[Evans, Marv]

I taught high school from the seventies to the nineties in a low income area of gangs and problem kids whose parents couldn't care less what they did as long as they left them alone. Since I was somehow able to manage the kids, they put an inordinate number in my classes. At the time, I looked at other teachers' classes and wondered why they didn't have the same mix of the type of kids I had. Much later on when I was doing another job, one of the administrators told me they did put a larger proportion of problem kids in my classes.
I can only comment on what I saw from what school administrators did all of the time. They let things ride knowing situations would almost always work out and cool down, mostly throught the efforts of the teachers. They didn't want those higher up to know anything was wrong on their watch, & if they just didn't do anything and let the situation pass, things looked OK. I got into trouble once when I told a principal he "needed to get some balls and get out there & do something." Another time I had five asian kids come into the classroom to attack a hispanic kid who had been hastling one of their friends. I grabbed two of them & told the other teacher (combined classes & two teachers) to grab two more to take to the office - which he never did of course. The female principal, when I dragged the two kids into her office and told her what had happened, & that I was going back to the classroom to get control said, "Now if you are going to do things like this, we can't have you on campus." I told her to call the police because an assault had been committed in my classroom. Of course she didn't because that would have indicated a problem. The outcome was that we all got telephones in our classrooms. I have other similar stories.