The Attacks South Philadelphia High School: A Plea for School and Social Reform

I am currently a teacher's aide at South Philadelphia High. This school has made national news over the past couple of months due to a racially motivated attack on Asian students. The context of the attacks was a series of 'jumpings' that went back and forth between Asian and African American students. The attacks that occurred on November 3rd were indiscriminate attacks against the minority Asian population of the school. A number of students were hospitalized and the Asian students refused to come to school for a week, as they demanded more security. This incident has inspired me to assess what type of intervention is necessary at the school and the underlying factors to the attacks. 

In order to understand the impulse toward violence one must first look at the context. All of the decent schools in the city require applying. The students that don't get in to these schools are lumped together in their local district schools, such as South Philly High. This concentrates all of the underperforming students. Such a pool of students also concentrates all of the most problematic families, such as those with an imprisoned parent, or a drug addict parent. At the very least you can expect the parents to be severely overworked, undereducated, and under-compensated.

While I do not want to demonize the "culture of poverty" of which students of SPHS come, it is also undeniable that such a culture is prone to have high levels of problems, such as drugs, a lack of parent guidance, emotional and economic support. This puts a severe emotional toll on the students of such households.

Given that so many of the students are accustomed to these problems, they are also apt to re-enact these problems and the negative feedback surrounding them within every authority figure. This is the backdrop of SPHS. It feels like a prison, through which disruptive students are pushed through, as if on a conveyer belt, and on which about 40% are discarded. Such a concentrated pool of under-performing students, who bring with them the baggage of coming from an economically stressed household, demands greater resources; The school is in desperate need of more counseling services and highly skilled teachers that are able to implement lessons in such a difficult environment.

The problem with this student demographic is not that they are somehow diseased with laziness and coddled with welfare, such that they never learn to pull themselves up from their bootstraps. Rather, the problem is such that schools cannot be reformed simply through a revision of procedures and curriculum; School reform must be accompanied by socio-economic reform. Discrimination and violence will not dissappear once such broad scale reform takes place, but the conditions breed violence and racism among inner city youth would certainly be assuaged. 

We do not live in a just society where everyone has an equal opportunity. Those who are born into wealth find it extremely easy to perpetuate their wealth with investments and a top rate education. Conversely, those born into poverty find it far too easy to fall into a lifestyle of long working hours, little pay, poor budgeting, and debt slavery.

Only when education reform is coupled with socio-economic reform will it actually achieve genuine results. The learning gap can only be closed with such a broad scale intervention. In the mean time the following are needed:

-A massive influx of counseling services is needed. The process of referring students to these services needs to be made easier. 

-Teachers need to receive more supervision, such as through inter departmental reviews, to promote a positive learning environment.

-More tax money for education is needed, but at the same time education professions need to be more competitive. There are far too many unproductive administrators. Higher quality teachers and administrators are not only better performing, but more productive. The hiring process for teachers should be more based on one's intelligence, writing, and interview than simply on experience and being certified.