Preparing to Wield the Rod

By Ellie McGrath

Reagan clashes with schools over the issue of discipline

Before Francis Nakano became principal of Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles in 1982, the school was a combat zone. Teachers walked in fear of assault, gangs roamed the litter-strewn hallways, students were arrested for drug dealing, and vandals had just burned the administration building to the ground. The tough new principal changed all that. He painted the school, put in an alarm system, provided enough lunch benches for students to eat sitting down and bought some trash cans. He made each teacher responsible for the behavior of 120 students, and gang leaders were bluntly told who was boss. Result: student suspensions are down by 80%, vandalism has dropped, and teachers want to work at Jefferson.

That story is not an unusual one. Many schools across the nation have learned to deal effectively with the breakdown in discipline that caused chaos in the nation's classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Scott Thomson, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, discipline problems are "nowhere near as bad as they were five years ago -- there has been an important swing in student and parent attitudes."

The Reagan Administration disagrees. It apparently prefers to see schools as centers of mayhem and gangsterism, the way they have been depicted on film in The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and in a more recent movie called Class of!984. On Jan. 7 the President told a national radio audience that "we can't get learning back into our schools until we get the crime and violence out." He is expected to return to the subject when he gives his State of the Union message next week Meanwhile, the Administration has released a report, "Disorder in our Public Schools," designed to prove that students are still at war with their teachers. One solution: more power to school administrators. To that end, the Justice Department says it is prepared to side with school authorities in discipline cases.

The reaction of U.S. educators to this flurry of concern has been largely one of dismay. They accuse the Administration of overstating the problem. "The President is painting schools with a broad stroke, conjuring up what they were ten years ago," says Mary Futrell, president of the 1.7 million-member National Education Association. "The schools are no longer drug dens and battlegrounds."

Educators dispute the Education Department's use of statistics. Each month, the "Disorder" report contended, 282,000 students are physically attacked on school premises, 1,000 teachers are assaulted seriously enough to require medical attention, and 125,000 teachers are threatened with bodily harm. But the figures are out of date, gathered by the National Institute of Education between 1975 and 1977. Indeed, in an N.E.A. survey of its members last year, only 45% of the teachers questioned thought that discipline was a major problem, against 74% in a 1979 survey.

Reports from major school districts show that such basic steps as assessing stiffer penalties for students caught with weapons, setting tough codes of behavior and working to improve community relations have made discipline less of a problem. Says Massachusetts Commissioner of Education John Lawson: "The protest period of the '70s permitted students to drop discipline standards collectively, but that trend started to reverse three years ago." In Boston, physical assaults on school employees have dropped by 70% in the past 2 1/2 years; robberies declined from 331 in the 1981-82 school year to 120 last year. In Jacksonville, drug violations dipped from 503 to 254 between 1979 and 1983, possession of firearms from eleven to two, and physical assaults against school employees from 50 to 19. Assaults in Atlanta schools decreased from 111 to 75 between 1977 and 1982.

In his radio talk, the President characterized many schools as "filled with rude, unruly behavior and even violence." But the Government report insisted that measures to tighten discipline "do not require massive spending, only motivation and leadership." School supervisors answer that money is essential for developing programs to give students extra help. California, for example, runs 439 schools, at an annual cost of about $200 million, at which troubled youngsters are given counseling and special attention.

Nor does the nation appear to lack leadership in its schools. When Jerome Winegar took over South Boston High School in 1976, 90 armed troopers were necessary to oversee a court-ordered busing program. Winegar began a program that isolated disruptive students in special classes instead of sending them home. Students in the special classes dropped to fewer than 100 last year from 1,660 in 1976.

At Jacksonville's Ribault Senior High, Principal Walter Harris recalls that in the early '70s "any day you didn't have a racial riot was a success." Harris gained control of the school by closing the campus to outsiders and instituting a dress code for both students and teachers. Most important, he raised the school's academic standards. Says Harris: "Once students found they could improve academically, they improved their self-concept and discipline."

To many educators, the most unsettling aspect of the Reagan discipline message is that it does not address the need to keep students in school. Although expulsion is sometimes necessary, educators believe that most students can be reached. In 1979 at Samuel Gompers Vocational-Technical High School in the South Bronx, only 60% of the students regularly showed up for school, and teachers were afraid to stay after the last bell. A new principal, Victor Herbert, began fighting back with graffiti-free hallways, a more stimulating curriculum and special events. Last year at Gompers (enrollment: 1,500), attendance was up to 80%. Says Herbert:

"Reagan's message is that more can be done with less. I don't believe that. We're at a very critical time when many young people are going to be lost. Unless we reach out to these young people, there is nothing after Gompers. There is nothing but the street."

--ByEllieMcGrath. Reported by Patricia Delaney/Washington and Meg Grant/Los Angeles

With reporting by Patricia Delaney/Washington, Meg Grant/Los Angeles