FALCONER MISSES ROOTS OF SCHOOL VIOLENCE
(The following article is from the February 1-15, 2008 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.
By Johan Boyden
Canada's largest public school board just released a report on school violence. While the subject is Toronto, the media have brought it to country-wide attention.
The report pans the Tory "Safe School Act" and directly implicates the crisis of public school funding in this real problem. At the same, it presents a misconception of how schools fit into communities, sensationally advocating some deeply mistaken solutions instead of a much needed jobs and anti-poverty strategy.
"The Road to Health, A Final Report on School Safety" has become known as the Falconer report, after the investigation panel's chair, lawyer Julian Falconer (also on Maher Arar's legal team). The panel was assembled after the tragic shooting death last May of a 15-year-old African-Canadian student, Jordan Manners, in his high school hallway.
The report reveals systemic gender violence against young women, uncovering the gang-rape of a young Muslim woman at Manners' school. It also reports systemic violence against youth of colour, and found that one-third of students at Toronto's aboriginal school are suspended. The picture of students as "walking wounded" has startled many.
So has the report's strangeness. Take the opening comment that, in the following 1,000 pages of "detached systemic discussions" in the report, "it is all too easy to forget why we are here..." Really? Easy for whom? The panel members? Jordan Manners' family? His teachers or classmates? The report's main conclusion is to fix the blame on the school system's "culture of silence" - yet Falconer also found the overwhelming majority of students feel safe at school.
Media reports have focused on Falconer's calls for school uniforms, police and "sniffer dogs" in schools, and other "get tough" measures. "This is moves us in exactly the wrong direction," Education Action Toronto stated recently. "Would people accept random searches of their home by police officers?" another writer asked.
In many ways, these policies have already been tried, tested and failed - in the US. A few years ago, I attended a talk in New York on school discipline. In this mega city, armed police patrol the hallways of the schools in black neighbourhoods. Although African American youth are only 17% of school population, they account for 34% of the suspensions.
Historical inequities - segregated education, concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement - feed the one-way path from school to jail. The a "school to prison pipeline" is one of the most "urgent challenges in education today," says the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Why is this going on? Criminal justice policy in the US long ago rejected rehabilitation over jail sentences. Why address root causes of crime when some are born criminals? Falconer correctly says that was the mistake of the "Safe Schools Act," and then produces more recipes out of the same cook book.
As Stephen Seaborn with the Campaign for Public Education told me, "the media [is] focusing on quick solutions, [and] many people are missing the key message of this report." Seaborn points out that Falconer specifically calls on the McGuinty Government to increase and protect school funding, demands "consistent with positions taken by the Campaign for Public Education, Toronto education workers, teachers and parents over many years."
Buried in the report is the conclusion that "Government policy from the mid 1990's into amalgamation emphasized cost-saving measures intended to dismantle key support structures for marginalized communities."
Today, the school board is "nowhere near sufficiently funded to manage" the diverse students it serves, and can't provide enough social workers, hallway monitors or child and youth workers.
This is a Canada-wide problem. After decades of federal and provincial policies of P3 privatization, budget cutbacks and calculated attacks on teachers unions, local school board autonomy and students, public schools aren't getting enough money to even pay the bills. Young people and education workers are under attack, along with our right to good quality, universal, accessible, public education.
Here, then, is a central and strange problem. Falconer hits the nail at least partly on the head, pointing to under-funding as a major culprit - not, as today's racist corporate media says, "young black thugs." But he then goes on to propose many measures which will make school violence a lot worse.
In no small part, this strangeness arises from Falconer's desire that schools somehow isolate themselves from the social reality of their communities. But schools are bound to reflect their communities. Can they become little islands of safety? Even if they are as regimented as youth jails, are prisons free from racism, sexual abuse, weapons, drugs or fear?
Violence in schools has social causes: racism, national oppression, alienation, poverty, unemployment and lack of control over how we live and work. If you are a non-white high school student, you are going to experience racial oppression. Combine this with poverty and the "growing income gap" among families, the crisis of industrial manufacturing jobs and inaccessible housing. This is the picture of a society where "it is easier to get a gun than a job."
Of these problems, Falconer reminds us that "matters going beyond academics must also be overcome in order to address the fundamental needs of youth who come to school unable to learn because of their challenging lives outside of school." But in all the talk about his report, the real "culture of silence" obscures the need for a sharp break with the current direction: to establish a new funding formula and give billions more to schools; to create good, well-paying jobs, and affordable housing; to enforce equity in hiring and change racist immigration laws; and for community control over policing which could end racial profiling.
That is a much harder problem, however. It would require strong criticism of the McGuinty Liberals, who in many ways have either produced inadequate policy solutions, or expanded the Harris corporate agenda. To his credit, Falconer hinted at the problems, but seems quite unwilling to grasp the nettle and start to pull out its roots.
Will his 1,000 pages be remembered for getting solid results, or for provocative phrases? The report does not include a budget estimate for its many initiatives.
Students and families not only want safe schools, they want a safe workplaces, safe air and water, safe food and products to buy, and safe places to live and relax. What stands in the way of all this is the insane drive for profits, and corporate control over public policy. This must be confronted. Otherwise, we will continue to build a "school to prison pipeline" here as well.
(Boyden is a writer and youth activist in Toronto.)
Found at: https://peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint11/03_FALCONER_MISSES_ROOTS_OF_SCHOOL_VIOLENCE.html
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