Non-violence in the Inner City: ‘Decent’ and ‘Street’ as Strategic Resources

Alternative schools such as CAA are an increasingly common response to school safety concerns. In a national survey of school boards (National School Boards Association 1993), 66% of responding boards claimed to have an alternative program or school in place as a setting for placing violent students who have been expelled from a traditional school setting. 85% of urban districts report having such a program in place, 66% of suburban districts, and 57% of rural districts. Many policy makers advocate such settings as an alternative to expelling students, thereby balancing the rights of violent students to receive a free education, with the rights of all students to a safe environment. Leo Klagholz (1995), the New Jersey Commissioner of Education, states, “The removal of violent students through long-term suspension or expulsion is neither immediate nor guaranteed. The severity of these measures and their denial of educational opportunity render them ineffective as means of helping students who are violent or disruptive, or protecting all students,” leaving alternative schools as a viable remedy. Many students at CAA have been transferred there for frequent episodes of fighting and violence, although others were transferred for dealing drugs, and others are simply dropouts from traditional high schools, who have sought out CAA as a means to achieve a high school diploma. Michelle Fine’s (1991) thorough examination of the ways inner-city schools produce drop-outs, and Deidre Kelly’s (1993) detailed depiction of the history and contradictions of continuation schools, provide an apt backdrop of the milieu of social and political issues in which alternative schools are located.

For a detailed entrée tale, focusing especially on how I came to know and befriend those in the field, as well as a number of chapters on teachers’ and administrators’ perspectives on gangs, see Garot (2003).

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs (2002) cites such an “imaginative solution to conflict” as “a way of saving face in terms of the code,” at least prospectively. As he states, “Saving-face is always imaginatively and prospectively possible.”

Such terms were not common ways of understanding young people in this analysis’s setting. One teacher at CAA came close to making such a distinction when she stated, “You’ve got 40% of these young people out in the world that are not gonna make it. They’re gonna end up dead, in the penitentiary, prostituting, on drugs, got a house full of babies, can’t take care of ’em, poor, hungry, suicidal, all of the above. And that’s pretty sad.” Even though this teacher blamed such conditions on structural factors, stating, “Society has now kind of turned their backs on them,” such a view of the students is actively discouraged by CAA administrators. As Ms. Reynolds, the school principal stated, “I don’t cherish having anyone on my staff with an attitude about students like that.”