Suburban Kids at Risk

As far as serious school violence goes, most Americans can afford to relax. Despite the high-profile school shootings over the past several years, including the wrenching massacre at Columbine High in Colorado and Monday’s middle school shooting in Oklahoma, schools are not becoming more dangerous.

In fact, though the statistics are not entirely clear, there is some evidence that school violence may have declined somewhat over the past seven years. And regardless of trends, most schools are pretty safe. In 1996-97, only 10% of schools reported any serious violent crimes and 43% of schools reported no crime of any sort.

But Americans have plenty of reason for concern. Those 43% of crime-free schools include elementary schools, whose pint-sized students mostly are incapable of planning and carrying through any serious offenses. When we get to middle and high schools, however, the figures are not so encouraging. One in five middle and high schools report serious crimes. Ten percent of students had carried a weapon to high school. Gang presence in the schools nearly doubled between 1989 and 1995.

Still, the real story about school safety cannot be found in the familiarly lurid headline characters like the alienated, gun-toting loner or drug-dealing gangs. It’s simply this: Deprived of meaningful adult guidance at home, kids are becoming harder to handle and schools are resorting to tactics unimaginable a generation ago.

Ask any veteran teacher or administrator and you will get the same story: Many kids from loving though often ineffectual families are restless and chaotic. They talk back, even to the point of verbal abuse. They don’t seem to recognize adults as having any real authority over them. They are even crueler to one another.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of high school principals who complained of serious disciplinary problems rose significantly during the 1990s, even as violent crime on the streets and in the schools eased.

What is most striking about these increases is that they are more prevalent in suburban than inner-city schools. True, most school violence continues to occur in poor, urban schools, but many of the everyday demoralizing problems have been on the wane. Not so in suburban schools. According to NCES, for instance, verbal abuse of teachers declined in the ‘90s by almost 10% in those schools where 75% of students are eligible for free lunch. At the same time, it went up in affluent and moderate-income schools.

“Twenty years ago,” says Michael Axelrod, president of the principals’ union in Philadelphia, “suburban districts would look down on inner-city principals and wouldn’t consider them for positions in their schools. Today the suburban schools want to hire us because they’re facing the same problems we’ve been dealing with for a long time.” Equally disturbing is the fact that these problems are showing up at younger ages. A Phi Delta Kappa Poll found a 17% increase between 1984 and 1997 of elementary school teachers who say they have students disrupting the class most of the time or fairly often, and a slightly smaller increase among those who find students talking back and disobeying. “Sixth graders used to be benign and afraid of adults,” a principal from affluent Bedford, N.Y., told me. “Now you see some of them who are so defiant, their parents have no idea what to do with them.”

To make matters worse, educators believe they can no longer rely on parents for support. In a subtle way, many parents abet troublemakers. School administrators find they are spending more time justifying their disciplinary actions to suspicious and adversarial parents, many of whom seem to see their role as being their child’s legal advocate, accusing the other kid of being a bad influence or educators of overreacting.

Even the good news that school violence may be receding disguises a darker reality. Each year, an increasing number of schools are placing law enforcement officers on their campuses, searching student lockers, doing random drug tests and installing cameras and metal detectors.

Most kids continue to go to school, sit still during class and do their work without threatening their teachers or classmates. But disruptive kids have a way of dominating classrooms, and even a few newcomers to their ranks can alter the atmosphere of a school. As their numbers keep increasing, expect that a few will dominate headlines as well.