Preventing violence in Chicago schools: A video update
Six weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled, Can anything be done about gang violence in Chicago? A friend just notified me of a recent story on Chicago Tonight that provides an update on Chicago’s plan to prevent at-risk students from getting caught up in acts of violence. It’s really well done and includes interviews with a CPS principal and CEO Ron Huberman. Click here to watch the 7-minute piece.
Also, in case anyone was wondering why there have not been many/any violent incidents involving CPS students lately… Something my colleagues and I picked up on right away as beginning teachers was how students talked about their time after school. One was either inside or outside–inside meaning in one’s apartment/house, and outside meaning walking or hanging around on the street, in the park, etc. Since we get cold, windy winters in Chicago, fewer people are outside walking around or hanging out from December-February. Thus, there are fewer interactions between people and fewer acts of violence committed than in the fall. Come March and April, though, we teachers were told to keep our eyes open for signs of trouble. After months of being inside, students would once again be spending more time outside and the potential for confrontations and violence would spike.
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A computer-based model should be developed for middle school students to help identify those who do not attend classes, don’t do well academically and who cause problems in school. This should be done earlier than in high school so that by the time many students attend high school they have a better chance of succeeding there and won’t be a statistic as a “shooter” or “being shot.”
True, we should be identifying “at-risk” students earlier in the educational pipeline. I’ll be writing about this in the next week or so. However, my perspective is that many attendance and behavior problems stem from academic problems; if a 12-year-old can’t read well and doesn’t understand what’s going on in class, of course she is going to act out! So by closely tracking academics and intervening early and often, we might be able to prevent many of the non-academic problems that occur later on.