Linda Darling Hammond writes that arming teachers and expelling students will not make schools safer. It might make them dangerous.
“In response to the rash of school shootings in the United States, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is now considering allowing states to use federal funds to put guns in schools, training and arming marshals and teachers.
“The Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants (under Title IV of the Every Student Succeeds Act) are intended to expand and improve student learning, not to buy guns. They are used by school districts for implementing school-based social, emotional, and mental health services and support as well as dropout prevention programs. They are used to help ensure that students from low-income families have access to technology as well as to advanced coursework, and college and career counseling. In short, these funds are intended to help to create schools where all students are seen, supported, and valued.
“Siphoning off those funds to put guns in schools won’t make students safer and it won’t improve academic achievement. In fact, in school shooting incidents, 95 percent of attackers were current students at the school and of those, 71 percent said that they felt persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked, or injured by others prior to taking action. By contrast, in schools that focus on social-emotional learning and offer mental health supports, evidence shows that students feel and are safer, interpersonal relationships are stronger, bullying and fighting are reduced, and achievement and graduation rates are higher. Where students are supported and taught to be caring and responsible, these students can be helped, protected, and redirected to productive futures.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teachers need resources, decent pay and respect for the work they do. They do not need guns. The authoritarian DeVos with her reptilian brain believes teachers need guns that will ultimately put more young people at risk. Darling-Hammond states what schools need according to research, to “strengthen students’ social-emotional skills, mental health supports, and sense of safety and belonging. If we genuinely want to ensure safer schools.” In other words we need to invest in our young people to make them feel less alienated and provide them with supports to address social emotional issues. We need a total reversal of our current policy of disinvestment.
Instead of pushing for smaller class sizes, more wrap around services such as counselors, psychologists, social workers and health services, DeVos and too many others are advocating for guns in schools. It’s nuts. The US, the only wealthy industrialized democratic country without universal healthcare and affordable drugs. Instead, we are marching in the opposite direction and dismantling the public programs that we do have. When does this country come to its senses?
We can’t shoot our way out of poverty! Is this the DeVos “big idea/” We can control the “rabble” with them which is probably part of DeVos’ out of touch thinking.
This is the crux of much DeVos-type “reforming” — there truly is a rabble and it must be “controlled.”
As Warren Zevon fanously said
Send lawyers, guns and money
Deform has hit the school
Famously too
Although, given the original lyrics, fanously actually works quite well.
Schools in the United States are Rube Goldberg machines. They run at a frenetic pace, on very tight schedules, and there are continual distractions. Only someone who has spent almost no recent time in schools, someone with a severe cognitive deficit, or someone who suffers from both of these would think that dropping guns into the mix would be a good idea. Hardly a day goes by without a significant incident involving inattention. A teacher leaves her purse or cell phone in the cafeteria. Another leaves an answer key for the mid-term exam on her desk while checking out the noise in the hallway, and it disappears. And kids get into everything. The money from the bake sale vanishes from an administrator’s office while she’s dealing with the graffiti in the boys’ bathroom. Snacks disappear from a teacher’s “locked” desk.
Arm teachers, and students will die as a result. This has to be the stupidest idea in education since the Common Core.
Excellent, Bob, and thanks. I greatly appreciate your orientation–unlike the Secretary’s–orientation to the silly formality of reality.
What Cluless Brainpan Empty Betsy wants to do with firearms for public schools is a wake-up call and a dire warning. She represents the real Deep State that wants to turn the United States into every person for yourself lawless state where only the strong and powerful can afford armed security and the rest of us are heavily armed and distrustful of everyone except our local tribe, close friends and family members we trust.
The world she, her allies in ALEC, Trump, her mercenary brother Eric Prince, with his for-profit, private army, and their paid for slaves and minions want to build can be seen in films like “Mad Max” and the “Hunger Games”.
And Donald Trump wants to play the same role of President Coriolanus Snow from the “Hunger Games”.
There are not many things about education that I agree with the left about. But I think that passing our Glocks to school teachers, is the looniest idea since looney tunes.
There are many other cost-effective and common sense things that can be done to make schools safer, besides this insane idea.
Schools will never be safe, only safer.
Charles, I am asking you this question sincerely (and I know I have been insincere, even snarky, in our exchanges in the past, for which I apologize): who would you say constitutes “the left” of which you speak?
There is no real answer. I am not trying to be evasive. The modern-day “left” is constituted of people who hold the liberal/progressive views, that are traditionally classified “left”. Best answer I can give you.
Ok, Charles, and thank you. I just wondered if there was a representative figure of the left. Personally, I don’t identify as a leftist, but in our current political environment, or along our current political spectrum, I suddenly find myself classified as a leftist. That said, would you call Charles Schumer a leftist? Bernie Sanders? In any case, thanks again for your response.
see
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2018/08/28/explaining-the-left-part-iii-leftism-as-secular-religion-n2513574
Thanks Charles. Before I decided to move to New York and become a public school teacher, I was a doctoral candidate in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin, with a concentration in the History of Ideas, particularly the intellectual history of late-Imperial Period Russia. So I am familiar with the idea that Marxism is basically a secular religion; I more or less subscribe to the thesis, with minor qualms. in any case, Marx’s vision of a future workers’ paradise is certainly millenarian in nature, and the idea that he was a secular cleric is mostly a commonplace now. I am also familiar with Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a book which has provided guidance and succor for me on occasions of existential malaise.
What I wonder about, and this is the purpose of my question, is this: who is a leftist and what makes them that way? Is it concern for the disenfranchised and marginalized that makes a leftist? The idea that when a country provides it citizens with opportunities to become wealthy, it has a right to ask them to pay taxes to support the infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc) that helped them to earn their riches that makes a leftist? When a person prefers diplomacy to armed conflict, do they become a leftist? Is a person who opposes ethnic and religious discrimination a leftist?
Also, I am interested in the social composition of “the left.” Who is the left? I repeat myself, but is it Charles Schumer? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? When Warren Buffet says that the wealthiest Americans should pay more taxes, and that wealth inequality in a country like ours is politically dangerous, does he somehow become a leftist?
I ask mainly because I’m not sure how much terms like “left” and “right” mean anymore. For example, on many issues in our public discourse, I am probably more “conservative” than Donald Trump, who I see as a “radical” who wants to destroy things that have served this company well.
And, frankly, when I see a low-watt bulb like Donald Trump Jr. talking about “the left” on Fox News, I don’t think he has the faintest idea of what he’s talking about.
Anyway, thanks for responding.
That someone needs to say this to a United States Secretary of Education says volumes about how idiotic our public discourse has become.
On that note, I think I’ll go watch “Idiocracy” for the umpteenth time. Not to many films switch genres, but this one has gone from a comedy to a documentary.