Bullying and Self-Defense for Kids: The Schools Have It All Wrong

On my Facebook feed, I found the following (posted by a prominent internet persona):

Caveat: Like all things internet, this one hasn't been verified. I don't know whether this kid's story is true or false. It was posted by a source I have otherwise found to be reliable, so I think it's likelier true than not. But ultimately, I'm not as interested in this particular story as I am about a specific aspect of it.

There's a lot about this story that rings true. Kids that "look gay" are harassed and bullied all the time. Schools frequently don't do anything about it, either because of pressure from the other parents or because the bullies are very good at not getting caught. That's one of the survival traits of a bully - the ability to sense when adults are watching and switch behavior.

The particular aspect of the story that caught my eye is in the middle:

I got 2 days out of school suspension for overcoming the bully, defending myself.

Schools obviously want to discourage fighting among their students. This is more a function of cultural behavior than anything else - where my kids go to school there are virtually no fights, because physical violence just isn't in the local culture. I'm sure that there is bullying of other kinds, some of which can be horrific. But kids hitting other kids? Not so much.

But this kid's school may well be different. And here's where the schools get themselves in trouble and end up teaching the wrong lessons. What most of us want schools to do is punish the aggressor in any physical altercation. Someone who defends themselves, within reason, should be either lightly punished or not punished at all. Personally, I'd lean towards the latter, because we want to teach kids that it's OK to defend yourself if someone attacks you. Otherwise, we're raising potential victims.

But schools don't do this - not because they don't want to, but because it's hard. Usually by the time an adult gets involved, the altercation is well underway (if not over), and there's no way of knowing who started it. Schools used to try to sort that out by interviewing both the fighters and witnesses, but discovered that that's a tricky arena. It takes real skill and judgment to take a bunch of biased witness statements and figure out what really happened.

In today's world, judgment is not encouraged. Schools prefer rules that can be uniformly applied by anybody, so there won't be any charges of bias against a particular teacher or administrator. "Zero Tolerance" policies fit this mold exactly. It doesn't matter if you're carrying stolen oxycontin or a couple of aspirin - a drug is a drug, and off to detention you go.

So if you want a universally enforceable rule on who to punish in school fights, but you can't know who the aggressor is, what do you do? Here schools adopt a rule with terrible consequences: they pin guilt on the winner of the altercation. Teachers will assume that, if you're winning the fight, you must have started it.

This is, of course, patent nonsense. Kids start fights all the time that they then lose, often badly - just search YouTube for dozens of filmed examples. Sometimes, the innocent victim really does know how to defend themselves, and does. Sometimes, the bully gets a nasty surprise.

My guess is that teachers, like most adults, have little to no experience with interpersonal violence themselves and so don't realize how silly the assumption is. Unless they have training, the most likely exposure they would have had to fighting was being a victim of bullies - in which case, they may well have been on the losing end. They may also make the mistaken assumption that violence is rational - that a bully wouldn't start a fight he couldn't win. All of this, of course, is wrong.

Unfortunately, the results of this error are that schools teach kids to be victims. If the only way I can avoid punishment by the school is to lose the fight, I have an institutional incentive not to defend myself. The authority figures around me are telling me: if you want to be a "good kid", if you want to get good recommendation letters to college and good grades and the approval of your teachers, don't fight back. Let yourself get hit, pushed, kicked, picked on. Trust the adults to deal with it.

Except, of course, that the adults don't deal with it. The story in the picture above rings true because it happens all the time. Teachers are powerless to stop bullying, and they know it. So do the bullies.

I don't have an easy solution. Allowing free-for-all combat would shift the balance of power to the strong, not necessarily the virtuous. Right now, that balance lies in the hands of the sneaky and unethical, which is probably worse. But I certainly don't think that having all kids "fight it out" is the answer.

The best answer, unfortunately, is messy. There has to be room for judgment on the part of teachers and administrators. I have many teacher friends who have seen situations where they and their colleagues know who the troublemaker is. But because of the "universal rules", the kid gets away with it time and again. And all students learn the same lesson: the one who cheats best, wins.

Readers of this blog know that I'm an ardent self-defense pacifist and a passionate believer in the use of force to defend oneself. There are thousands upon thousands of teachers, dojos, workshops, and classes all over this country teaching people how to defend themselves when they're attacked. Much of that effort involves undoing the damage of the K-12 years, where kids are methodically taught not to engage in any self-defense at all. For the sake of the kids in our schools and the adults they will become, we need to find a better way.

Another University Shooting: What Does It Mean?

Another week, another seemingly senseless shooting in a public place. This week's entry took place at Seattle Pacific University; you can find news all over the net. The first version of the news story I found was here.

What interested me about this story was not the particular details, which are in some ways depressingly familiar but in some ways inspiring. I am tempted to use this case, once again, to add to the mountain of evidence that Wayne LaPierre was wrong in his infamous formulation that, "Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun." I've blogged before on this point, and will leave it here only by pointing out that the "bad guy with a gun" was stopped in this case by a good guy with a can of pepper spray and the will to act. Courage and perceptiveness are the first and most important weapons, without which nothing else matters.

But what really interested me about the story was this quote given in the aftermath of the shooting:

"The actions of the subject in this case do not define Seattle Pacific University nor the city of Seattle," Assistant Police Chief Paul McDonagh said. "The actions of the students and staff on site, those are the things that define Seattle Pacific University."

This is why we spend so much time talking about violence and why the subjects of guns, murder, and the like are so prominent in our public conversations. Violence isn't just about the damage that it causes. While significant, there are lots of other things that cause similar amounts of damage. Nearly as many people died in Hurricane Katrina as died on 9/11; which one has gotten more attention?

We give violence the attention that it gets because of what it says about who we are. When somebody kills others, whether it be with a gun, a knife, or a plane, that act says something about both the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s). And how we respond to that act also says something about us. What it says, of course, is in dispute. We argue about it all the time. It is a, if not the, central question of our lives: who are we?

Recently a friend re-posted an op-ed piece from late 2012, after the Sandy Hook shootings, titled "Our Moloch". In it the author makes a strong argument, not about the tactics or the laws surrounding guns, but about the kind of identity that has been constructed around what might be termed the "gun rights movement". Whether you agree or disagree with his portrait, he is pointing to the right question. It's not about the guns. It's about us.

In times of crisis we look for meanings that uplift. That's why firefighters were so revered in the wake of 9/11 - because of the self-sacrifice they made to try to save other's lives, that noblest and most blessed of pursuits. That's what Assistant Police Chief McDonagh is invoking here. We are not the guy who pulled the trigger on innocent people. We are the guy who jumped on him, who disabled him and took him to the ground, who saved lives. That's who we want to be.

I've blogged a lot before (search the site on the "Use of Force" label; here's one of my favorites) about the intersection of violence and ideas. I think that one problem we have is that people spend both too much and not enough time thinking about violence and its relationship to who we are. We allow Hollywood fantasies about violence to shape our understandings of what it's useful for and how it works (just as we do about sex). At the same time, we don't spend enough effort thinking about who we want to be and where we want violence to fit into that picture. The extremists who carry assault weapons into Target and Home Depot have become a caricature, a grotesque parody of what we would regard as a good and civilized life.

So as we mark another senseless shooting in the headlines (alongside the many hundreds of senseless shootings that go unremarked because they are done in "those parts of town" among "those people") let's try just a little bit more to think. Not about the details of gun control, or the political clout of the NRA, or the best tactics for self-defense. Let's think instead about who we are and who we want to be. And let's talk about that together. Because in the end, that's the only question that really matters.

Update to Yesterday's Mass Stabbing

Yesterday I posted about a "mass stabbing" at a high school near Pittsburgh. As tends to be the case with such emergencies, initial information was incomplete. I don't necessarily retract what I wrote then, but I've gotten some additional perspective which raises some new thoughts.

A college classmate of mine was an alum of that high school. She still knows many people in the area, and spoke to some of the families, including some who had witnessed the event. She assured me that the school did have an emergency plan in place, and that both school kids and (most importantly) the adults in the building acted quickly and appropriately. We can yet hope that as a result none of the casualties in this case become deaths (although a few are apparently in critical condition at local hospitals).

Assuming this to be true (and I have no reason to doubt my friend's report), this raises a couple of additional and related observations. First, the chaos point still holds. Despite the best-laid plans executed as well as possible, a 16 year old student with two knives (apparently kitchen knives, from recent reports) was able to seriously injure 20 fellow students, four of them critically. I still suspect that the number, and the stabber's ability to move about the school in doing so, is due to the initial chaos. A plan is only good once someone figures out what's going on and "pushes the button" to activate it. That undoubtedly took some time, time in which the violence could continue largely unabated.

This leads to a broader observation about the asymmetry of violence - something I've written about before. My claim then: Real security is hard - 100% security is impossible. This case tragically proves that point. As much as we need to be prepared, individually and organizationally, to mitigate these kinds of cases we delude ourselves if we think there is a "magic bullet" (arming teachers, better emergency plans, metal detectors, what have you) that is going to keep everybody safe 100% of the time. It is a tragic reality of our world that if someone is truly bent on causing mayhem and destruction, they will succeed to some degree. We may be able to influence that degree at the margin, but once you've reached that point you can't stop it from happening entirely unless you get very, very lucky.

Which leads to the final observation - one which NRA supporters and detractors can, I suspect, agree on. The real source of violence lies in the human heart. The answer therefore ultimately lies in real connections between people. I don't yet know who this boy was, or why he did this terrible thing. But other people did know him, before he came to this pass in his life. That's not to lay blame on parents, or friends, or teachers - this isn't about figuring out "who's at fault". But it is to say that the only real solution to violence we have is in healing the hearts of the people around us. And that, far more than guns or police or martial arts, is hard. But it is something we should dedicate ourselves to nevertheless, every day and whether we touch the heart of one person or twenty.

Guns and the Different Planets We Inhabit

Recently I took a driving trip that involved substantial stretches on the road by myself. I used the time to catch up on some podcasts I had been saving for some time, but hadn't had the chance to listen to. In particular, I was able to get all the way through a two-part series put out by This American Life on reporting they had done on Harper High School in the fall of 2012, aired in February of this year. You can find the episodes here and here; I highly recommend them (fair warning: they are depressing).

In the show, the reporters present a series of stories gleaned from spending 5 months (fall semester 2012) at Harper High, a predominantly black high school on the south side of Chicago. Although it is well-run and well-kept within the building it is clearly in a rough neighborhood, and the majority of the reporting focuses on violence (shootings) involving current and recent students. Pretty much all of this violence takes place outside the school building itself, but it nevertheless has a profound impact on the school and the students. Over the year prior to the reporting (the 2011-12 school year), 29 current and former students had been shot, 8 of them fatally.

The discussions reporters had with students and staff were remarkably frank and matter-of-fact, both about the violence that these young people had witnessed (many if not most had seem someone shot in front of them) and about the social and economic systems that sustained and encouraged that violence. The discussions on gangs blew apart most common conceptions about what gangs are and are not, and how and why violence among these rival tribes occurs.

At the end of the report, the host mentioned that they had gotten a tweet after the first episode from a listener who accused them of finding the most violent high school anywhere, implying that they were blowing the problem out of proportion by focusing on an outlier case. In response, the last segment of episode 2 is simply a role call of roughly a dozen principals and superintendents from cities around the country citing similar numbers of casualties among their students. This is clearly not an isolated problem, except insofar as it is isolated in the poorest inner-city regions within major American cities.

And therein lies the disconnect. It struck me as I listened to 15 and 16 year old black kids matter-of-factly talk about guns - where to get them, how much they cost, how to keep them hidden, which kinds are the most desirable. The national conversation about guns and gun control over the past year in the United States has been almost completely dominated by middle-class and upper-middle-class white men. Occasionally a white woman, usually a prominent one, will get a voice in (say, Gabby Giffords). Occasionally, a prominent and well-to-do black man will be let in as well (Leonard Pitts or Thomas Sowell). The debate has a largely theoretical tone, focusing on rare cases like the Aurora theater shooting or the Sandy Hook tragedy. High-minded ideas about the Bill of Rights and the Founders' Intent are bandied about. Wayne LaPierre expounds his now-famous "good man with a gun" theory.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of those actually affected by gun violence - young urban poor, often minority kids - are left out completely. Those Harper High kids could tell you with precision and cold calculation the value of a 30-round clip (it lets you keep shooting longer in a firefight, which is good since most shots miss - these kids are lousy marksmen). But if the NRA showed up with its arguments about the 2nd Amendment and Inalienable Rights penned by white slaveowners over 200 years ago, would we expect those urban black kids to understand, or care? Would the social workers in the school, who do their jobs with energy and enthusiasm day in and day out despite fearing for their lives, care about the niceties of whether this or that model of assault rifle can or can't be bought at a gun show with a background check? They live in a world so far removed from the pundits and pontificators that they might as well be on Mars.

Except that the decisions that result from the tussle among pundits, politicians, interest groups, and others - the wealthy chattering classes - have a very real impact on those poor black kids and teachers in south Chicago. In fact, the urban core suffers the consequences far more than the rest of us do. Whether I can or can't buy an AR-15, or a 30-round clip, at my local gun store is largely peripheral to my life, and (however much they may protest) to the lives of nearly all wealthy white suburbanites who are the ones carrying out the argument. Nobody I know will die whether gun laws are tightened or loosened, whether 30-round clips are legal or illegal. Some conservatives will get into a high dudgeon about their "freedom being taken away", but this is largely the kind of freedom that wealthy people with very few real problems in the world can argue about - the epitome of the hashtag #firstworldproblems.

Back in the urban core, meanwhile, the fact that guns are freely available and that gun laws are being loosened on an ever-wider basis has real life-and-death consequences for those kids at Harper High. Police stats show that at least 40% of the guns in the Harper neighborhood come from straw purchases at nearby suburban gun stores and shows. When 30-round clips are readily available, more poor black kids die.

It was in this context that Chicago passed (and, to some degree, still maintains) incredibly strict handgun laws - the very kind that the NRA and their comfortable suburban members seek to get rid of. I have no idea whether such laws are effective or not - so far, the dent seems to be minimal. On the other hand, only a very great idiot would expect the NRA's call to arm everyone for "self-defense" to lead to anything other than a bloodbath in urban core areas already awash in petty violence. Those kids are Harper will tell you themselves - guns aren't for defending yourself when you're being shot at, they're for taking revenge against the people that shot your buddy. These kinds of "gang wars" go on for years, with nothing more at stake than pride, "turf", and survival.

The fact that the victims and perpetrators of violence are mostly poor, minority, and in the inner cities, while the pontificators (me included) are mostly white, wealthy, and well outside those inner city regions means that the "national conversation" on gun violence is neither national nor a conversation. It is a Kabuki argument between wealthy ideological tribes with no real material stake in the outcome - a political game played for money and votes and influence in Washington and in state capitols around the country. Those stuck in the urban killing zones, while they are in theory citizens with equal rights to the rest of us, live in a democracy in name only. They have no voice in the decisions that affect whether they are likely to live or die.

It is long past time that those people had a voice. Until they get it, the "gun debate" in our country is a worthless farce, akin to letting farmers with pickup trucks in Montana control mass transit policy in Boston, or Los Angeles plastic surgeons decide the fate of dairy farmers in Wisconsin. We would recognize this as injustice in just about any other area of public policy - the cries of "No taxation without representation!" are quick to run at Tea Party rallies when decisions they care about are on the line. But because the victims and perpetrators of gun violence (and often, they are both) are poor, and confined to urban slums, and largely not white, it seems somehow natural that the rest of us should decide their fate for them. I don't know how to solve that problem, nor do I expect a resolution any time soon. But if the NRA or other gun-interest-groups want any thinking people to take them seriously, they should stop arrogating to themselves, from their suburban and rural base, the power to decide the fate of people who live in another world entirely.

Corruption in Education: It's the Assumptions, Dummy!

Concerns have been circulating for some time that teachers, or possibly even entire schools, have been cheating on behalf of their students on standardized tests. These concerns were widely publicized by, among others, Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame. The data they presented was pretty compelling - patterns in test answers indicated that cheating was definitely taking place.

Now the story is back in the headlines - this time with an entire school district. The former Superintendent of the Atlanta schools, along with 34 other administrators and teachers, has been indicted on charges of racketeering, theft, conspiracy, influencing witnesses, and making false statements. The superintendent faces 45 years in prison if convicted - punishment that would run beyond what many convicted Wall Street swindlers have faced in recent years. A total of 178 teachers and administrators were implicated district-wide.

That there is cheating and corruption on this scale in American public schools will come as a shock to some - although the "dramatic increases" in test scores seen in the Atlanta schools should have been enough to raise eyebrows rather than garner invitations to the White House. The article linked above should be read widely by anyone who is interested in K-12 education in America today. This isn't to say that every school district in America has this problem - but if you think it's confined to Atlanta, I have a bridge to sell you.

What's more interesting to me is how we got here. This kind of corruption is a direct product of No Child Left Behind and the high-stakes "accountability" testing that it ushered in. NCLB rests on a set of assumptions that, when exposed, are absurd. The entire system relies on a set of sticks and carrots, with standardized test scores designed to trigger either benefits to those who do well or punishment to those who fail to make the grade (with a decided emphasis on the punishment side, embodied in the widespread term "failing school"). And because you can't punish students directly, these carrots and sticks have been directed at districts, schools, and (increasingly, especially here in Ohio) individual teachers.

If you believe that this kind of accountability is going to improve children's education, you have to accept two assumptions. One is that standardized tests actually measure the educational outcomes we want. That belief has been widely debated and criticized, and I won't rehash that debate here.

Even if you believe that standardized tests are reliable and valid measures of student education, believing that carrots and sticks will change those outcomes requires a second assumption: that the fundamental obstacle preventing kids' learning is the motivation of teachers. You are, in essence, arguing that teachers are either lazy or incapable.

If the former is true, then threats and rewards should induce them to do what they could otherwise do, but won't. If the latter is true, then the system should force out teachers and replace them with others capable of doing the job (at the prevailing wage structure for teachers, no less).

Since we don't see mass teacher firings, the primary mechanism here is motivating the existing teacher workforce. People who believe in the NCLB approach think that if you threaten teachers, they'll suddenly start doing a good job - which they could have been doing all along, if only they were properly motivated.

This is, of course, an absurd assumption. Of all of the obstacles preventing kids (especially kids in inner-city districts like Atlanta) from learning, the motivation level of their teachers is pretty low on the list. Yet somehow, introducing "accountability" is supposed to solve everything.

That this kind of absurdity should produce widespread cheating and corruption, as it has in Atlanta, should not surprise us. NCLB has turned school districts into a version of Kafka's The Trial - a world in which truth is irrelevant and real progress is impossible. In such a world, what else should we expect? Teachers and administrators faced a terrible choice: cheat or be fired.

We should all hope that Dr. Hall, the administrator at the center of the whole mess, is sentenced to a goodly long prison term as an example to others. But even for her, the incentives were skewed. Until she was caught, cheating earned her the highest honors - invitations to the White House, plaudits from politicians and the business community, and some $500,000 in "performance bonuses".

Given the obstacles faced by a large number of the 52,000 children in her district, there was no way for her to earn these things honestly - especially without large numbers of additional resources to invest in Atlanta schools, which she did not have. It's unfortunate that she made the choices she did - but if we present people with a system in which cheating is the only way to get ahead, we shouldn't be surprised when some of them do.

It may be too much to ask that this one case, as shocking as it is, will cause us to reexamine the NCLB approach and the absurdist assumptions which underlie it. Maybe we need to indict a dozen more major urban superintendents. I hope that it doesn't take that long, and that we can someday soon rebuild our approach to education on the basis of a more rational set of assumptions.

Zero Tolerance and the Upside-Down Rules of Violence in Schools

Much has been made of the craziness of "zero tolerance" policies recently in light of a story about a student who bit a pop-tart into the shape of a gun. Gun-rights advocates have been having a field day with this, which may compete for Dumbest Decision By a School District this year.

But there's a deeper reality behind the way schools have set up rules about violence, bullying, and the use or threat of force in schools. "Zero tolerance" is easy to make fun of, with good reason: it is very likely counterproductive. But there is a deeper, underlying set of "rules of engagement" shared by many schools, whether written or not. And these rules are teaching some very bizarre lessons.

Consider this story, posted by a substitute teacher who happens to be a martial arts instructor (and therefore, well versed in the controlled use of force) to a group of martial artists:

Junior High Student KICKED AT ME (Substitute teacher)

Let's just say, everyone is OK, except potentially the future of my clearance to work with children.
This kid was supposed to be working on math, in his seat. Instead, he was closing the period with three VERY CLOSE spin kicks to a seated student's face. 

Helping another student, I told him to stop and rose, closed my distance to create space between them (no idea of how serious either was). Once there, he lifted his hand and said "Do you want to spar?" {Yes, insert groans now} 

Declining, I had my left hand out to "ward off" and as I turned toward him, the weasel did another spin kick AT ME. I was out of range, but as we all know, even a badly done kick still can hurt like %$#@! No contact, but avoided the kick rather than BLOCK. 

I extended my right hand to press/direct him away from the other seated students (for the safety of all) and maneuvered behind him to an Aikido-like position. Right hand hovering near elbow, left hand on his left shoulder, middle finger behind clavicle- I was in an "I AM HERE" grounding/control position and in a direct and slightly elevated voice said "You need to STOP", "You need to SIT","Do you UNDERSTAND?" 

Of course, I had cut my fingernails at the beginning of the day, to accommodate the later guitar class. The "poor innocent baby" felt the scratch of my fingernail and reported "my attack" to the principal. As there was no high risk attack or equal force defense, I had planned upon reporting the incident myself during the third period prep, but instead was called in, provided my statement and dismissed for the day and removed from the sub list for that district. Later that morning, as I was typing my own statement, a sheriff's deputy came to interview me. I demonstrated the position upon him, and although underwhelmed himself, he could not verbally tell me how ridiculous this was, because he had not interviewed all the parties and witnesses. 

This fellow tried to do his best under very trying circumstances - a kid who would not behave in class or respect his authority, and who was endangering (not to mention distracting) others in the class. For those non-martial artists (that's most of you) among my readership, this fellow's detailed description of the physical steps he took is imminently reasonable, and he showed remarkable restraint. For which he was punished by the school district.

Here's the rub: what he did was technically correct and ethically proper, but totally wrong under the rules of engagement of the school. What he should have done is something almost no one would think of: take the kick.

Why allow yourself to get hit? Because the underlying rules of engagement in schools are simple: whoever gets caught hitting (kicking/etc.) loses. Whoever is the victim of the strike wins. This is particularly true if the interaction is teacher/student; a teacher who lays a hand on a student is asking for trouble.

School administrators apparently think that these rules will deter fights, bullying, etc. Instead, they have created a loophole that bullies and jerks (like the kid mentioned in this story) exploit ruthlessly. There are numerous stories of kids being suspended for defending themselves, when everyone around (including the teachers) knows who really initiated the fight. There are other stories of fights started by bullies in which both bully and victim are punished equally.

Essentially, what schools are saying is: you are not allowed to defend yourself. If someone wants to hit you, let them - let us (the authorities) handle it from there. This gives bullies, masters of going right up to the line and not getting caught, all kinds of opportunities to induce fear and get other kids in trouble.

This is an upside-down, looking glass world that teaches bullies to be sneaky and everyone else to be victims. It's time to get chuck these rules of engagement and develop a more realistic and reasonable approach to dealing with bullies and fighting in schools.