March 3, 2024
The Long, Horrifying Collapse of Discipline in NYC Public Schools
By E. Jeffrey Ludwig
The New York Post recently ran an article about overt aggression in a school called Origins High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. against a Jewish female teacher as well as threats to Jewish students at the school. The high school has 40% Muslim students, and the swastika is being posted around the school to send a message of hate to Jewish students and faculty. Threats are being made daily. Homosexual students are also being threatened at the school. Students are not being punished by the acting principal for defacing property with swastikas or for shouting “heil Hitler” in the Jewish teacher’s face. By the end of the article, we see that the principal, who is depicted by the harassed teacher and by community leaders as negligent and as perpetuating anti-Semitism by her failure to call students to account, has received many compliments and much recognition for her leadership as an educator.
How is it that she is so praised for her “leadership” while the horrors of anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi acting out grow exponentially in that high school? The answer lies in the breakdown of discipline in the NYC public schools, which breakdown has been in place for decades. Principals are rewarded for their ability to maintain irresponsible levels of poor behavior while pretending education is moving ever upward to the benefit of all involved. In this respect, Origins High School, along with so many schools in NYC, is putting on a big charade pretending that order is still in effect and that learning (sic) is still improving. To the extent that a principal projects this false view, he is deemed “successful.”
This writer taught social studies for 21 years in NYC public high schools, and substituted occasionally for two years before that full-time tenure. My first five and a half years were taught in a “hellhole high school.” Some of the behaviors that are included under my “hellhole” rubric are as follows: students taking 10–20 minutes to pass between classes, toilet seats set on fire using fluid from lighters; students slashed with razors while changing classes, with the razors then thrown out the windows; weapons being brought into school even after metal detectors and electronic wanding of students was implemented; and oral sex in stairwells. One student asked me if I wanted to see the Glock in his bookbag.
I asked one student to stop chasing Tameka around the room and take his seat so I could begin the lesson. He was so incensed by this request that he began scraping the veneer off the top of his desk with his fingernails. Security was called eventually, and he was removed from the class. A 10th-grade girl, who I later was told was regularly taking drugs with her friends, went over to the window, lifted it up, and jumped out. We were on the first floor, but it still was an eight- to ten-foot drop. One day she introduced me to a grinning guy who, she said, was the father of a baby she had aborted two years previously. On another occasion, during a social studies computer lab session set up by a teacher and his cousin, who had come in on a few weekends to do the wiring, students were pouring crazy glue into some of the keyboards. The teacher did not even send the students to the dean, knowing that no punishment would be administered. On one occasion, I gently told one girl to move her cursor a little to the left, and she stood up suddenly, tipping over her chair; yelled, “F--- you!” to me; and stormed out of the room.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_long_horrifying_collapse_of_discipline_in_nyc_public_schools.html
