Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

mlinhares

It has and parents are very much to blame for this.

anon291

My mom received threats of rape and assault and direct violence against her vehicle as a teacher in los Angeles public schools. Turned her from a bleeding heart liberal into a die hard conservative. Yes it's gone too far. And the administrations don't care. Addressing it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths

Molitor5901

I agree with the author, violence against educators has become normalized, but it's also been a fault on both sides. Both sides have lost respect for one another, and the reasons why depend a lot on politics and social issues. It almost mirrors the strife between citizens and cops: each side entrenching believing they "know what's best" and the other side be damned.

Steaglsz

Workplace violence in general is becoming normalized. I think of healthcare workers and fastfood employees as well as teachers with this trend The company/employer normalizes it and makes it the employees fault. Make some HR presentations on how to appropriately defend yourself and the next time you get attacked at work it's your fault. When in reality nobody should have to deal with physical/verbal/mental abuse at work

phishin

Through my observations this has been completely normalized and with terrible pay as a reward. The justification is that it’s the students’ home life causing it and the teachers are there to fill in as a stable adult. This is at a tipping point.

amanaplanacanal

I am many decades out of public schools, but I wonder, is this in specific school districts, or is it nationwide?

MadameMinty

Hard to call it a "society" then if it's just sticks and stones.

nekusar

> The American Psychological Association completed three National surveys in which the findings reveal high rates of verbal/threatening (e.g., verbal attacks, verbal threats, sexual harassment, intimidation, public humiliation, bullying) Cry me a river. Public schools pride themselves on furthering extreme authoritarianism, while being in a country that praises on being a constitutional democratic republic. And guess what, public schools share striking similarities to that other place where authoritarianism reigns supreme - prisons. And when you treat the inmates/students like that, with capricious rules, 0-tolerence (0-thought) policies, and more, the inmates absolutely respond back. And "verbal attacks", oh noes, whatsoever shall we do? They said a bad word! And regarding "public humiliation", I remember quite a few middle and high school teachers who used public humiliation TOWARDS students as a way to shame them. Even remember a health class where the asshole teacher would put down each test and loudly say the grade and some snide remark. I also remember teachers *thieving* from students random "distracting objects". Of course, those class/school rules are just arbitrary principal bullshit. And somehow absolves thievery. Now, the whole physical violence and threats of physical violence, that's a whole different problem. But again, that's' caused in part by the prison-nature of current schools. Honestly, im surprised there isnt more violence towards teachers.

UrineSqueegee

gentle parenting strikes again

fHr

Imagine parents still parenting we wouldn't be in this shity situation. Most of you have kids as a lifestyle accesoire and externalize way to much of their upbringing and raising.

7sigma

I remember James Talarico talking about how a very aggressive student completely transformed from an angry kid into a thriving one once he had the therapy and support. Of course republicans cut the funding and the therapy ended and he was eventually expelled. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x2PsFWrwCDI I know its a single data point, but I think those situations would happen a lot less if students had access to the right support.

johnobrien1010

This article so very poorly written, to the point that I wonder whether this is real or just AI generated. One whole sentence in the 2nd paragraph is repeated nearly verbatim in the 3rd. In addition, I can't find the author elsewhere online. There is an Elizabeth Martin who comes up as a writer, but she is a script-writer. I am not sure that this is a real story. Is anyone else skeptical about the validity of this article?

ryanmcbride

Yes and nothing will be done with it because intentional or not, teachers being treated like shit from both ends furthers the goal of the people in charge, which is to dismantle the public school system completely, let rich kids go to private schools, and pipe poor kids straight into the serf class.

armchairhacker

My understanding is that it’s normalized by administrators, and the public doesn’t think much about it. Another issue is that some schools have heavy police presence and prison-like rules. I think a solution to both is to expel students who, for example, assault other students or teachers. Other commenters are blaming parents, and sure we should incentivize and facilitate better parenting, but in the short term what is more successful at reducing violence is expelling violent students.

Ambolia

That the whole article can be seen as a masterpiece of talking around the obvious while avoiding stepping on the mine. Obvious rules cannot be applied systematically because certain government metrics would look bad. Goodhart's law, any explicit metric will be immediately optimized. And this is people optimizing metrics as best as they can in play. I'll leave the obvious as an exercise for the reader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

wxw

> My experience made something painfully clear: violence against educators has become so normalized that society now treats it as an expected part of teaching. I don’t think this is normalized at all. Something about the ad-riddled website and way this is written makes me wonder if this is even a real article.

ValueTheory

"The parents of the student who assaulted me sued the district, claiming it had failed to prevent the incident. Suddenly, I found myself on phone calls with administrators and attorneys questioning whether I had done enough to stop the assault." This is the root of the problem. Of course, civil lawsuits are important to correct actual wrongs, but school districts seem to be so cowardly in the face of bad lawsuits that they are willing to throw teachers under the bus to avoid them.

cyanydeez

Violence against poor people has been normalized, and teachers tend to get paid just above welfare levels, so. You know, ==your budgets are your values==

puskavi

Who does this? Oh, right..

bluedino

I thought this would be focused on the parents coming in to assault the teachers.