PREVENTING VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS A Challenge to American Democracy PREVENTING VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS A Challenge to American Democracy Joan N.Burstyn, Syracuse University Geoff Bender, Syracuse University Ronnie Casella, Central Connecticut State University Howard W.Gordon, State University of New York at Oswego Domingo P.Guerra, Syracuse University Kristen V.Luschen, Hampshire College Rebecca Stevens, University of South Carolina Spartanburg Kimberly M.Williams, State University of New York at Cortland LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Copyright © 2001 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, micro-form, retrieval system, or any other means without the prior written consent of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, NJ 07430 Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preventing violence in schools: a challenge to American democracy/Joan N.Burstyn… [et al.] p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-3733-7 (cloth.: alk. paper)—0-8058-3734-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. School violence—United States—Prevention. I. Burstyn, Joan N. LB3013.3.P757 2000 371.7’82’0973—dc21 00–062252 ISBN 1-4106-0020-3 Master e-book ISBN Contents Preface viii Acknowledgments xii 1 Violence and Its Prevention: A Challenge for Schools Joan N.Burstyn 1 Part One: The Social Context of Violence in Schools 2 What Is Violent About “School Violence”? The Nature of Violence in a City High School Ronnie Casella 15 3 The Importance of Ethnography in Understanding Violence in Schools Kimberly M.Williams 43 4 Resisting Dominance? The Study of a Marginalized Masculinity and Its Construction Within High School Walls Geoff Bender 57 v vi CONTENTS 5 Someone Is Screaming Short story by Howard W.Gordon Followed by Joan N.Burstyn’s account of an interview with the author 73 6 “Frontin’ It”: Schooling, Violence, and Relationships in the ’Hood Kimberly M.Williams 89 7 Interrupting “Good” Girlness: Sexuality, Education, and the Prevention of Violence Against Women Kristen V.Luschen 101 Part Two: Appraising Strategies to Counter School Violence 8 Involving the Whole School in Violence Prevention Joan N.Burstyn Rebecca Stevens 127 9 The Cultural Foundations of Peer Mediation: Beyond a Behaviorist Model of Urban School Conflict Ronnie Casella 147 10 Peer Mediation: An Examination of a School District’s Training Program for Educators Rebecca Stevens 167 11 What Derails Peer Mediation? Kimberly M.Williams 183 12 Reaching Troubled Teens Through a Literacy Tutoring Project Domingo P.Guerra Joan N.Burstyn 193 CONTENTS vii 13 The Challenge for Schools: To Prevent Violence While Nurturing Democracy Joan N.Burstyn 207 Authors 217 Author Index 219 Subject Index 223 Preface Gun violence among adults has long been endemic in the United States. In the 1990s, however, when highly publicized incidents of gun violence took place not only among adults, but among children in schools; in middle class suburbs and rural areas as well as in financially-strapped cities; and among children of the White majority as well as among minority populations, the public became outraged. The authors of this book believe that the outrage about violence in schools was long overdue. The use of guns, while the most lethal, is still the least likely form of violence in schools, but violence through bullying, extortion, name calling, sexual harassment, and suicide are prevalent nationally. We have written this book to explain the cultural and psychological underpinnings of violence among youth; to assess the effect of programs already adopted by schools; and to galvanize professional educators and the public to act on their outrage by adopting a whole-school approach to preventing violence, an approach that will involve communities as well as schools in addressing the problem. Young people of school age belong to a network of systems—family, community, and school. Each of these has its sub-systems. The community, for instance, includes federal, state, and local legislatures and executives, religious organizations, social service and law enforcement agencies, private corporations, and the media. Responsibility for the violence among young people today does not lie with any one system; all are complicit in it. Change in one system cannot end violence. While this book tackles the school as a location for change, families and communities must, also, change for violence to end. ix x PREFACE How did we come to write this book? My own interest in violence prevention and conflict resolution has been long standing. In the 1990s, I and Neil Katz, of the Program for the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts in the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, arranged day-long conferences for teachers and administrators in central New York on conflict resolution in schools. A grant from Syracuse university enabled me to design (with help from Rebecca Stevens) two courses for educators entitled: Infusing conflict resolution into the K-12 curriculum, and A whole school approach to conflict resolution. Teachers, counselors, and administrators who took those courses, and students who occasionally visited class to talk about their lives, increased our knowledge of the problems, as together we struggled to find ways to address them. Through Syracuse University, I, Rebecca Stevens, and others gave workshops for teachers and administrators in central New York on ways to prevent violence in schools. Whether from rural, suburban, or city school districts, educators declared that violence, in one form or another, posed a threat to their schools. The chapter in this book on ways to implement a whole school approach to preventing violence, grows out of these years of work with schools. Several authors—myself (as principal investigator), Ronnie Casella, Domingo Guerra, Rebecca Stevens, and Kim Williams—have worked on the Syracuse University Violence Prevention Project, funded since 1997 by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, as part of the Hamilton Fish National Institute on School and Community Violence. In its first year, the SUVP project examined efforts to prevent violence in one city school district, completed an assessment of the needs for a future intervention, and piloted a small-scale intervention. Several chapters in this book—by Ronnie Casella, Domingo Guerra, Rebecca Stevens, and Kim Williams and myself—draw upon that first year’s work, as well as work conducted subsequently by the project. Ronnie Casella has been influenced by his subsequent work on violence prevention in Connecticut in schools and a prison, and Kim Williams by hers assessing the effectiveness of programs to prevent violence in rural and suburban school districts in central New York. We are grateful for the opportunity the Federal funding has provided to engage in this research, and to present it at national meetings, such as the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association. There, and in discussions with teachers, university faculty, and students, we came to understand that the literature lacked discussion that combined both the socio- economic and cultural dilemmas that lead to violence in our schools, and the effects of interventions already adopted. My two chapters, which begin and end the book, focus on the social, cultural, and emotional contexts of violence in schools. To help readers understand those contexts more clearly, other authors examine how boys and girls are socialized to deal with violence. Howard W.Gordon and Geoff Bender discuss African PREFACE xi American and White boys respectively. Kristen Luschen writes about the socialization of girls. While most chapters are based on ethnographic research, where the voices of students, as well as teachers and administrators, are highlighted, Gordon’s chapter breaks the mold with a piece of fiction: a short story about a fight, followed by an interview between Gordon and me about his intentions in writing the story and his views on the pressures faced today by African American males as they grow up. As well as thanking the U.S. Department of Justice for funding the research reported in several chapters, we wish to thank the educators and school students who agreed to be interviewed, sharing with us so freely their hopes and frustrations. We thank also the colleagues and students at our various universities who have critiqued chapters for us and helped us to sharpen our arguments. We have been energized by our research to redouble our efforts to counter violence in schools. We hope this book will encourage readers to redouble their efforts as well. —Joan N.Burstyn Acknowledgments All the authors of this book would like to thank the administrators, students, support staff, and teachers who so generously shared their opinions and beliefs. We want, also, to thank our colleagues at the various universities where we teach for their support and insights. Thanks are also due to the Syracuse University Violence Prevention Project (SUVPP), funded by the Hamilton Fish National Institute on School and Community Violence through a contract with the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.1 SUVPP supported Joan Burstyn, Ronnie Casella, Domingo Guerra, Rebecca Stevens, and Kimberly Williams to conduct research in the schools of Northeast City. Chapters 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12 draw, primarily or entirely, on data collected during the first year of the project, 1997– 1998. The group worked as a team during that year, so that each owes much to the discussions held at that time. Joan Burstyn, as Director (1997–1998) and Principal Investigator (1998 on) of SUVPP, and Kimberly Williams, as Assistant Director (1997–1998) and Director (1998–1999) of SUVPP, benefited especially from discussions with colleagues at the other six institutions forming the Hamilton Fish National Institute.