Schools Step In Where Parents Fear To Tread

On September 2, 2008, the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper published an editorial entitled, "Schools must confront root causes of violence". I quote it verbatim here:

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Thirty-five sixth-graders attended Kohn School in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood just before classes let out in June.

Counselor Lee Jones of the South Side Help Center met with sixth-graders weekly last year at Kohn School in Roseland. He taught them, according to one student, "how to express your feelings instead of fighting all the time."

Students at Schneider School, including Veronica Carter and Gessina Rodriguez gathered daily to share the good and bad things happening in their lives.

Twenty-six of those kids -- nearly 75 percent -- told a visitor from the Chicago Sun-Times that they knew someone who had been murdered. Half said they had actually seen a shooting, including Amos, who saw his 19-year-old cousin take a bullet to the head.

"He was throwing up black blood, that's how I knew he was going to die," Amos told the visitor and his classmates, who were gathered in a stuffy classroom for a weekly social skills and counseling session.

"Sometimes," Amos said quietly, "I think it could happen to me."

Since last September, 36 Chicago public school students have been killed, but the fallout extends far beyond those grieving families.

Legions of Chicago kids are traumatized by what they've seen in their neighborhoods.

Many know little about resolving problems except through violence.

Still more carry the burdens of the poverty, isolation and mental illness that fuels the violence around them.

Today, these children arrive for their first day of the new school year. There, they'll find little to salve their wounds.

The Chicago Public Schools spends $55 million on security each year to quell violence. Several high schools, such as Farragut and South Shore, spend more than $400,000 annually on security guard salaries alone.

But when it comes to confronting the root social and emotional causes of violence, the city's public schools fall woefully short.

Social workers drop by most elementary schools just a few days a week; psychologists come by even less. Almost all their time is taken up by special education students, leaving little time for anyone else.

Counselors work at schools full time, but many students never see them. In high schools, it's one counselor for every 350 students. In grammar schools, it's one counselor per school. But that just started this fall. For years, it was one elementary counselor for as many as 1,200 students, with most of the counselor's time reserved for special needs students.

Faced with limited budgets and an unyielding emphasis on raising test scores, the vast majority of schools simply get by.

We must do better.

Today, the Chicago Sun-Times is advocating for a radical rethinking in the way the Chicago Public Schools deal with the social and emotional problems plaguing many students -- the stuff that makes metal detectors and security guards necessary in the first place.

It's not enough to teach fractions: kids must be taught to get along.

It's not enough to teach American history: kids must be taught to stand in each other's shoes.

It's not enough to teach spelling: kids must be taught to express their feelings in words, not with their fists.

We're not asking schools to take on more than they're already doing. These problems are in the schools now, poisoning them. But we are urging the entire Chicago school system, not just individual teachers and schools, to confront these problems head on, instead of drowning in them.

"It's not reading, writing and arithmetic anymore -- that doesn't work," said Lisa Maggiore, a rare social worker who is assigned to just one school because her principal sets aside extra money for it. "I look around and see how many kids are hurting and feeling abandoned, and they bring it right here, into the classroom."

The good news is that some top Chicago school officials already get it. The school system, after a year of planning, is experimenting with a radically different approach this fall.

A handful of schools are launching a well-established program that systematically teaches kids the social and emotional skills many aren't getting at home: anger management, empathy and problem-solving. The program also helps schools take concrete steps to promote and reward good behavior.

Needier students will get group or individual counseling -- and not only by already-burdened social workers, counselors and psychologists. The pilot program calls for freeing up in-house staff or enlisting outside mental health professionals. It also, wisely, calls for hiring a coordinator at each school to make sure the program doesn't get shelved.

CPS hopes to bring this model to most of its schools by 2011, says Bryan Samuels, chief of staff to Schools CEO Arne Duncan and the driving force behind the new approach.

But scaling up from a handful of schools will require money, proof the model works and widespread public support.

We know there is no magic solution. We also know this model is no cure-all and won't be carried out effectively at every school. But it represents a clear break with the school system's understaffed and haphazard approach. That's a mammoth step -- a revolution, really -- and it's way overdue.

This pilot program holds promise of genuine progress. Don't let it go the way of hundreds of other CPS efforts -- here today, gone tomorrow.

Many teachers and administrators object to all this, saying a school's job is to teach, not to fix all of society's ills. We don't blame them. They were trained as teachers, not as social workers. They also say they have no time -- the demands of raising test scores trump everything else.

But a frontal assault on the social and emotional issues facing kids should make teaching easier, as any veteran teacher already knows. When kids have a place to turn, rather than blowing up in a classroom, when kids learn to manage their emotions, rather than repeating what they learn in the streets, teaching is easier and scores go up.

This isn't just intuition talking. Research backs it up.

Students completing social and emotional learning programs score 11 percentile points higher on standardized tests in reading and math than kids who don't, according to a 2007 meta-analysis of 207 studies spearheaded by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

They are also better behaved, have better attitudes, are less depressed, and show fewer other signs of distress.

"It's not about marching in the street against violence," said Joyce Brown, who oversees high school counselors for the Chicago school system. "It's about getting to know the kids and their needs. Many just need to know someone cares."

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Whenever I hear people weep and moan about how schools should not be in the business of teaching anything besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, I agree - IN THEORY. However, I suspect they are living with their heads in the sand.

The above editorial clearly shows that people who live in the real world recognize that certain moral values are no longer being taught in families or religious institutions. Yet those values still must be imparted for the good of society at large. Hence it falls to the schools to do so. Do teachers and administrators, skilled in teaching and administrating, want to devote scarce resources to these topics? No. But they are undertaking those duties, and getting nothing but grief for their efforts.

I say they should be applauded. Of course, the public should have input into both the subject matter and the process by which it is taught. Chicago is fortunate to have democratically elected local public school councils to help in this area. People who reside in other school districts around the country are not so lucky. Every state legislature should provide for such public input. Perhaps such action would help to motivate those in the communities to take a more active interest in the education of our young people.

Once people get back to being involved in instructing their children in areas such as how to deal with differences without resorting to violence, the pressure on schools to do so will wither on the vine, and our teachers can apply 100% of their efforts and expertise on subject matter more germane to their institutions' goals.