A New York high school does absolutely nothing about a violent student brandishing guns.
In an email to Principal Paul Wilbur, Forest Hills teacher Adam Bergstein described [Moshe] Khaimov as “a clear and present danger” who has struck and threatened students and staff, and brought other weapons to school.
Bergstein faulted the city Department of Education for a system of lax discipline.
“Schools are in a constant state of danger because the DOE refuses to hold students accountable for their behavior until it’s sometimes too late,” Bergstein told The Post.
“They rely on restorative justice circles instead of punishing a child when they are dangerous and clearly pose a risk to everyone in a school.”
Only when students made a fuss did administrators rouse themselves a little from their stupor.
January 19th, 2025 at 4:27AM
As long as k-12 state and Federal funding is tied to the number of asses in seats, no long term changes will occur. Having been a HS teacher, it became quickly apparent that quite a number of students had no place in a formal school setting.
But, i also had more disruption when class size increased. Maybe it was an attempt to gain attention, or a lack of adequate time with a teacher, but acting out became far more evident when my class size was at 20 or more.
I also worked with NAACP’s after school tutoring programs, and those student encounters were a joy. I worked with groups of no more than 4-5 individuals, many of whom had been behavioral problems. But, when the student and teacher had adequate time to assess what the kids were lacking, we could help them advance. Quite often, it was a literacy issue. Some couldn’t read near their grade level, which created a great deal of anxiety. When those students finally had an adult that gave a damn, and helped them understand the written word, it made a remarkable improvement..,
January 19th, 2025 at 6:28AM
As always, charlie, a really helpful comment from the inside of the problem. Your description of your work with small groups is heartening.
I get the cynical asses in seats thing, but it still amazes me that, even with this motivation, schools like this one keep manifestly nutty aggressive armed people in class. It’s criminal negligence, really. And if the complaining teacher is right about restorative justice circles, it takes things to a much more cynical level.
Background for all of this: Abigail Zwerner.
January 19th, 2025 at 11:13AM
UD, thank you for the links. School districts have a large inventory of bureaucrats with advanced degrees in psychology and behavioral studies. And these clowns can’t figure out how to not be held hostage to heavily armed six year olds? Are these vastly underachieving human warehouses getting Fed subsidies precisely because they’re such massive failures?
I bring this up based on what Jaime Escalante experienced when he first began teaching at Garfield High in East Los Angeles. Escalate was the basis of the movie, Stand And Deliver. Garfield HS was violent and gang ridden, and was so poorly administered that it was on the verge of being taken over by the state of CA. Nevertheless, Escalante persisted in getting his students proficient in mathematics, to the point of eventually teaching advanced calculus. As hard as he worked, the administration road blocked his work. He came to find out the reason was that if academic achievement did increase to the point Escalante wanted, Garfield would lose a great deal of Federal/state subsidies. The system was predicated on student failure, not success.
Well, no greater indication of failure is having the occasional school shooting, with the strong possibility of death and injury. If so, that school district can solicit Fed and state grants for student behavioral remediation. It’s also a whole lot easier to get a public bond passed to build a brand new school, replete with enhanced safety measures to keep the little darlings from shooting each other.
Follow the money and you’ll find the answer….