Preparing to Wield the Rod

Reagan clashes with schools over the issue of discipline

Before Francis Nakano became principal of Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles in 1982, the school was a combat zone. Teachers walked in fear of assault, gangs roamed the litter-strewn hallways, students were arrested for drug dealing, and vandals had just burned the administration building to the ground. The tough new principal changed all that. He painted the school, put in an alarm system, provided enough lunch benches for students to eat sitting down and bought some trash cans. He made each teacher responsible for the behavior of 120 students, and gang leaders were bluntly told who was boss. Result: student suspensions are down by 80%, vandalism has dropped, and teachers want to work at Jefferson.

That story is not an unusual one. Many schools across the nation have learned to deal effectively with the breakdown in discipline that caused chaos in the nation's classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Scott Thomson, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, discipline problems are "nowhere near as bad as they were five years ago — there has been an important swing in student and parent attitudes."

The Reagan Administration disagrees. It apparently prefers to see schools as centers of mayhem and gangsterism, the way they have been depicted on film in The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and in a more recent movie called Class of!984. On Jan. 7 the President told a national radio audience that "we can't get learning back into our schools until we get the crime and violence out." He is expected to return to the subject when he gives his State of the Union message next week Meanwhile, the Administration has released a report, "Disorder in our Public Schools," designed to prove that students are still at war with their teachers. One solution: more power to school administrators. To that end, the Justice Department says it is prepared to side with school authorities in discipline cases.

The reaction of U.S. educators to this flurry of concern has been largely one of dismay. They accuse the Administration of overstating the problem. "The President is painting schools with a broad stroke, conjuring up what they were ten years ago," says Mary Futrell, president of the 1.7 million-member National Education Association. "The schools are no longer drug dens and battlegrounds."

Educators dispute the Education Department's use of statistics. Each month, the "Disorder" report contended, 282,000 students are physically attacked on school premises, 1,000 teachers are assaulted seriously enough to require medical attention, and 125,000 teachers are threatened with bodily harm. But the figures are out of date, gathered by the National Institute of Education between 1975 and 1977. Indeed, in an N.E.A. survey of its members last year, only 45% of the teachers questioned thought that discipline was a major problem, against 74% in a 1979 survey.