While Glenn Singleton preaches there is nothing wrong with black violence in schools that getting rid of white teachers won’t cure, black school officials throughout the country ignore black mayhem because they do not want to “criminalize” students. Trayvon Martin is the most famous example of that.
Trayvon was caught with stolen goods and burglary tools but never arrested because of that policy. Jack Cashill wrote a great book about it that is the first, last and final word on the criminal history of St. Trayvon.272
The secret of disproportionate levels of black violence in schools is no secret. It is the subject of frequent stories at black web sites including the TheGrio.com, Huffpo Black Voices, The Root.com, Ebony, Jet and others.
Glenn Singleton is way past trying to deny it. But he does explain it:
“White educators are prone to wondering why black and brown boys are prone to fighting in school,” he writes.
“They question why violence is taught in homes of color. Missing from this analysis however is how these boys might be affected by growing up in a White-governed country which threatens young men of color at will, distrusts their ability to succeed and follow the law, and allows daily racial stress to mount in neighborhoods, schools and classrooms.”
To quote the great poet: I did not know that.
Let’s look at some of the hyper-violence Singleton explains away with such facility.
In South Philadelphia High School, black students harassed, assaulted and tortured Asian students every day for years. The black principal said they did not alert police because they did not want to criminalize the students.
For all the talk about the disparity in punishment black miscreants receive in school, no one was talking about the victims. The students who could not learn. The students who suffered the assaults.
And the teachers from schools all over the country who every day try to create order out of constant chaos. Often at risk to their own safety. Including this teacher who recently decided to call it quits:
I am a white teacher working in an almost exclusively black middle school. In May of 2012, I left my classroom in an ambulance after two fighting students ran around the room at full speed and plowed into me, knocking me to the ground.
I sustained permanent back injuries and had a knee operation. This year, instead of remedial reading classes (I am a reading teacher), I was assigned full classes. From mid-September, I have been subjected to almost daily race baiting, racial and sexual taunts, threats, and attacks.
Students chase me and each other around the room with table legs, threaten to kill my “three ugly little niggers”, follow me to my car in groups shouting racial epithets and “get in a white school, bitch”. Requests to sit in a seat are met with, “Oh, it’s cause I’m black” or “Why you hate black people?” I often hear, “Imma gonna slap this white bitch”, etc.
On Oct 30, a 7th grade girl with a history of incidents against me had just returned from suspension (she had sprayed me in the face with perfume after telling me that I “smell like old white pussy”) and got angry when I changed her seat.
She said, “Oh, this damn bitch is all up in my face startin’ her shit. Imma gonna kick her fuckin’ white ass”. She then got up and gave a long racially charged diatribe about how she “can do whatever I want to the white bitch and the school can’t do nothin’. It’s just a damn school and I’m about to kick this bitch’s white ass ‘cuz I am DONE with the damn bitch”.
She ended her rant by shoving past me and shoving me to the floor.
Incidents such as these are written off as “poor instruction” or “poor planning”. When I discussed this situation with my (Black) principal, she said, “I doubt they even know you are white.” She also said, “I have to wonder if you are able to really to engage the young people – do they LIKE the work you give?”
I know other teachers who are in similar situations who are also fed up.
Many teacher beat-downs at the hands of black students are caught on video: Here’s one from Upper Darby from October 2013:More than 70 black students were fighting and when the teacher tried to break it up, the students turned on him. They fractured his skull.273
Black student violence against teachers is a persistent and dangerous problem in Philadelphia schools. It is hard to start singling out more incidents when the problem exists every day in every school.
And it has been happening for a long time. Let’s look at 2007:274
Officials in the 185,000-student district reported 409 student assaults on teachers between September and January, up about 4 percent over those same five months in the 2005-06 school year.
The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents the district’s roughly 10,300 teachers, reports that a growing number of its members don’t feel safe in their classrooms.
“The chief complaint that we hear is that there just isn’t enough adult supervision in many of these schools,” said Barbara Goodman, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers affiliate. “The environment in some of these schools is really hostile, with constant fights. There’s a level of physicality that is very disturbing.”
In the worst incident, a 15-year-old male student at Germantown High in north Philadelphia broke mathematics teacher Frank Burd’s neck when he struck the teacher several times.
How about flash forwarding four years to 2011:275“In the last school year, 690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were.”
Veteran Philadelphia schoolteacher Lou Austin endured 40 minutes of terror as a 15-year-old ninth grader jabbed his index finger into Austin's temple and threatened to kill him while swinging a pair of scissors menacingly.
Austin didn't even know the youth, who ransacked his classroom - flipping desks and attempting to set fire to books - at Lincoln High School in Mayfair on Valentine's Day. He'd merely asked him to step away from his classroom door and go to his own class when the youth exploded.
As bad as those numbers are, the real numbers are far worse, said the head of the Philadelphia school police union in 2011.
Teachers and union officials, meanwhile, spoke of constant pressure from senior administrators at the district and school level - sometimes subtle and unspoken, sometimes blatant - to hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.
"My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported." 276
Milwaukee has the same problem. The headlines tell the same story: “Teachers assaulted by students.”277
Punched, kicked, and injured, it's what Milwaukee Public School teachers report facing on a regular basis at the hands of students.
CBS 58 News found dozens of claims of battery, assaults, and fights. One former staff member is speaking out to CBS 58's investigative team, saying bottom line, teachers are in danger.
"They are in danger." Danger is the reason MPS teacher David Larson quit. He says MPS teachers are afraid to work and be put in the middle of out of control fights.
Larson says, "I've been kicked, I've been hit, one kid almost stuck a pencil in my eye. I've been on the floor many times with kids breaking up fights."
Two years ago Larson retired from Bay View High, he agreed to talk to CBS 58 News saying the public needs to know about the violence in the schools.
"Teachers are in danger, their safety is in danger."
Larson says he even got e-mailed death threats.
What about Baltimore, one of the largest black school districts in America:278
Out of 2,998 teachers surveyed, 80 percent had been victimized in the workplace. In the city of Baltimore alone, school employees filed more than 300 injury claims related to student assaults in 2013.
In Baltimore, four teachers are assaulted every day. Many on video. 279
The local ABC news gang went to the head of the Baltimore Teachers Union, Marietta English -- who also does double duty as vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. She dutifully told the reporters how she did not like that, and how she was “surprised” the number of assaults is not even higher.
Whoa..... Wait a minute. Isn’t she the same Marrieta English we just met? The one who showed up on CSPAN a few months later, talking about how white teachers don’t have a clue when it comes to teaching black kids?
Yep, this is the WASSUP woman.
Now you tell me: Watch the news story with videos of white teachers being assaulted by black students. Now listen to the lovely Ms. Marrieta English again. And now answer these three questions:
1) Is she blaming white teachers because black students attacked them?
2) Does she seem as if she cares?
3) On a scale of 1-10, how crazy is Ms. English?
Correct answers: 1) Yes. 2) No. 3) I give her a 15.
In Boston, Philip Chism killed his teacher in 2013. The following year he followed a female staffer into a bathroom of his youth detention facility. He tried to kill her too.280
In Louisiana, a student stalks and plays the Knockout Game on an unsuspecting teacher. On campus. In the middle of the day. With one of his cronies filming it.281
And it is not just big schools in inner city districts. This is from an article in the American Psychological Association Journal in 2014: 282
Teachers across the United States report alarmingly high rates of personally experiencing student violence and harassment while at school, according to an article published by the American Psychological Association that presents comprehensive recommendations to make schools safer for school personnel as well as students.
“Understanding and Preventing Violence Directed Against Teachers: Recommendations for a National Research, Practice, and Policy Agenda,” was published online Jan. 7 in the APA’s flagship journal, American Psychologist.
“Violence directed against teachers is a national crisis with far-reaching implications and deserves inclusion in the school violence equation,” said the article’s lead author, Dorothy Espelage, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A challenge: Find me some white students beating on teachers on video. Because there are a ton of examples of black students doing just that.
Like this one from 2014 at Bennett High School in Buffalo, where of course it has been happening for a long time.283
Last month, News 4 Investigates told you about
Bennett teachers who had come forward asking for help because they
felt unsafe. They had even appealed to the school board saying
conditions had become chaotic with students fighting and roaming
the halls.
Now this vivid video describes just what they were talking
about.
In Detroit in 2014, a teacher was breaking up a classroom brawl with a broom. They fired her.284
How about Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania? There, a teacher breaking up a large fight among black students was attacked and sent to the hospital.285
In Houston, a black student was caught on video, taunting, pushing then giving a forearm to an elderly female teacher. The rest of the class cheered and yelled and had a good time.286
In September 2014, 18-year old Victor Nash knocked his teacher unconscious then raped her. Right in the empty classroom.287
In Los Angeles, a teacher confronts a student for selling drugs. The student attacks the teacher, on video. Soon after, the teacher is suspended. Soon after that, parents rise up and say stop the insanity. School officials figure it out: Re-instate the teacher. Suspend the student.288
Here’s another from 2014: Student plays Knockout game on teacher. On video. A student stalks, then sneaks up on a teacher. Then lets loose with a punch to the head.289
Remember the Gentle Giant Michael Ferguson. He attended the Normandy School District. Let’s peek in on them:290
Violence in the troubled Normandy School District in North County has gotten so out of hand that teachers are finding themselves under attack from students. One teacher told FOX 2 of being pepper sprayed by a student when she tried to stop a fight involving nearly a dozen 9th grade girls. She has more stories of attacks on teachers, like one being choked by a student.
Finally, student violence rose to such a menacing level that not even the most determined black administrators and parents could ignore it anymore. 291
The principal of Normandy Middle School temporarily kicked out 20 percent of the student body this week for disruptive behavior and required face-to-face meetings with parents as a condition for them to return.
The Normandy High School principal took a similar step.
It was the kind of move teachers have hoped for since the school year began on Aug. 18. And it had the blessing of state education officials who, over the summer, gave the Normandy system a new name and governing board.
With the school year into its fourth week, a handful of new teachers have resigned. One middle school teacher sought medical treatment after being hit in the head by a textbook lobbed by a student.
The major St. Louis daily newspaper figured out whom to blame: White teachers. 292
Many new teachers are white and previously taught in more affluent suburban schools. Some are struggling to connect with their students, most of whom are black and come from impoverished backgrounds.
In New York, the black violence directed at this teacher was so bad that she sued and won $450,000.293
Theresa Reel, 52, who quit her job when she signed the deal, said the knowledge that she never has to set foot in the High School for Legal Studies again is just as sweet.
“I wasted six years of my life being treated like dirt — less than dirt,” Reel told the Daily News on Thursday. “I can’t put into words how happy I am.”
The Mississippi native started working at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn school in 2005 and within a month, her job was a nightmare.
In a lawsuit she filed three years later, she described how students called her filthy names, flung condoms at each other and even touched her breast.
Her pleas to school bosses were met with accusations that she showed too much cleavage, she charged.
When she told then-Principal Denise Morgan that she made a student leave the class for sexual comments, the official’s response was: “And how does that threaten you?”
In New Bedford, Connecticut in 2014, a black student threw a chair at the teacher, Joanne Maura. On video.294
At first, they wanted to fire her, saying she could not control her classroom. Then good news: She was “cleared of any wrong doing” after a lengthy investigation into the student throwing a chair at the teacher.295
I only have one question about that: WASSSSUUPPP?
The new code word for black school districts is “high need” schools. And for some crazy reason, a majority of new teachers in these schools quit teaching soon after they begin. So now they want to put the “best educators” in places where they are needed the most and are offering them the best salaries to go there.
No one is calling it combat pay. But they should. Because that is what it is.
In Paterson, New Jersey a 62-year old teacher is assaulted, then thrown to the ground. On video.296 That was no surprise to recently retired teacher Lee McNulty.
“It is a dangerous place,” McNulty told The Record. “I couldn’t take it anymore. When I talk about it, I get so upset my gut turns. There’s no such thing as rules. Our school is an indoor street corner. When I walk into that building, I have no idea of the concept anymore of what right and wrong is.”297
Black mob violence against teachers was just the warm up. What about black mob violence in black schools? Then we’ll get back to Singleton to explain it all to us.
My file on that is bulging. It might be bigger than the examples of the Knockout Game that I keep. Lots of video on it, so let’s get to it, then we’ll come back to Mr. Singleton.