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Public Affairs coverage from our award-winning staff |
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Pursuing a 'Culture of Calm'
Produced by Linda Lutton on Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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Sean Stalling talks with students during a visit last week to Manley Career Academy. (WBEZ/Linda Lutton) |
Youth violence in Chicago has grabbed local and national headlines the past several weeks, following the beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert. None of the Chicago Public Schools students killed last year or this year died IN school. But CEO Ron Huberman is spending $30 million in education stimulus funds to tackle youth violence. Part of his plan calls for creating a "culture of calm" inside 38 high schools.
Ron Huberman says he can walk into any one of the Chicago Public Schools he oversees and size up the school’s culture in fewer than 10 minutes.
HUBERMAN: They really fall into two camps. One is disorder.
In those schools, he says, you see trash on the floor. A general lack of respect between adults and kids. Students still wandering through the halls when they should be in class.
HUBERMAN: And then you walk into other schools by the time the bell rings, everyone is sitting in their class ready to study. Kids are not hanging out in the hallways. When a teacher engages a group of students they listen. And so I call that the “culture of calm.”
Huberman wants this culture of calm to take hold in 38 high schools that have had students fall victim to violence. He hopes it’ll help learning, but he also thinks the strategy will diffuse conflicts that could spill into the street and cost more kids’ lives.
STALLING: So this was a hotspot.
Sean Stalling is standing at the main entrance to Manley Career Academy on the West Side. This school was trying to change its culture long before Huberman started talking about it.
STALLING: One of the biggest fights that I’ve seen happen, happened right here.
Stalling was principal here for three years. He recently became an area administrator, but he still remembers his first year at Manley:
STALLING: We had probably a fight every day or every other day. And kids don’t fight one on one anymore. At the time, CPS was closing nearby high schools, and kids were crossing gang lines to get to Manley. That’s an issue that’s come up at Fenger High School too in the wake of Derrion Albert’s killing.
STALLING: We had a very difficult year. Our first year here the whole thing was to stay off the news: that was really our mantra as an administrative team was just to stay out of the newspaper. I think at the time there was a shooting at CVCA. And I just said, “We can’t be that school.”
Stalling replaced staff. He told security guards to quit yelling. The school kicked out troublemakers and added art classes. They cut down on suspensions.
But if you ask Stalling, he’ll say the most important thing he did was get kids on his side.
Senior Joe Henigan spent a lot of time fighting during his freshman year. Now he’s a school leader—stopping fights.
HENIGAN: Students would rather hear from someone their same age than from someone that’s older than them. We’re like a smaller version of counselors that help these students get back on track. If they hear from us and they stay around us and they came from the same neighborhood as us and they see how we’ve grown and got out of that same neighborhood, they’re gonna want get on track and do what we’re doing right now.
LEFF: When bystanders start intervening to break up a fight as opposed intervening to run to get to it, cheer it on, make sides, and possibly wage a bet, it’s a very, very different school culture.
Lila Leff runs the Umoja Student Development Corporation, which is housed inside Manley and supports students and teachers there. It brings in an extra $700,000 a year. Few schools have these kinds of extra resources.
Manley made some real in-roads. Stallings says serious infractions dropped by 75 percent between his first year on the job and his second. But despite improvements, Manley is still among the 38 schools the district says need to improve their culture.
Gang affiliations and family feuds still enter through the front door. Kids still fight. It’s like Manley has been able to better the odds against its neighborhood. But it hasn’t been able to beat them outright.
LEFF: This work is messy and it’s expensive and it’s hard. And it is the only thing. It’s also messy and expensive hard to bury kids.
Huberman is asking these schools how they plan to get to a culture of calm—and they’re submitting wish lists of what they need. So far, CPS says social workers, counselors and security officers have been popular requests.
Melanie Flores is a teacher at Foreman High School on the northwest side, where a fight last year brought out the Chicago Police Department in riot gear.
When Flores and others from Foreman started talking about how to create a culture of calm, they figured they should start with the causes of school violence.
FLORES: Foreclosure of properties. Economic situations around the school. Parents living in different houses every other day because they’re homeless.
That’s right…she said FORECLOSURES.
Flores is talking about big-picture issues like joblessness that no school system is going to be able to beat, but she sees a direct tie to aggression and violence.
FLORES: If I have to worry about my little brother not eating and me not eating, Yeah. I’m a little aggravated. I’m a little annoyed, and maybe you talk to me wrong the wrong day, and I might snap.
Huberman admits that not everything is in a school’s control—but he says the adults in the building NEED to set the culture.
HUBERMAN: Adults engaging kids in a respectful tone is a building block of this.
But in many neighborhood high schools, adults add to a culture of aggression. Security guards holler, teachers curse. Kids get physical and adults do to.
A year ago this week I was at Robeson High School reporting another story. Robeson is now one of the 38 schools targeted for a culture makeover.
It was October 16, about 3 PM, sunny…Students were leaving school. I was driving out of the parking lot when I saw one of Robeson’s assigned police officers grab a boy and slam him against a police car.
The officer raised his arm and hammered the side of the boy’s head, smashing it into the car. Another officer held the boy, even though he wasn’t putting up a fight. The first officer punched him in the face again.
I stopped my car and scrambled to turn on my tape recorder…This is all I got—the police sending away the crowd of kids who??d gathered.
POLICE: Get the f*** away now! Get this motherf***** in the back of your car! I headed for a group of kids who saw the beating.
LUTTON: Did you see it?
GIRL: Yes I did. OK. The little boy was walking he looked like he was on his way home. The police just ran up on him, grabbed him from behind, boom boom boom—started punching him all in his face
GIRL2: And then the other police officer… In the past four years, CPS says there have been more than 400 cases of district employees physically abusing students. That includes everything from coaches paddling athletes to kids being hit with staplers. Huberman says he wants to re-train security guards as part of his culture of calm—he’s even suggested a security guard academy.
Huberman says one way he’ll know how well a school is doing is by how many times the fire alarm gets pulled. Kids looking to brawl will pull a fire alarm when they can….what follows is total chaos.
Back at Manley High School, principal Stalling also measured the school’s success in fire alarm pulls.
STALLING: In the first semester of our first year, we had 8 fire alarm pulls.
The next semester there was just one alarm. That’s the sort of quick and dramatic change Huberman is looking for. And he hopes it makes a difference—inside the school, and out.
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Gretta F, Marquette Park // Wednesday, October 14, 2009 @ 5:48 PM
I'm glad the police beating of innocent youth leaving school is being covered in the media, but I'm not sure how the schools are culpable for police violence. What does a police beating off school campus have to do with the culture inside -- except continuing to blame the schools for societal problems?
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KidsRpeople2, Cumberland City, TN // Thursday, October 15, 2009 @ 4:51 AM
"I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation," U.S. Department of Education Secretary Duncan said.
School corporal punishment is related to the discrepancy in achievement scores for African American children. The committee announced two years ago that addressing the achievement gap is a high priority in LNCB reauthorization. African American children represent l7 percent of the school population and receive 36 percent of the paddlings.
Educators and Parents Worldwide are in Desperate need of training/Public Service Announcements in the Media, especially television and internet, to learn effective, non-violent discipline methods to teach children why what they did was wrong and to model appropriate behavior. Shockingly, schools in 20 states still practice physical/corporal punishment of children by hitting them with WOODEN PADDLES to deliberately inflict physical pain and suffering intended to PUNISH them! Meanwhile, this outdated and harmful practice has been made ILLEGAL in schools in 30 states, obviously not 21st Century Education's "Best Practice" and a BLATANT CIVIL RIGHTS INEQUALITY AND VIOLATION OF CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION FROM ASSAULT AND BATTERY and LIBERTY PROTECTION! Over 50 National Children's Health and Education Organizations are OPPOSED to School Corporal Punishment of children and recent research indicates physical punishment of children is bad for them, teaching them to become violent, disengage in learning and trusting adults/authority figures and lowering their IQ's. U.S. Congress is holding hearings on Abusive and DEADLY practices in schools (kids have DIED at the hands of school employees entrusted with their care and education, who are still paid by our tax dollars to be entrusted with our children, as they are legally immune from prosecution for their negligent and harmful actions resulting in DEATH of children) and must ABOLISH Corporal Punishment of ALL Children in ALL Schools nationwide immediately!
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Megan Cottrell, Lincoln Square // Thursday, October 15, 2009 @ 1:59 PM
This was such a great piece, Linda. Great work. I really loved how you incorporated all the different ideas into what creates a school culture - administration, staff, security, the economy, the neighborhood, the police. It's a really holistic way of looking at education. Your description of the police action at Robeson shocked me and helped me realize just how much violence kids really do experience - both between themselves and other kids and from adults. Really eye opening. Great work, as always.
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Linda Lutton, Education Reporter, Chicago Public Radio // Thursday, October 15, 2009 @ 2:22 PM
Just a quick clarification in response to Gretta's comment:
The beating took place on school grounds. The officer's permanent assignment is Robeson High School. He continues to report there.
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Gretta F, Marquette Park // Friday, October 16, 2009 @ 11:51 AM
Is he assigned by CPS or CPD?
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CPS Teacher, Gage Park // Saturday, October 17, 2009 @ 12:05 AM
As a CPS teacher this was a very honest and true depiction of what is in fact going on in our schools. It is indeed a complete culture of chaos in some of our failing schools. Blame cannot be solely put on students, families, teachers, administration, or security...a cultural change is in order. Great piece! It's important Chicagoans know about this educational travesty happening miles away from them.
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Amber, Fullerton,California // Sunday, October 18, 2009 @ 1:49 PM
This idea of mutual respect between students and the school faculty is a terrific way of creating a calm environment conducive to learning. I had to be pulled out of junior high and home schooled because many of the teachers at the school I went to swore at and put down the students. As a student who worked hard I couldn't concentrate in class while the teachers and students had cussing matches. Sadly the teachers thought swearing and putting down students was "tough love" and thought kids only learned if they were yelled at like bootcamp trainees. However, it's time that someone points out the behavior of students is affected by how adults model behavior for them.
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CPS Teacher, Chicago // Monday, October 19, 2009 @ 1:56 PM
Great piece! As a CPS teacher in one of the schools identified as needing a "culture of calm", I was thrilled to hear this story.
Note to Mr. Huberman:
If you ask any of your teachers or any expert on education, they will tell you that in order to create a culture of calm you need to have teacher/staff stability in the schools. When you lose teachers and positions, it destroys any hope of having a culture of calm and leads to chaos. Too many schools lost teachers this year and it destabilized the environment. Students usually in these difficult areas respond better when they have relationships with the adults in the building. They go to class when they know the teachers are checking on them and care about them. When there is constant movement of teachers/staff in a school, students are anonymous and this can lead to chaos. Just ask any of the teachers at these schools.
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