Delinquents, they found, were more likely to repeat grades and drop out of school, and typically did not get along well with their schoolmates. They “misbehaved more extensively than did non-delinquents.”13 The Gluecks’ portrait of young delinquents was brought to life vividly in the 1953 novel The Blackboard Jungle, by Evan Hunter, a pulp novelist of minor talent and florid prose. The jungle is North Manual Trades High School in New York City, and the inhabitants are poor white, black, and Puerto Rican boys relegated to a vocational school. The ostensible hero is a Navy veteran, Richard Dadier, who becomes an English teacher after returning from the war and learns his tough-guy demeanor and earnest desire to teach are no match for his unruly students: “A last-period class is always a restless one, and when a boy is thinking about the money he can be out earning, it can become a torture, even if the English teacher is the best English teacher in the world—which Rick was not . . . Nor can you push around a nineteen-year-old boy when he sometimes outweighs you and outmuscles you and outreaches you.”
Dadier’s idealism clashes with the veteran teacher Solly’s view of the students and vocational education: “This is the garbage can of the educational system. Every vocational school in the city. You put them all together and you got one big, fat, overflowing garbage can. And you want to know what our job is? Our job is to sit on the lid of the garbage can and see that none of the filth overflows into the streets.” And much like new teachers of the common schools who faced disciplinary challenges, Dadier experiences a more modern version of “turning out the teacher,” when a group of students ambush him outside school. “They gave it to him until they felt they’d squashed his scrotum flat, and then they gave it to him equally around the head. He stopped struggling at last, and they grabbed his briefcase and dumped everything into the gutter, tearing the papers and the notebook, and then ripping the stitching on the bag . . . The kid with the knife in his hands got ideas, but the sport was over now, and when the sport is over you get the hell out of the neighborhood before the cops show on the scene.”
Disciplinary policies at North Manual were explained to Dadier by the administrator Max Schaefer: “Clobber the bastards,” he said. “It’s the only thing that works. What do you think happens at home when they open their yaps? Pow, right on the noggin. That’s the only language they understand.”
Although Dadier believes he is above physical discipline, he is tempted because “despite any edicts about corporal punishment, there were a good many vocational school kids who got clobbered every day, and when the heavy hand of someone like Captain Max Schaefer clobbers, the clobberee knows he’s been clobbered, but good. Clobbering, then, was one accepted means of establishing discipline in a trade school.”
Hunter’s novel is cartoonlike in its caricature of the teenagers in North Manual. But The Blackboard Jungle was accurate in reflecting the stereotypes and class biases of the time that fed white, middle-class America’s fears of urban youth and a growing youth culture, which would burst out of conformity in another decade.
ENTER “SCHOOL VIOLENCE”
It’s impossible to understand the history of public schools and of school violence without situating them in the larger picture of the nation’s history and the prevailing economic, political, and social currents that shaped it. The fear of social disorder and swelling immigrant populations that gripped the middle class of the nineteenth century motivated reformers such as Horace Mann to champion public schools. In successive generations, educational debates would mirror contemporary concerns about workforce preparation and the need for vocational schools, and about racial segregation in schools. In the mid-to-late 1960s, the irresistible forces acting on public schools were varied and potent. Social protest movements, including those focused on war, civil rights, student rights, and black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano nationalism, were in play. At the same time, in urban areas especially, increasing residential racial segregation and economic hardship for the poor fueled crime and violence. Race riots exploded in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, and in New York City, in 1966 and a year later in Newark and Detroit. Schools were, not surprisingly, one institution where these combustible trends reached their flashpoint.
It was during this period, in fact, that the words school and violence were first joined in news reporting. The stories had nothing to do with the Columbine-type incident that’s come to define the term. Instead, they described a nation whose public schools, especially in cities, were gripped by racial turmoil and the property crimes that were a side effect of it. Perhaps the first news media reference to “school violence” appeared in a Los Angeles Times op ed published in April 1968, which criticized Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago for his reaction to riots sparked by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Rioters set swaths of Chicago ablaze, eleven people were killed, and eleven thousand city police, seven thousand National Guard soldiers, and five hundred federal troops were called in. Daley later ordered police to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters—even children among them could be gassed, Daley ordered. The writer noted that in Chicago’s “West Side ghetto,” which was predominantly black, “the level of school violence, always high, was rising dangerously.”14
In New York City, racial tensions prompted similar student clashes and reporting on “school violence.” In March 1969, the New York Times debuted the term school violence in an article on Mayor John Lindsay’s reactions to escalating “school disorders” and parent protests at public schools around the city. Lindsay, considered a political liberal, faced racial conflict flaring out of control: black parents in two Harlem elementary schools began a boycott to demand appointment of a black school supervisor; black and Puerto Rican students “rampaged” through Eastern District High School in Brooklyn in protest against a white Jewish administrator accused of “harassing” them; and the United Federation of Teachers, a predominantly white union, protested against the protestors. Lindsay anticipated a greater police presence in the schools to address the crisis, the Times reported. The student and parent protests, while violent and disruptive, were an urgent response to rapidly segregating New York City public schools and their deteriorating physical conditions. Eastern District, the article noted, was 65 percent Puerto Rican and 25 percent black and bursting at its ancient seams with 3,080 students crammed into a building meant for 1,900.15
Eight months later, the Times ran an article about the continuing “racial unrest and disorders” in the city’s schools. The superintendent had launched an “inquiry” intended to improve race relations between black and white students and “eradicate racial tension and hostility in the school neighborhoods.” The article detailed violent incidents at Wingate High in Brooklyn: a fifteen-year-old white student was slashed but uninjured, Molotov cocktails were planted in a gym locker, black students set off fire bombs in the cafeteria, and white students were beaten outside the school. Wingate, once “a model of integration,” the superintendent stated, became 70 percent black after rezoning sent black students from overcrowded schools in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods. “We’ve got to get back to the goal of integration,” the superintendent said. “It would be a shame to turn this into a segregated school.”16
Washington, D.C.’s public schools likewise were gripped by racial turmoil and violence. In January 1969, the Washington Post reported the fatal shooting of an assistant principal at Cardozo High School by three teens who robbed the school’s safe.17 In the fall, fights broke out between black and white students at several high schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In January 1970, the Post reported on the first death of a student in the D.C. schools, in an accidental shooting that occurred when two fifteen-year-olds at Hine Junior High were looking at a gun during lunchtime. The article noted that the two deaths were not connected, but called both “part of a pattern of violence that is afflicting many schools in Washington and other big cities.” A week later, the Post reported that racial fights had broken out at DuVal High after “racial tensions had been building for days,” and police arrested twenty-two students. The same day, the D.C. school administration announced the appointment of a new, full-time director of school safety. A day later, police were brought into the city’s public schools for the first time in
