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Lean on Me is based around the experiences of Joe Clark who became the principal of a East side high school which has been filled with violence, drugs, and abysmal academic performance. Joe “Crazy Joe” Clark is given the daunting task of bringing student's test scores up to the minimum acceptable level within one school year or the school will be taken over by the state. It was obvious education there had not been taken seriously, seeing the reputation for violence and lack of ability.
Fighting in school halls and classrooms was common. Weapons had been used against teachers and students. Drug dealers worked the school daily, inside and out. They also could be smelled throughout the halls. Hallways were sprayed with graffiti and furniture
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went broken and never got repaired. The school was in complete disarray. Students and teachers worked in constant fear. Dropout rates were high and test scores were close to the lowest in the state. At Mr. Clarks first staff meeting, he yells at all present for being unable to keep their own school safe, or to maintain passing test scores. The tension could have been cut with a knife. Clark was extremely strict and demanding towards both his students and teachers. This made him the target of parents, board members, civil servants, and teachers determined to bring him and his new style down. Within the first week of Mr. Clark being there, he expelled 300 students from who were known as drug dealers or troublemakers. The next day Clark runs into Sams, a student who was expelled the previous day, asking for a second chance to finish his education.
He said that he’d been scared to tell his mother he was kicked out of school. Clark then looked into his paperwork and noticed that he was expelled for smoking cocaine. He brought Sams to the roof and explained the consequences of crack cocaine. Although he let Sams back in school, Clark made it obvious that if he messed up in any way, there would be problems. Then, another expelled student intrudes the school and gets in an altercation with another student. When Mr. Clark rushed in, the expelled student pulled a knife on the new principal. Those were just some of the problems that he had to deal with. Knowingly breaking the fire code, he ordered all doors be chained shut in a serious effort to keep drug dealers out. He fired the music teacher for arguing with him in front of students and suspends a coach/ English teacher. Later that day, he has a meeting with Dr. Napier (The person who suggested him for the job) reminding him to stop with his crazy antics or his efforts will be in the wrong spotlight. Practice test scores come back and they are not where they need to be. Mr. Clark then gets into action. He makes new student policies, dress code guidelines and a strong disciplinary system. Broken lockers and furniture was fixed also. Walls were repainted. Security kept out all drug dealers. Over the school year, Crazy Joe became a father
figure. Despite the outside resistance, Clark became a system of hope for many students by his harsh demands for self-discipline and loyalty to their school. He counseled Kaneesha, and old student of his after he found out she had no place to live at, and then announced and unplanned pregnancy. Eventually the fire chief catches Principal Clark chaining doors and he was arrested. While he’s in jail the school board has a meeting to get him removed as principal. In the efforts to do so, students chanted that Clark cares for them. They say that he has done so much for them and the school, thry wont accept anyone else. Principal Clark was eventually freed by the mayor in an effort that he could talk and calm the students into going home to avoid violence from happening. In the midst of doing that, he is given a letter from the State with amazing news that enough students have passed the basic skills ecam. Clark them leads his class of 1987 students in singing the school song. Over time, the students changed a lot. In the year of Mr. Clark coming along and taking over, test scored were raised and a sense of peace was brought back to the school. After doing more research I learned that Eastside High- School was in the national spotlight. Support came from President Reagan’s administration team after they called and offered a position. He denied. “Without Joe, where will we go?”
His grades were very bad and he wasn’t known to be a good student in class. He was described as, “ noisy,disruptive, always fooling around with his friends”. When his mother was notified about this, although her help was limited, it seemed to help him for a little bit, but then he fell back into same place as he was before. Donny was set up with a tutor, by the name of Cal. Cal was not the type of tutor any parent would intentionally set their child up with. He encouraged the child to rebel against authority. He criticized every attempt Donny's mother made to help her child. Donny unsurprisingly enjoyed the sessions with Cal. At the end of the story Donnys tutor was dropped and Donny was sent to a new school. His grades began to look better, but after a few months he disappeared. No one knew where he could be, not even Cal. Donnys parents are now left with a lost
To begin, Mary Sherry discusses the corrupt school system that lingers. In her article, we obtain insight on how schools
Mike Rose shares his personal story to the public in “I just wanna be average”, as he reveals the many flaws within the educational system of a high school in an economically depressed neighborhood in Los Angeles. Rose, starting his first day of high school, was placed by an administrative error in the vocational track, due to the results of another student with his same last name. This mistake or error went unnoticed over the first year of his school. His classes were all dead end. The author encountered many terrible teachers in charge of this remedial track; most of these educators were paranoid, abusive, racist, and unprepared.
“I viewed each of the films at least once…taking notes on the role of the teacher, peer relations, among students, relations between students and adults, student attitudes toward schoolwork, extracurricular activities, the role of the family, the resources of the school, the use of violence and drugs, exploitation of sexuality (4).”
The mentality of the school was to help the popular kids succeed. Joe had fallen through the cracks for 2 years and kept trying to reach out for help but was ignored. As I examine his circumstances I wonder how things could have been different. If he had stayed on the football team, would he had received the help he needed or would the teachers just of given his good grades to keep playing? I believe the former is more likely. The teacher-students relationships were inappropriate and negative for the students. The students were not measured on their learning merit but on their popularity. The sad reality is the failure of the education system that forced a child with a learning disability to repeat the same grade almost 3 times. The teachers have the responsibility to develop their students into success individuals even if the students are disabled.
The movie producer’s intention was to inform the views of issues faced by these communities in hopes to influence a new popular cultural awareness of current problems. The movie barbershop had similar views to an older movie titled lean on me which was produced in 1989. These two movies share similar patterns of violence within minority communities and also shows the issues found in the public school systems due to gangs, female stereotypes, and also lack of law enforcement. Although the two movies are based in different time eras the issues are still prevalent and ongoing. The movie barbershop shows a strong popular cultural view of how the American Government is failing to protect its people and was more a cry for help and understanding than a comedy. The comedy aspect of the movie was to draw the big crowds but the message was to create popular ideologies and awareness that would produce change. The 48hr ceasefire that was played out in the movie was used to send a message that people of a community have to stand up and assist in making change. Although there are still issues in Chicago this movie made a valiant attempt to modify the though process of younger citizens in Chicago to step up and stop the
unleashed his wrath on some of the students. He killed one student named Lisa Leavy.
Schools were not effective in community life because the principal and teachers didn’t care to invest in finding out why he was getting in trouble. Instead they just suspended him or called his parents. Reymundo mentioned that the violent behaviors shown towards him at home resulted in negative behavior at school (Sanchez, 2000, p.29). One of the teachers did notice that Raymundo wasn’t acting himself and ask him what was wrong. Reymundo did well on lying and continued to misbehave at school. Even though the educational staff members did not do their job well, they did provide a place for the students to
In modern society, the rules for school are simple and straightforward. To do well in school means to do well later in all aspects of life and guaranteed success will come. Sadly however, this is not the case for Ken Harvey or Mike Rose. Author Mike Rose goes to Our Lady of Mercy, a small school located deep in Southern Los Angeles where he meets other troubled students. Being accidentally placed in the vocational track for the school, Rose scuttles the deep pond with other troubled youths. Dealt with incompetent, lazy and often uninvolved teachers, the mix of different students ‘s attention and imagination run wild. Rose then describes his classmates, most of them trying to gasp for air in the dead school environment. On a normal day in religion
Walking down the school hall to the next class, the bully appears before his prey. He stands before his soon to be victims as if he is two feet taller and ten times stronger. His victims attempt to ignore him, but he stops them and puts his face in front of theirs to make sure his presence is known. He then abruptly decides to save his senseless punishment for another day as he passes by with a slight shoulder nudge. In today’s high schools, the majority of bullying incidents occur in this fashion. A bully finds the weakest kids and targets them. Freaks and Geeks, a television show, demonstrates these specific bullying instances and their effect on the character Bill Haverchuck. The pain bullying causes goes beyond surface level bruises and stretches to damaging internal feelings. When analyzing Freaks and Geeks, it is apparent that this television show demonstrates the physical and emotional effects of bullying through character Bill Haverchuck.
Thereby, institutions that were intended to nurture youth (schools) have been collapsed into the practice of surveillance and criminalization, often acting as the behest of police and probation officers. In the case of Spider, he was isolated from “regular” school and sent to EOCS, which was a school for students who had already been officially labeled as deviants and delinquents by the school district. There, many of the teachers had a common practice that whenever any student misbehaved, the teachers would threaten either to call the police, to send them to jail, or call their P.O. (sometimes, even for students that weren’t on probation). In the schools attempt to main social order, it used the full force of criminal justice institutions to regulate students’ behaviors with constant threats. Also, Rios accounts that Slick’s beating, a student at an EOC, was the result of the schools impeccable communication between a security officer, the administrators, and police officer Miles. At these types of teaching facilities, stigma, labeling, detention, harassment, and humiliation are just about the only consistent experience that adolescents could count on as they entered the school. If students attempted to resist criminalization by acting up, a police officer lurked nearby ready to pounce. In essence, school was simply an extension where young people were criminalized for their style and culture. As a matter of fact, many of the boys Rios describes, saw no distinction between the school and police officers who constantly lurked around them, like a “zookeeper watching over animals at all times.” Police officers played a crafty “cat and mouse game” in which adolescent boys remained in steady trepidation of being humiliated, brutalized, or detained. Hence, this sort of control is created by a
In conclusion, School Violence is a widespread issue that must be addressed. School shootings and bullying are some of the biggest issues in today’s school system. Many times the seed of the issue begins with bullying and ends with consequences like suicide and school shootings. They affect people as early as elementary school all the way to the college level, some even ending with death. Only together can we stop school violence if we take a stand and change the world.
Michael Oher was from an all-black neighborhood located in the third poorest zip code in the country. By the time he was a sophomore, he’d been to 11 different schools, he couldn’t read or write, and he had a GPA of 0.6. In his first-grade year alone, he missed 41 days of school and ended up repeating both the first and the second grade; he didn’t even go to the third grade. Oher was one of the thousands of children that have been identified as having four or more of the at-risk factors mentioned by the National Center of Education and Statistics (NCES). According to the NCES, poverty and race are high on the list of things that negatively affect students’ ability to succeed at school. Other risk factors include changing schools multiple times and being held back from one or more grades. Oher’s biography, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, proves how socioeconomic status impacts a child’s academic success because placed in perspective, education is not as important as the hardships of reality.
Bidwell, Allie. "Report: School Crime and Violence Rise" U.S News & World Report, June 10, 2014
Bullying, often dismissed as a normal part of growing up, is a real problem in our nation's schools, according to the National School Safety Center. One out of every four schoolchildren endures taunting, teasing, pushing, and shoving daily from schoolyard bullies. More than 43 percent of middle- and high-school students avoid using school bathrooms for fear of being harassed or assaulted. Old-fashioned schoolyard hazing has escalated to instances of extortion, emotional terrorism, and kids toting guns to school. It is estimated that more than 90 percent of all incidents of school violence begin with verbal conflicts, w...