More Troubles with Teens

I was not blaming “snootiness.” Rather, I was adding particular dimensions of the problem to the discussion. In particular, I was trying to mention some of the factors that lead to stress and tension in these kids.

Do these explain violent incidents? Of course not! Do they help to explain them? Of course they do.

It is not merely a case of absent parents. It’s not that simple.

As for why I assume that the kids involved in the stabbing were not from Park Slope? Well, I taught in one of the schools in the John Jay building on 7th Avenue. In the whole school (700 students), the only kid who claimed to be from Park Slope lived on 17th St. That’s not an assumption, Biff. That’s a fact. Kids in the Slope tend NOT to go to these schools. The odds are that the kids involved were not from the Slope. That’s not an assumption. That would have been a deduction, had I made it.

I din’td deduce anything about those particular kids. Rather, I spoke to the tensions and stress they feel — as a group — when they come out of school. Even those few from the neighborhood can still feel it in the air. As I said, I don’t know the particular kids involved, so I didn’t say anything about them.

When thinking about the students in Park Slope, keep in mind that they older they are, the less likely they are to go to school in the same neighborhood that they live in. That’s a trend, not an absolute.

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As for Far Rockaway, Legion, you are missing quite a few imporant points.

* SES and economic class are the same thing. Socio means something. Too often we say SES and we really just mean economic class. Too often we are trying to find real SES and can only go by income, and therefore use it as a proxy. What do I mean by that? Well, imagine a poor starving graduate student. Very low income. Very high SES.

Immigrant groups often have people of low income but high SES. So, “middle class” or “working class” can be misleading if not properly used and properly understood.

* We close schools down for different reasons that we used. Heck, we never even used to close schools down.

But the big different is in what we expected from schools. In the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, it was ok if all the minorities and low SES students dropped out before graduating — or even before high school. Then, the high schools could focus on the better prepared students, the ones easier to send to college. Even when the lower track kids did not drop out, much less was expected of them.

In recent years, we have looked more at equity. On of the few good things to come out of NCLB is attention to kids across the spectrum. Minorities and low SES kids are not dropped out like they used to, decades ago. But they have not been graduating, and often schools have not make proper efforts to teach them.

So, the job of schools has gotten harder, with the more challenging kids staying in longer. And expectations for succeeding with those kids have gotten higher.

So, this school had 3 nobel laureates graduate back in the day? What % of the kids who were zoned for the school in those years actually graduated? How does that compare to the equivilent statistics today? And what kind of choices did those three have when came to selecting a high school? We have massive school choice now, in a way that the city did not back then.

I could go on and on about all the reasons why the the far rockaway high school of the 40’s is not comparable to the far rockaway high school of this decade.

People are quick, including myself, to assume that the perp was a kid from outside the neighborhood who attended John Jay.

Looks like he was a local boy afterall:

“Tuesday afternoon, police announced the arrest of a 14-year-old connected with the attack. Armed with information from witnesses, detectives apprehended the young suspect at 3:25 p.m. in his home on Sixth Avenue, a block from where the incident occurred”

Z, I said that initial remark because I think sometimes topics on Brownstoner are chosen because they will be hot button issues, and anything regarding crime, violence, and rampaging kids is bound to gets the keyboards humming and will eventually bring up issues of race and class. Would we have even half the comments here if this was a report about 2 kids getting in a fight in a Brownsville school? Even if one had gotten killed? I don’t think so. I didn’t want to go there this morning. And I freely admit that if I am at the computer that day, I will probably jump in feet first, and I ended up doing that.

I don’t expect people to necessarily agree with me. Most may not, and I don’t post so people can nod their heads in agreement with my great wisdom. I’m just another anonymous voice trying to connect with my fellow Brooklynites. I call em as I see em, like everyone else.

I happen to think that, like the great writer W.E.B. DuBois said almost 100 years ago, that “the problem of the 20th (now 21st) century is the problem of the color-line”. I would now expand that to include class. That doesn’t make everything and every situation racial, and certainly does not make everyone a racist, but race and class are always there somewhere, and we are better off realizing that, and dealing with our own preconceived notions and assumptions, and how those notions affect our own actions, than acting like we didn’t notice at all. That is not complementary to our liberal and fair minded view of ourselves, and saying this does not make me popular. I can deal with that.

“I would welcome a genuine discussion of youth violence, or tensions between Park Slopers and the kids who go to the local schools. But that would mean a real discussion of race and class in Brooklyn. And I don’t think very many of us are comfortable with that.”

i am confused. your first comment in this thread stated that there are too many brownstoner posts about youth violence in brooklyn. now you say you would welcome a “genuine” discussion of brooklyn youth violence and park slope tensions. the import of these statements, taken together, is that you want this topic discussed only if people say things you agree with or consider “genuine.” i doubt that is what you intended, but that is how it sounds.

the fact of the matter is that discussions about topics like these are always going to be messy and controversial. that doesn’t mean they are not worthwhile. you can say your piece, others will listen, and hopefully you will listen to others too.

in any event, i am still at a loss as to how this become a race discussion, given the absence of any reference to race in the incident report.