Teachers Unions and Houston Chronicle Should Blush Over the Violence at Madison High School
Kids in hallway fights are mimicking what they hear from adults
The Houston Chronicle’s coverage of the ongoing violence crisis at Madison High School is a disgrace. Along with the teachers’ unions, wittingly or not, the Chronicle is encouraging and enabling violence at the school.
Today the paper carries a story that seems to blame the school principal for getting himself jumped on and beaten in the head with fists by students. The headline is: “Video emerges of HISD's Madison High School principal involved in altercation with students,” over the by-line of Sam González Kelly.
Kelly tells us: “The grainy video shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, shows (Principal Edgar) Contreras holding one student in what appears to be a headlock, before another student jumps off a table on top of the principal, swinging their fists at his head and shoulders while other students crowd around.”
The video shows the principal involved in a wrestling match with one student when another student jumps off a table onto the principal and begins hitting the principal in the head with fists.
The issue raised in the newspaper story is whether the principal had a right to fight back: “HISD policy allows employees to ‘physically restrain’ a student if they believe it’s necessary to protect someone, including themselves, from physical injury, among other concerns.”
Oh, good.
Background: In an effort to stem violence at the school, the administration has swapped principals a couple of times already this year and recently imposed a cell phone ban at the school.
Administrators said they banned the phones because students were using phone videos to spark fights and vendettas. Under the policy, students are required to turn in their phones when they arrive in the morning and can reclaim them at the end of the day.
Unhappy about the ban, students have staged what the newspaper keeps calling “walk-outs.” And, OK, I guess they walked out. As a product of the walk-out sit-in generation myself, I always thought a little more organization and statement of purpose were required to turn merely walking out of a building into a walk-out, but let’s not quibble.
In terms of culture and context, I don’t think there’s a better window on the toughest issues faced by Houston’s reform superintendent, Mike Miles. The problem at Madison doesn’t seem to be so much effective teaching versus less effective teaching as it is teaching versus violent chaos.
One of the stunning results of the Miles reform regime when he was here in Dallas a decade ago was the overnight turn-around in discipline problems and behavior at the schools targeted for his intensive improvement program, called ACE Schools in Dallas. It was truly amazing.
When the kids became engaged, when they felt themselves accomplishing something, when they gained respect for themselves and for the school, the bad behavior seemed to evaporate. But somebody did have to get their attention first. It had to start somewhere, and it certainly didn’t start with a culture that tolerated violence in the schools, whether violence against students or against adults.
The Miles reform program in Houston includes multiple strategies designed to avoid wholesale expulsions from school, as in putting misbehaving kids into study halls with more studious students, all of which the Chronicle and the teachers unions have derided without suggesting any alternative.
Meanwhile the Houston media, led by the Chronicle, persistently present personnel changes – principals getting switched around – as evidence of chaos under the reform regime imposed on the district under the state takeover.
You want to know what chaos is? Chaos is a kid jumping off a table and smashing his fists into the principal’s head. And I can’t help seeing a direct connection between this violence and the relentless campaign of disparagement by the unions and the media.
The Chronicle has quoted kids justifying their behavior by saying the more rigorous classroom reforms are putting too much pressure on them – precisely the line they have seen over and over again on TV and are probably getting in the classroom from union activists.
It's only my own observation, my opinion, but I think it’s obvious. The adults in Houston who are campaigning against meaningful reform– in particular the unions, in general the media but in particular the Chronicle – are encouraging and enabling bad behavior like the violence at Madison.
An angry commenter (mad at me) on an earlier item of mine here in Substack said this: “Lots of these kids take public transportation and a phone is necessary… nor is it anyone’s business. And they should not have been physically searching children looking for phones that is disgusting.”
Nor is it anyone’s business?
I think that just about says it -- the perfect expression of the problem.
I'm glad to be a former teacher (retired two years ago). Teachers are supposed to do everything from teach (a minor part now) to psychiatrist to referee to continual meeting attender to administrative sycophant. My last few years were hellish at best, made worse by bad administration--especially the principal herself. I was blessed with many good years teaching journalism and advising nationally recognized publications--that part unappreciated by administration. I have many adult friends who were once my students. I don't know that there is AN answer to fixing education but I can tell you listening to teachers and acting on what they have learned is a huge part. My discovery is that as soon as a person leaves the ranks of teaching for administration, most memories of what goes on in the classroom disappears into the stratosphere. Sad.
Did anyone catch the irony? Video of the fight in the cafeteria was captured on a . . . cell phone.
To me, the obvious solution is to shut this high school down and bus the kids to better behaving schools. Once the cycle of violence is broken, they can reopen this high school in a year or so.
Also, it's pretty obvious that this isn't the first fight that the principal has been involved in over his lifetime.