students have reported increased violence at 443 middle and high schools since Mayor de Blasio’s progressive reforms took effect. After Los Angeles County banned suspensions, students likewise said 214 middle and high schools became less safe. In Seattle, in Oklahoma City, in Baton Rouge, the same story: Teachers report more violence and a greater number of threats. Of the 78% of teachers in Madison, Wisconsin who claim to understand progressive discipline, just 48% say they agree with it – and of those, only 13% say they’ve seen a positive effect on student behavior. Parents are waking up to the dangerous trend as well. Nicole Landers, a mother of three in the suburbs of Baltimore, tells me that when her son came home complaining another boy had brought a knife to school without penalty, she marched indignant into the main office. There, she says, the principal insisted that, “The other student has rights, too.” When the same boy threatened her son for snitching, she took him to the police department. There an officer instructed them to call 911 directly instead of relying on the school. The schools could no longer be trusted to lay down the law. Neither, Landers learned, could the county or the state. She realized it’s a national phenomenon with consequences far beyond the confines of her school board’s constituency. She started a support group, which amassed hundreds of members – parents and teachers – within weeks. According to Landers, children who witness what hers have are “being taught that the rules don’t apply to
His reforms reflected the flawed logic of the following year’s federal guidance and won praise from his former boss. SROs, typically retired cops stationed at public schools whose primary job is to keep kids safe while they’re in school, have a particularly tough go. Amid the national protests that followed the 2015 police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, Broward’s student-support director Michaelle Valbrun-Pope told SROs they should think twice before reporting students who break the rules. A former SRO I met last month said Valbrun- Pope, who is black, appealed to their sense of racial injustice in the meeting with references to “students who look like me.” I went to Broward County to report on the search for culpable negligence after the Parkland shooting. While I was there I heard Valbrun-Pope explain the district’s discipline policy like so: “We don’t want school leaders to say, ‘If you do this, this is what will happen.’” It was confusing, my SRO source said, for a room full of cops to learn that the code they’d lived by for so long should change. And, as he’d told local reporters already, solely blaming the SRO who’d failed to protect the 17 killed at Stoneman Douglas was too simple an answer to be true, and too typical of a district dedicated to the diminishment of personal responsibility. Max Eden, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a friend, has studied survey data asking students whether they feel safe in school. On the NYC School Survey, one such study compiled every year since 2007,
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