of the students fighting to break it up.
So many circumstances. Not ideal, but they happen even with some precautions - or extra bodies - in place.
In my school system, the term SRO is only used for sworn law enforcement assigned to schools. Every middle and high school has at least one (I think most have only one). But now that I think of it, there are none in the elementary schools. The non-cops are called Security Assistants, and they are in every school.