Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?theeducatorsroom.com

Dr. Martin argues that violence against educators has become dangerously normalized, with society and school systems increasingly treating physical and verbal abuse as an expected part of teaching rather than an urgent…

148 points•obscurette•2 days ago•325 comments•

#become #society #violence #accepted #teachers #become accepted #teachers become #teachers become accepted

325 comments

ValueTheory2 days ago

"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault."

This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.

duxup2 days ago

My wife works for a school system that at one point had the following proclamation handed down:

"We're referring too many black kids to special services. That could be because of racism."

Keep in mind these were free services like speech therapy, help with reading and so on.

So in the spirit of not being racist they decided the teacher's couldn't use their own judgment on who needed services and offered black and other minority students fewer services.

Public school administration is just poor all around. For many their first response is to blame teachers because that's the easiest target. The union is of no help either. Any complaint from a parent, even well known problem parents, is a whole process of emails and meetings and etc with no real resolution. It takes an endless amount of time before it's clear "problem is the parent" and by the time that is decided they're gone and on to the next parent who submitted their 6th absurd complaint this year and everyone starts over wagging fingers at the teacher's.

danesparza2 days ago

Nurses have the same shit they have to go through (they get questioned by their own hospital legal team when the nurse is the one that got assaulted).

It's wrong. We need to stand up for educators and healthcare providers.

hogs_get_fat2 days ago

At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?

As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?

WarmWash2 days ago

Zero semblance of customer service.

Going off on a bit of a tangent now, but it might still be relevant to education.

I have noticed with healthcare, as I have dealt with it more in the last five years than my whole life combined times ten, is that when they fuck up or make a mistake, at best you will maybe get a sorry. What you will not get is a "yeah, we made a mistake, we'll eat the cost and do it again".

They never have to eat costs or take an L. There is no loss when they fuck up. They only thing they respond to is "lawsuit", which is normally a wildly expensive years long endeavor for everyone. This is all complicated by insurance being the picture too, who ostensibly would be the ones to get a refund in most cases. But the net result would be cheaper insurance for everyone, and less careless behavior from healthcare professionals.

jan_m_savage2 days ago

The problem is particularly serious in some countries, like South Korea.

A recent popular Korean tv serial "teach you a lesson" became wildly popular despite being not-so-politically-correct, precisely because of the severity of the problem.

highly recommend you watch it.

xattt2 days ago

The common thread is that nursing and grade-school education are both female-dominated professions.

forshaper2 days ago

A lot of hospital have armed tactical teams. Though I would guess that in major metro areas they would be more hidden, and so less used.

runjake2 days ago

> but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits

It's not so much that they're cowardly, it's that they don't have budget for the lawyers to deal even with the bad lawsuits.

That, and the court of public opinion is a thing, and it's not reasonable, and it's powerful. It takes down boards of education, gets leadership wrongly fired, and so on.

Henchman212 days ago

They don’t have budget to put food on their teachers tables or supplies in the classroom.

We put teachers in an impossible situation — “raise the next generation with no investment from current generations” — and then get pissed off when they fail?

Our world has become a Kafka-esque nightmare.

igetspam2 days ago

That is a problem but it’s definitely not the root. The root is our increasingly high tolerance for violence, especially in schools. We should also stop shying away from the gendered aspects of the thing: this is done by boys and men FAR more than girls and women. We just don’t like to talk about it.

We need to address violent tendencies in males and our ludicrous willingness to not see the reality of it.

pelagicAustral2 days ago

Your dog whistling argument can be easily countered by peeling a few more layers of the onion... The trouble is, as usual, some things we just dont talk about.

watwut2 days ago

I agree that boys are on average more violent ... but young men violence was going down for years overall.

Yes, conservatives are trying to make it go up, but statistically speaking, they are not succeeding.

59percentmore2 days ago

It's not like the parents are wrong. But it's a structural issue, a product of the way schools are set up, and not of the actions of a given staff/faculty member.

If you treat students like prisoners, they'll act like prisoners, including doing things like assaulting the "guards." If "each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way," strict, blanket edicts aren't going to solve the individual issues each child is going through.

SubmarineClub2 days ago

Classic bleeding-heart prog backwards thinking.

The students are treated like prisoners because they were ALREADY acting that way.

Use your brain. Schools install metal detectors and hire guards because the kids were getting into fights and bringing guns/knives to school. Acting like adding a metal detector is what causes kids to bring guns to school is insanity.

t1234s2 days ago

Having been a student in the mid-late 90s in US public school I can say I witnessed this often. Public schools are storage facilities for delinquent kids with useless parents. These people are a waste of tax money to try and educate. After a certain amount of incidents they should be removed from the public school system and left with the parents to deal with. Instead the public school is forced to try and deal with these delinquents. They take time and resources away from the smarter youth who are trying to do the best they can in the public school system.

gamblor9562 days ago

Having been a student in the late 90s in US public school, I can say I did not witness this at all, and my high school had several thousand students.

However, my district also had a school specifically for troublemakers (with fences and extra security and all of that) so the other schools wouldn't have to deal with them.

robocat2 days ago

I wonder what the troublemakers learnt?

Although for self-selected friends my personal saying is that "All the smartest left school at 15". My other friends are academically educted which doesn't smarten up anyone.

jandrewrogers2 days ago

I went to a high school in California. The school district had a separate dedicated campus where they sent all of the violent and antisocial kids in the rest of the school district. They weren’t hesitant to use it either, repeat offenders weren’t a thing. All of us were aware of it.

The antisocial kids sent to this school received focused, dedicated attention in an environment where they were minimally disruptive and with much higher staffing ratios. The kids in the rest of the school district were never exposed to this behavior because antisocial kids were identified early and removed quickly. It was and is widely regarded as one of the top-tier school districts in California.

I consider it a solved problem. Yet many people will argue that this is bad actually even though it is demonstrably effective at the nominal objective.

Ambolia2 days ago

That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

dash22 days ago

Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.

Mathnerd3142 days ago

Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.

BowBun2 days ago

Vagueposting is a new term online for this kind of behavior - it stems from people getting absolutely destroyed online for various opinions, resulting in people not feeling safe to say what they really mean. Sometimes it's hateful opinions, sometimes it isn't. The end result is people will become unable to simply state their opinions and we won't be able to pick apart people with terrible ideas from the good ones, because no one wants to talk!

klooney2 days ago

We're talking about schools in the US, which means we're talking about black and latino students. This trips the culture war wires, so people get wink winky.

dolni2 days ago

Because some things are politically incorrect to say.

If those things are left unsaid and everyone still understands what's being referred to (even generally) there can be some alignment on the issue.

Some people with ideological axes to grind like to pick fights on particular points, even (perhaps especially) when it is not constructive.

Ambolia2 days ago

It's not rocket science, certain kids showing up as getting impacted by punitive measures looks bad on certain government measures. So they stop getting punished. Problem solved!

jmull2 days ago

What are the "obvious rules" that could be applied here? (They aren't obvious to me.)

phoghed2 days ago

Preemptively jail minority and special ed children and make them work their way up from prison to school.

OP doesn’t seem to have an answer other than “equally apply the rules and outcomes” but he hasn’t shown us that non-minority students are expelled (or whatever punishment) at a higher rate currently, it’s currently his vibes based hypothesis that he’s afraid to openly state.

phishin2 days ago

Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult.

This is at a tipping point.

criagsbkbk2 days ago

I always hear it's because they don't have breakfast. As iff when we deliver them a free meal they are going to become honor-roll students.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

325 comments

Related stories