On this episode of The Bespoke Parenting Podcast, host Julie Gunlock talks to American Enterprise Institute Research Fellow Max Eden about the state of kids in America, increasing violence in public schools, why restorative justice programs—not COVID school shutdowns—created this problem, and how parents can reverse the trend.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey, everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of the Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to this program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and most importantly, their kids. Today, I am speaking with my friend, Max Eden. Max is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he focuses on education reforms, specifically K through 12 education and early childhood education. Before rejoining AEI, he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I’m really glad to have Max on today. We’re going to be talking about a dark subject, the increasing violence we’re seeing in schools and among kids. And so thanks, Max, for joining me. I think this is a really confusing time for a lot of parents.
Max Eden:
Yeah, no, it really is, and it’s unfortunate and I’m looking forward to helping you unpack it for them.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. We have a lot of folks on that watch this podcast that really want the freedom to parent their kids the way they see fit, but I feel like now parents are asking for more guidance. What can they do not only to help their kids, but from maybe… I mean, I don’t think a lot of listeners to the show necessarily have violent kids, but maybe after COVID they’ve noticed some changes with their kids. But also I think a lot of parents want to know, how can I protect my kids?
And I know that’s a really broad question. I think the first question I would ask is, am I wrong? Is there more violence in schools today? Is there more violence among young people? Okay, that’s my first question because sometimes I think the media can blow these things out of proportion, and pretty soon it’s like free-range parenting. You’re constantly told you shouldn’t free-range parent because a white van might pull up and steal your kids. That’s the narrative in the media. Is this the same thing? Is it being overblown or are we seeing an increase in violence among young kids?
Max Eden:
Well, it’s always hard to say for certain blanket things about national trends, but there are statistics to suggest this is true. There was a national poll that was commissioned and disseminated by the Department of Education, I think it came out three or four months ago that suggested that somewhere in the order of 80% of teachers say that there’s been a rise in school violence or in students talking back or in fights. And that’s really the only clear national data point we have. But it’s consistent with what we’ve also seen, which is just a rise of stories in the news, a rise of videos that make their way around. And so I think it’s pretty reasonable to say based on the data we have, and certainly very intuitively reasonable to say that violence has been exacerbated in the post COVID era, but the effects of COVID aren’t the only reason for that. There are several forces that are combining to make schools less safe and orderly places.
Julie Gunlock:
Let’s talk a little bit about that because I think that this is both a parenting problem. I really do. I think too often we say it’s COVID, and it’s the schools and it’s this. I think parents are really failing in this country. I think there’s been a change in the way parents parent, and I’d like to explore that a little bit, but let’s talk about COVID and I sometimes feel like parents just say, “Well, it’s COVID and I’m not responsible for this.” But talk to me about if there have been, I mean you mentioned that one story or with that one study, is it a COVID effect or are there other things at play here?
Max Eden:
There are two major factors I would say. Partly there is a COVID effect, right? Locking kids in their house, putting them in front of screens, telling them they can’t play with their friends, making them scared about playing with their friends, interrupting their social development by putting masks on their faces, which increases the anxiety in any given social interaction. I mean, I’m not a developmental psychologist or a neurobiologist, but that stuff does not just go away the second the restrictions are dropped and the second the kids get back together, you have third-graders who have never have interacted as much with each other as kindergartners have, you have people who hit puberty and gone back to school without ever navigating that process with their friends. So that’s a huge thing that can’t be discounted. And unfortunately there’s nothing to be done about it at this point.
But the other factor that goes under discussed, and I think is COVID used as a cover for it, is the rise of what we’ve talked about some years ago for restorative justice in schools. And this is a complicated story to tell, but the simplest version is under the Obama administration, the Federal Office of Civil Rights started to pressure school districts to adopt a different way to deal with school discipline. Traditionally, the model is a student misbehaves, he gets in trouble. He does something bad, he gets a detention. He does something really bad, he gets a suspension. Really, really bad, he gets an expulsion, and rules have consequences and consequences are enforced. This is no longer the dominant paradigm for how schools deal with misbehavior, right? Because partly because the Obama administration believed that the racial disparities in school discipline were a sign of institutional racism and a proto critical race theory thing.
Julie Gunlock:
So this was this whole pipeline to prison narrative that we heard years ago.
Max Eden:
Yeah, no, and that’s a complete statistical aberration. I mean, there are reasons why these racial disparities exist because there are massive inequities in society and there are reasons why kids who misbehaved in school are more likely to misbehave outside of school. And it has nothing to do with them being punished or not punished for their misbehavior. But on the strength of this narrative, the argument went not only is giving consequences implicitly biased or inherently racist, it’s also directly harmful to students because the theory goes, anything that is punitive is damaging. Whereas trying to get to the root of the problem, trying to be restorative, having a discussion, trying to repair harm is theoretically a more effective way to ameliorate misbehavior. The problem with this is that once schools adopt it, the principals have in their minds that I’m successful or I’m a failure to the extent that I can lower detentions, lower suspensions, lower expulsions.
And this is something my mom experienced firsthand when she was teaching in Cleveland public schools. The principal basically told her, “Don’t send a kid to my office unless there’s been a fight.” And when the principal said that, my mom lost the ability to control her classroom, because the kids knew. The whole theory of, all misbehavior is a communication of need, therefore it should be met as a need and you should try to repair and restore. It doesn’t quite fit with human nature. Human nature actually is kids will try to test the boundaries and go straight up to where the boundary is. And if they sense the boundaries going back, then they will push it to the boundary. If the boundary of the misbehavior you’re allowed is you can’t untuck your shirt and you get sent to the office if you have your shirt untucked, well then you’ll have a couple kids who will keep on untucking their shirts and a lot who won’t.
If the boundary is you can’t punch a kid, well then you’ll have a couple kids who are punching kids and some kids who won’t. You just have a much wider subsidy for misbehavior. And these so-called restorative interventions rarely ever occur, right? I mean, theoretically they could help sometimes, but in reality there’s not enough time to restore every bit of damage, repair every bit of harm, get to the root causes every bit of misbehavior. So what will happen when you talk to teachers, it’s a very common thing to hear, “I send a kid to the office and he comes back with a lollipop, and I’m the one who kind of gets in trouble for sending him to the office because the principal thinks, well, what are you doing wrong in this situation? Why didn’t you get to the root of it? Or why didn’t you fill out enough paperwork before sending him my way?”
So the combination of kids being kind of less socially, effectively adjusted just because they were around each other less for a long time and were stressed and had all sorts of anxiety symptoms exacerbated, they come back into a school where increasingly the rules of the game have changed, become more permissive. That’s just a recipe for what we’re seeing, which is environments where fights are more common, where swearing’s more common, where disrespect, it goes unpunished.
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, I tell you, Max, I actually talked to you years ago when my child was in the public schools and he got hit from behind and thrown across a hallway. And the reason I contacted you and talked to you and you were very helpful was because of the school not giving me any information. And that’s another part of it now. We see that not only are these, it’s now a consequence free environment, but in many cases, I don’t think parents even know either that their kids have been hit or attacked or that maybe even their kid is misbehaving in many cases. And I will also say we talk about this mythical pipeline issue that Obama promoted, and I don’t know the data on this, so I will ask you, but I feel like a lot of kids who go to schools and misbehave consistently over and over again probably don’t have the most stable home lives.
And again, I don’t know if that’s true. I assume so because I know my kids know that I will crack some skulls if they misbehave or are disrespectful, but I assumed that that’s true. And therefore when you took away the consequences in high school, it might have been the only consequences these kids were seeing. So now you have an unstable family life. And then again, the Alvin Bragg approach to crime in the schools on a nationwide level, it makes sense that we’re starting to see this. And again, it started way before COVID.
Max Eden:
Yeah, no, I mean the data on it, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Students who come from a single parent family background are twice as likely to get suspended as students who come from two parent backgrounds. And it also just so happens that African American students are about three times as likely to come from a single parent background as white students. And that’s about the overall size of the disparity. And so the fact that the school punishes a misbehavior is not really a significant thing in the course of a child’s life, except insofar as if the school sends a message that you can misbehave that puts those kids in for a really rude awakening. I mean, when you see a fight at school, the kid might get suspended for it, but if he goes outside, does the exact same thing three years later when he is 19 years old, he could go to jail for it.
Maybe not in New York City, but still enough jurisdictions where the schools are playing by a rule that almost suspends rule of law and sends a signal that you’re not really responsible for your misbehavior because it could be excused because it’s somebody else’s fault, because we know that you didn’t really mean it. So yeah, those kids don’t get that kind of authority structure from school. They don’t have it at home. And in my view, that’s what creates the real school to prison pipeline, not simply enforcing rules with consequences, which is the way of the world, and the world’s not really going to change in that regard.
Julie Gunlock:
I want to go back to something you said that I thought was interesting. You mentioned that your mom’s a teacher and she was teaching under these circumstances, and it made it very difficult for her. And I think sometimes I can’t quite work this out, you focus on K-12 education. Obviously you’re well aware of the situation with the teachers’ unions. This is what always confuses me, Max, and maybe you can shed some light on this. Teachers are in danger in many of these violent schools and they support, at least in my case, and I mean I didn’t do a poll, but there was never any objections to the restorative justice practices that were, at least I never heard any complaints from the teachers. And I attended a lot of meetings where the school principal would talk glowingly about restorative justice practices. I don’t understand why more teachers don’t speak up about this. Is it just because the union is so powerful? Are they afraid of backlash and retribution?
And maybe this isn’t your field of expertise, but I think about people like your mom being put in a really dangerous situation. We see these viral videos of that woman who took someone’s twitch away or switch or whatever they’re called, and she got tackled and that she had a concussion. And we know other examples of teachers facing grave danger, the teacher that was shot by a six-year-old in Virginia. Anyway, you get the point is why hasn’t there been a rebellion against Randi Weingarten and the teacher’s union who are totally fine with restorative justice?
Max Eden:
Frankly, because the actual power structure of the teachers’ unions prohibits that rebellion from taking place. I will say from my experience reading, researching, talking to people, your local union is probably uniquely bad in this regard. A lot of times I talk to local union leaders and it’s like I’m talking to myself on school discipline issues. They’ll say exactly what I’m saying, exactly what you’re saying. They’re there to try to protect their teachers as much as they can, but the higher up you get, the more incentive and the union structure is to go with what is the center of gravity for the left-wing ideology de jure. And so at the national level, and sometimes at the state level, you have them very aggressively pushing it. At the local level, you have them trying to push back, but being neutered in terms of how strongly they can really speak against this.
Because they can’t come out and outright say, “We oppose restorative justice because their leadership is in favor of it,” but they can say the administrators aren’t listening to the teachers, the administrators aren’t dishing out enough consequences. Things have gotten too soft. And we are seeing that in some cases it’s just a question of ideology, balancing with defending interests, and then just the structure of the union is not really democratic in any way, shape or form. And at the top level, their incentive structure is not to protect teachers at all. It is just to be one of the power brokers of the institutional left. And so that’s what they get from the top down. And it becomes very difficult for the union folks who know what’s going on with their teachers and who want to protect teachers to do that effectively.
Julie Gunlock:
Max, I have to tell you, it’s good to hear that because I was resentful, I still remain resentful of the teachers when I experienced that and I had no one would help me and no one would share information with me, it did make me resentful and I’m still allowed to be resentful of those particular teachers, but it actually gave me this sense that no one’s on my side and the teachers all have bought into this. So it’s important for me to hear that too, that it has to also be… All my kids are now out of that school, but when I was fighting that fight, there was a point where I just became tired because I couldn’t fight it without lawyers that I was…
So I imagine there’s a little bit of exhaustion on the part of teachers who just want to get to their retirement and go away and not have to deal with this stuff. So that does give me pause and makes me really feel bad for teachers that are trying to do their best in the schools. What advice would you give for parents? This is what I say all the time, that’s why we need school choice. And I feel like that is so not helpful to people who are stuck and there are people stuck in those schools. What can people do? What do you suggest to people in terms of, I don’t know, what do they tell their children? I mean, aside from get your kids out of violent schools and these days, I’m not sure some private schools are better. So what can parents do?
Max Eden:
Yeah, I mean the first thing is to figure out if there’s a problem. We don’t want the listeners of this podcast to be put in the position you were in where you figure out if there’s a problem when your kid gets hit. You want to figure out if there’s a problem well before that point. And you’re probably not going to figure it out from your kid. Maybe you will, but your best source is your teacher. And the best way to do that is to ask the teacher a few pretty simple non-loaded questions and just say, “Hey, do you feel like the administrators support you on discipline?” And if they say, “Yeah, they do, they’re great,” then maybe there’s not a problem. Say, “Hey, have there been any room clears at my school this semester?” And your listeners might not know what a room clear is.
It’s a pretty new phenomenon. It used to be if there was a student who would lose his marbles in class, a teacher or school security officer would need to lay a hand on that student to restrain him, to bring him out the door and to calm him down. In a lot of cases, that’s become all but impossible because of various policies and paperwork and liability that’s been built in. So what you are finding more and more is that the teacher will funnel all of the kids out of the classroom and leave the misbehaving student in there.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of that.
Max Eden:
Yeah. So just asking if that’s happening is, I think, a must-do for any given parent because that will tell you a lot about the overall climate of the school. If it’s not happening, then probably the school is still reasonably sane in the way that it’s going about it. If it is, you know something has gone profoundly wrong in the way that the school is being administered. And then the third question to ask any teacher is, “Hey, is there anybody in my class who I don’t need names, I know they’re privacy concerns, but anybody in my kid’s class who seems kind of off or potentially dangerous to you?” And see what they say to that, right? Because those kids, there’s not necessarily one of them in every classroom, but there might be one of them in every district. And those are the low probability, high impact things that a parent needs to know about and needs to ask.
And they can sense in the teacher’s reaction whether that student is there, whether that sense of fear is there. And if they find that it is, then they need to ask the teacher, what can I do to support you? Is there any way I can get parents together to talk to the principal? Is there a way I can get parents together to talk to the school board member and see how you are responded to? And the most aggressive recommendation I would make, and it’s actually pretty easy, would be if a parent starts to get really alarmed, has a few friends who are on board with trying to do something, administer an anonymous poll to the teachers, just get all their emails, send them an email, ask them a few questions on SurveyMonkey, and then just say, “Is there anything else you want to say about school safety, your concerns about student discipline?”
And you leave them that open-ended response. And what you can get then is potentially dozens of horror stories that you can take in paper form to your school board at a school board meeting to your principal and say, “This is the reality that I’ve been told about. We’re concerned. We need these policies to change.” And you’ll know based on how you’re received whether or not there’s any hope of changing those policies. And frankly, there might not be. But I think as you start off this conversation by saying it’s incumbent on parents to try. Because if parents abdicate their authority and their concern when they send their kids to school and schools abdicate their moral position when they handle student discipline, then you can’t really complain when things get out of control because nobody is putting their foot down. Nobody is trying to insist on any form of moral order and things in the school will get more disrespectful, more chaotic, and more violent as long as that vacuum is created.
Julie Gunlock:
This is enormously helpful information. And actually it makes me remember that in my town of Alexandria, Virginia, a parent did exactly that. What I’m saying is he polled the community actually and he did a very simple poll and people could attack him for saying… Well, this wasn’t scientific, but boy, he put a lot of work into it. And he had this respect of the community. He was very calm, he was on a fact-finding mission, and it was undeniable. I mean, the results were pretty shocking. And I mean shocking because in my community, first of all, there’s a lot of people who don’t send their kids to the public schools. And I think he did a community-wide survey, but it was also the honesty of some of the answers. So it was very helpful for him to make a case. And as such, they brought SROs back.
They’re now going to do metal detectors in the schools. And let me tell you this, after COVID, when the kids went back to school, there was so much violence and gun confiscation. There was a deadly stabbing right outside of the school. I mean the brawls, the viral videos of brawls, I mean girls, and it wasn’t just boys, I mean it was girls too. And it was a real shock to the system. But again, a parent was the one who finally affected that change. So that is really good advice, Max. And I can’t thank you enough for coming on here. You have given some great advice, but also explained and in some ways, I don’t know if it’s reassuring, but reminded me that this was a problem way before COVID. I think it’s way too easy, and I think the teachers’ unions love it when we blame everything on COVID, because then they don’t have to think about restorative justice and some of these changes in discipline that created this permissive consequence free setting in the schools. So thank you so much, Max. I appreciate it.
Max Eden:
Thank you.
Julie Gunlock:
I loved that conversation with Max. He is so great. The Bespoke Parenting Podcast with Julie Gunlock is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. You can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help me out by hitting the subscribe button and please leave us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. It really does matter, and it helps my podcast if we can get those reviews. So thanks again for listening. Hang in there, parents, and go bespoke.
