That schools can be places of violence was never a foreign concept to me.

When I was in 7th grade, I would sit in fear as my science teacher would flirt with (or more accurately I eventually learned: verbally harass) the young girl sitting across from me. Sometime later that year, friends shared how he threw a desk across the room out of frustration. He was never fired. Years later when I had moved out of Jersey City already, I visited some friends who told me they’d seen him in a police officer uniform around the city. 

This is just one story. 

It'd be convenient to tell you that was the moment I decided to be an educator. But the truth is purpose and drive are never that simple. The facts of our lives usually remain constant in our memories, but the stories we construct, the meaning we give them and the order in which we tell them constantly shifts. 

It’s been over a decade since I was that confused and scared teenager. I teach AP Psychology this year. One of our first lessons is correlation doesn’t mean causation, that two things happening at the same time doesn’t mean they are linked. I can’t assume, nor prove, there’s a relationship between a predatory, violent teacher becoming a cop later on. I can just tell you that my first response when I heard that was, “That makes sense.” 

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Every public school in NYC has police officers. There’s a long history of how the NYPD and NYC schools established a relationship, dating back to the 1930s. 

In the 1990s, NYC Police commissioner William Braxton and mayor Rudy Giuliani popularized a 1982 article on the “broken windows theory.” The idea was that even the smallest, visible signs of disorder, such as public drinking or jaywalking, encourage more serious crime. The solution was that police targeting minor crimes will create an atmosphere of “law and order” that will prevent the more serious crimes. 

Crime did drop in NYC, but it also dropped in almost every city in the United States, whether or not they adopted the broken windows policies. 

Broken windows and crime was a correlation that was observed. Causation still has not been proved. Almost 40 years later, as New York City’s mayor Eric Adams returns to a focus on small crimes such as fare evasion, evidence of broken windows theory remains elusive. Yet the idea still lives vividly in policy and the imagination.

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“Miss you didn’t know what this school name stands for? It’s “Kids In Prison Program.”

The first time a student said that to me in my present school, I admit I struggled to fully understand why they felt that way. At that point, lived experiences aside, I had done the readings on the school to prison pipeline: students that experience exclusionary discipline (such as suspensions that isolate them from peers and learning environments) are more likely to fall back a grade level, drop out, and be incarcerated later on in life. 

But I had also only recently finished a year in a different school where this pipeline was more transparent. I remember that year, one of the eighth graders I worked with had restrained himself from punching an administrator but instead punched and shattered the glass window of a door. He was crying while he waited in the main office to have cops pick him up and bring him to the juvenile detention center. I in turn went to the school bathroom, the one with no windows, where it was luck of the draw if there was both toilet paper and soap available, sat down and cried. 

To contrast, in my new school, the windows were big, the bathrooms, halls, classrooms all meticulously cleaned and stocked. The clocks and water fountains all worked. The school ran its own food program, where the public school funding for lunch was used to order fresh food that was cooked in house everyday by the kitchen staff. There were no metal detectors. Prison? Here? 

Despite growing up in the height of stop and frisk, the experiences I had in my own schooling, and all of the statistical and theoretical knowledge I had… I also got distracted by the windows.

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The Northeastern researchers that couldn't find any connection between disorder and crime rates found a different correlation. People that live in neighborhoods with more disorder such as abandoned buildings or graffiti tend to have higher rates of mental health problems. 

Late this year in AP Psychology, I taught my students about Martin Sieglman’s dogs. Two groups of dogs were given electric shocks. One group of dogs were able to press a level that stopped the random shocks they were given. The other group was shocked randomly, but when they pressed the lever nothing happened, the shocks continued. Later when the dogs were given the opportunity to escape, only the dogs in the first group tried to escape. The second group of dogs didn’t try anymore. They just accepted the shocks and stayed there. Siegelman called this “learned helplessness.”

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“Miss, I don’t know why they talk to me like that. It makes me feel like I'm in prison.” 

“Man, all you teachers are like this. I don’t trust a single one of you.”

“I want to feel free in this building but you keep telling me to sit down, where to sit down, and what to wear and when to eat.” 

Over the past five years, I’ve heard different variations of this from students. Every time this happens with a student I have a relationship with, either I’ve taught or teach them, or they’re a kid that has wandered into my classroom enough times to know me, I ask questions. Eventually, they tell me how a teacher in the past told them they wouldn’t amount to anything, how they’ve failed over and over and they feel invisible to their teachers, that they need some space and time because they have a lot going on but everyone is always on them about things that don’t matter like dress code and seating charts. 

There are countless occurrences of physical violence from teachers, like my experience in 7th grade, and cops in schools. These are the tip of the iceberg and they dominate the national conversations around conversation. Beneath this, and beneath the broken windows theory is a much deeper story of the emotional needs of young people and the way our schools are structured. And that is going to take a lot of patience and attention to uncover.