To Blurry, Part IV

Case II

Circa the early 1990s the leadership of the Houston Independent School District (HISD) concluded that somehow, it just could not deliver many of the the same services the relatively lower paid management team had been able to direct since the foundation of the district. It thus farmed out the cafeteria and janitorial services, as well as the operations for its most vicious behavioral problems. It is this latter issue that I examine here.

When the HISD superintendent received far less pay as a percentage of average teacher salary, he and his associates were able to operate their own behavior alternative center to which the nastiest, most violent kids were banished. Their better-paid successors found it necessary to farm out this function. The first corporation entrusted with this function, Corporation A, balanced the need to show good data, despite making a hefty profit, by having waivers for the qualification of the teachers, underpaying them, and inventing data to justify continuation of the contract. Eventually, when their school district patrons could no longer help shovel the fraud under the rug, HISD fired Corporation A and hired Corporation B to do the job.

Corporation B has an ostensibly impressive system for both educational and behavioral rehabilitation. It also has statistics to show how its inmates/students progress, instead of just being returned to their regular schools after serving their time. The original principal of Corporation B was fired when one of the kids hammered the head of another with a chair and fractured his skull. The school authorities sent the kid home, instead of the hospital, and neglected to have the assailant arrested, because of a policy I call "murder in the cathedral."

Higher management pressured local administrators to accept egregious behavior from the students committed murder in the cathedral, a crime dramatically played out in the 12th century, but repeated many times ever since. On December 29, 1170, four knights of Henry II of England, Richard le Breton, Reginald FitzUrse, and Hugh de Morville murdered Archbishop Thomas Beckett as he was saying his prayers in the Canterbury Cathedral. Beckett had dared to oppose the king's interference in church matters, especially by condemning the Henry's insistence on practicing lay investiture of bishops. Henry II had never formally ordered his men to commit the crime, but did allegedly say “After all I have done to promote your careers, is there not one of you who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

Ever since, and without doubt, even before that fateful day, leaders of institutions have been able to conduct policy on two different levels. The formal level is the one at which the leaders are held accountable. It is a set of written directives and policies; etched in stone, so to speak. The other, the informal level, is only implied conversationally, but clearly enough that the lieutenants expected to carry it out understand that they must do something they would never do on their own. The written standards of Corporation B are very strict, but its informal ones are totally different. I know, because the principal who replaced the one who sent home the kid with the fractured skull had worked with me, and held me in very high regard. He asked me to work for him, which for ten hellish weeks I did.

The corporation claimed that unlike traditional schools, it had developed a method of dealing with such students well enough to control their behavior and lead them to viable academic achievement. Despite its elaborate theories on those methods, what in fact the corporation had the alternative school do is to offer no consequence for severe misbehavior, and for abject refusal to do any classwork. Short of criminal assault on another student, for which there was a suspension, the consequence was no more than a gentle warning not to do that again, and/or a call to the parents.

Thus, the kids were essentially free to do every day that for which they had been expelled, and even arrested in their regular schools. Some had been expelled for what the criminal code of the State of Texas calls a “terroristic threat.” This is a class C assault consisting of threatening to harm or to k**l another person. One of them had informed his principal that he would beat the hell out of her. She had him arrested and expelled to the alternative school, where he soon felt empowered regularly to inform me, “I'm going to knock your b***h ass out.”

The principal of the alternate school, in accordance with corporate policies, abjectly refused to allow the city policemen working at the school to arrest any kid for making a terroristic threat. Consequently, the students threatened teachers all day long with such impunity that it was pointless even to report it to the behavior support staff, who would only tell the kid matter of factly, “you know you shouldn't have said that,” or not address the issue at all. All day long teachers were told, “I'm gonna knock your ho ass out... I'll beat your ass... you gonna get smoked... I'll fuck you up”

The kids also felt empowered to throw things at the teachers. As a new teacher, I was a major target for this kind of behavior. Moreover, most of the kids were minorities with more than their share of r****t sentiments. They taunted me with appellations such as “fuck you, whitey” and “I'm gonna beat your ass, honky.” Moments after my very first day in the classroom a shower of pencils hit me. A few books followed, although I must admit that they threw far more books at each other than at me. Before the end of my brief two-month tenure one girl threw a chair at me and hit me with it. The school authorities refused to arrest her for this, or the boy who doused me with stale orange juice by throwing a garbage can at me. At my insistence, however, they did arrest a boy who punched me in the face.

The kid who hit me was one of many who constantly engaged in play fighting with each other. They would playfully threaten, then throw their kicks and punches. They tried to lure me into these exchanges, but I adamantly declined, because way too many of them were too emotionally unstable to be trusted to adhere to the rules of shadow boxing, especially against an authority figure, like a teacher. There was a great chance that they would use it as an excuse to land a real punch.

Fortunately, I did see the kid's punch coming in time partly to roll my head out of the way, making it glance off me harmlessly, instead of landing with full force. I was tempted to ask, “Sissy, is that all you've got?” Instead, I just had the behavior support men take him out of the classroom. The head of the behavior support team did not have the perpetrator arrested until I asked for that to be done. If I felt he was threat enough to require counter-punching, I would surely have been fired for “overreacting,” and probably arrested for assault. The other criminals in my classes needed an example to deter them from putting me in that position.

That evening someone from the district attorney's office called me to let me know that they would not prosecute the kid for criminal assault, because he was only seventeen, thus too young to spend two to ten years in prison for attempting to cause me brain trauma. I consider this familiar argument utterly invalid; that a young adult human is somehow not old enough to be responsible for his violent crimes. Does he somehow fail to understand that punching someone in the face can severely injure him? What then was his objective when he threw a punch? Would he still think it was a minor offense if he himself were the victim? How does a cat or a dog learn to understand and respect the fine difference between touching a person's hand as opposed to his eyes or lips? How old does homo sapiens, allegedly the wisest creature on the planet, have to be before reaching that level of social and moral development, fifty? The assailant thus ended up spending a couple days locked up, and was put on juvenile probation. Three days later he was back in my class. He would have to commit many more crimes before the criminal justice system, let alone the behavior alternative school did anything significant about them.

I failed to develop a rapport with enough students to be as effective as most of the other teachers were. The problem was that I saw certain things in absolute terms, whereas to the school nearly everything was fluid. When kids rushed up to erase what I had written on the board, I restrained them physically. This caused even more of them to do it. The behavior support staff only told them it was wrong to do that and that they should not do it again. This did not stop them.

Finally, upon the advice of the leader of the behavior support team, I stopped using the white board altogether. From that point on I wrote the assignments on computer and printed them to hand out. Some enterprising hoodlums thought it was really funny to attack my desk to take things off it to throw at each other and at me. They did not make exceptions for the assignments. For me the last straw was when right in front of the behavior support leader a kid invaded my desk, snatched the entire class set of assignments, and began flinging them about. While he did this another brazenly threw a pencil at me. The behavior support man said, “Hey! Hey! Stop that!” Later he told me that I shouldn't have anything on my desk that was irreplaceable. I should lock up everything in the storage room behind the desk. That was untenable, because it would take entirely too much time to lock and unlock the door every time someone turned in a finished assignment. Moreover, whenever the door to the storage room were open, some of the bolder kids would force their way in even when I was in it. Their purpose would be to harass me, to commit vandalism and theft, in front of me if I did not have the physical ability to stop them.

The wayward students were far more dangerous to each other than they were to the teachers. On the streets many of them were in rival gangs, which to them was an excuse to attack each other in the classroom without warning. The most common tactic was walking up behind the victim and punching him in the face from behind. It is absolutely miraculous that during the time I was there no one was severely injured, or even knocked out. Their fighting techniques must have fallen far short of their evil intentions. When a fight broke out the large, athletic behavior support team had to stop it without harming the culprits. Most of the teachers timidly sat out the fights, but I helped bring a few under control. In retrospect, I was taking an unnecessary risk. Although a fight, except in self defense, is legally an aggravated assault, not one kid was arrested for any of the daily fights while I was there.

I finally had a conference with the principal about the lack of consequences for very disruptive, threatening and even violent behavior. Why were the kids allowed with impunity to threaten the staff? Why was nothing done to them for pummeling each other? Why was it all right for them to pull the teacher's decorations off the walls? Why did they feel empowered to punch kick and poke holes in the walls of every classroom?

He threw his hands up and asked me what I thought should be done. At that point I had been working there for ten weeks, only eight of them actually in the classroom. I was only a teacher, not there to develop a working disciplinary system. It made very little sense for me to have to tell an institution where I just started working how to take care of its most severe problem. In fact, the corporation running the alternative school could not deliver its claim of rehabilitating each kid academically and behaviorally. They were dealing with the most violent young criminals in the Houston area; a student body that would not cooperate with the most basic rules. The institution created false statistics to match its false narrative, even to the point of claiming that the same students kept returning to the alternative school because within its high structure they could succeed, but in the more permissive regular schools they regressed. If the school admitted that the problem of managing severely misbehaved students could not be contained, except by severe force, similar to that in prisons, it would have to give up its profitable contract with the public school system. I resigned on the spot.

The two corporations Houston ISD had hired to run its behavior alternate program both altered data to pretend they were succeeding where in fact they failed utterly. A much larger behavioral support staff might have helped create more sane conditions, but Corporation B could not hire more staff, because that would eat up its profits. The public narrative they and Houston ISD issued told of a smooth operation about yet another public/private partnership. Until another skull is smashed, only a cynical thinker or someone who worked there will know any better.