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
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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:
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/articleprint11/03_FALCONER_MISSES_ROOTS_OF_SCHOOL_VIOLENCE.html