Tough Schools Can Help Tough Kids

Al Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers, has a winning idea. He wants to revive public schools by disciplining punks and demanding that kids actually learn before they move from grade to grade.

He offered this radical proposal to a fete attended by educrats, unionists and business honchos. “We’re appealing to the silent majority of parents who say that first and foremost they want safe and orderly classrooms and high academic standards,” he declared.

But rather than reaping deserved applause, Shanker got thumped. The press virtually ignored the event, and the Civil Rights Establishment tried to smother the idea before it could reach maturity.

The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, told reporters that he feared the program would hurt minority students, who are suspended from school far out of proportion to their membership in the overall population. Lowery hinted that the discipline numbers could betoken discrimination. He said he supported Shanker, but added, “I would urge that we make clear that we’re talking about equity.”

Perhaps Lowery should spend a little time in a classroom. The “equity” problem is not that too many kids get punished, but that too few receive the education they deserve.

Let me speak from experience. I come from a family of teachers. My dad taught for decades in public schools, and my maternal grandmother did the same for decades before. I even spent a little time in front of classes, as a substitute teacher in a high school in Cincinnati. One episode of my short tenure illustrates the flaw in Lowery’s logic.

I was teaching a driver’s education class - perhaps the worst torture anybody could foist on a substitute - when I noticed a young man in the front of the room taking something out of his army jacket.

“Tony,” I asked him, “what do you have there?”

“Nothing,” he replied, grinning. First came a black metal tube, which he smacked on his desk. Then a piece of plastic. Then a cylinder. He reached back into his pocket and pulled out an assortment of springs, screws and rods.

As he removed the hardware, I kept thinking: “No, it couldn’t be. Surely it isn’t.” But as I watched, the smiling kid began to assemble a revolver.

“Tony, put it away.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Put it away.”

“What are you worried about, man?” he chuckled. “It’s not loaded.”

The drama didn’t last for long. My dad, who was working in an office next door, hailed a school cop, who disarmed the scholar. And then the class returned to the mundane business of distinguishing yield signs from stop signs.

Tony stayed, and over the course of the next few weeks, I figured out what should have been obvious early on. He was a bright kid: He tossed off one-liners as the class slogged through traffic-law manuals. He picked up stuff more quickly than his colleagues and retained it longer. He learned how to ask probing questions of me - and then kid me later with personal barbs.

But he also was bored completely out of his mind. Hence, the gun stunt - and the broad grins, as if to say: “Look, teacher, this is a joke. If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t have brought it unassembled.”

Tony was the kind of student that young teachers dream about. He had enormous potential.

But he also needed a kick. He needed a teacher to say: “Look, you have brains. Use them.”

Instead, pedagogues - overburdened by paperwork and extracurricular duties - did the easy thing. They put up with his high jinks for nine months, then passed him on to the next batch of instructors.

Several years later, I asked my dad about Tony. “He’s dead. He got shot a while back. Drugs, I think.”

In retrospect, the young man needed the two things that Al Shanker stressed - discipline and a challenge. He got neither, in part because teachers these days aren’t allowed to punish miscreants or hand out bad grades.

Civil-rights leaders don’t do anybody any favors when they insinuate that poor youngsters - especially blacks and Hispanics - are too fragile or dumb to survive tough schools. Someone needs to revive the old Jesse Jackson line: “I am somebody.” For the sad truth is that some kids, like Tony, won’t survive without the help of tough schools.

MEMO: Tony Snow is a columnist for The Detroit News.