The Education Wonks found a sad story about Los Angeles' Combat High School. A fight broke out at Locke High School in LA. As many as 600 students ended up fighting:
"A fight between rival groups of black and Latino students at Locke High School quickly escalated into a campus-wide melee Friday, with as many as 600 students brawling until police restored calm with billy clubs.
The troubled campus in South Los Angeles was locked down after the fight broke out at 12:55 p.m., as students returned from lunch to their fifth-period classes. Overwhelmed school officials called Los Angeles police for help, but students and faculty said it took about half an hour before dozens of officers, many in riot gear, restored order."
The article provides a lot of insight into why the fight broke out. The Education Wonks' closing observation was very telling:
"As one who has taught for many years in a California public school system, I continue be puzzled at how our school administrators continue tolerating this type of criminal behavior from certain students who view school as little more than a place to socialize and victimize those youngsters who do attend school in order to make something of themselves.
But until the parents of the good students unite and rise-up in defense of their kids, further incidents of this nature can and will continue to plague our public schools."
Until government schools find a way to protect students, I think parents with children in these kinds of schools have an obligation to homeschool, and send their children to private schools.
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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education
2 comments:
When I was getting my MS ed, one of my instructors was a science teacher at a local high school. The school had had a serious fire the year before that had made one whole wing pretty much unusable.
There was a lot of shifting required to accomodate students. Some were sent to other schools. They also went to a block schedule with a day that ended at 1pm and no lunch break, just longer passing periods between classes. One of the odd effects was that fights and incidents requiring discipline dropped by more than half, just about the same ratio as the drop in the number of times that the kids were in the hallways without a lot of adult supervision and a real direction.
When I read about schools with lots of fights, I'm always reminded of this.
Thanks. It makes some sense, the less time children are unsupervised, the less chance they'll do something stupid.
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