Sure hope that attorney Brett Loftis misspoke when he told Peter Smolowitz that only a few parents care about removing disruptive students from CMS classrooms. The topic was expulsions, namely the radical notion of CMS increasing them:
Others, such as Brett Loftis, head of the nonprofit Council for Children’s Rights, said expelled students are likely to land in prison unless CMS partners with the community to help them get jobs or high school equivalency degrees.
“We’re not helping the community. We’re just making a couple parents feel better.”
Loftis has evidently never spoken to a CMS teacher. A teacher sick and tired of the same troublemakers eating up all their time with profane and violent behavior. Sick of the routine of begging administration for a suspension, gathering up coursework in the event of one (knowing it’ll never be touched), then waiting a couple days or maybe a week or two for the same student appear back in the classroom — with the same behavior. Repeat.
All the while other students are being short-changed and — some — enticed into repeating the same negative behavior. After all, it appears to them that such acting out carries with it no meaningful consequences. And, again, we are not talking about one or two bad choices. We are talking about a pattern of repeated disruptive and often criminal behavior.
It is beyond amusing that Loftis holds up jail time as the ultimate negative outcome from removing more troublemakers from CMS. In CMS high schools, those kids already have cycled through the jail, sometimes on felony charges — which are inevitably pleaded down by an overwhelmed (and bleeding heart) DA’s office before one of our insane judges sets the terror loose again.
The suggestion that The System has dealt harshly — or even unfairly — with these kids is clearly off-base. Dangerous even, given the level of violence in far too many CMS schools.
Update: Maybe fewer agit-prop events at the Westin, more contact with front-line teachers would serve Loftis and crew well.
