Bacon's Rebellion

by James A. Bacon

Most people watching the Academy Awards ceremony were shocked to see movie star Will Smith stride unbidden onto the stage and slap master of ceremonies Chris Rock across the face. Smith later apologized for his action, and then resigned from the Academy. Condemnation was widespread. But the disapproval was not unanimous.

Fletcher Norwood teaches high-school honors classes at a Title I school in Virginia, and he recalls how social media lit up the cell phones of the kids in his classroom the day after the awards ceremony.

“Of course, Smith slapped him. Rock dissed his wife. That’s how you’d react to a situation like that,” says Norwood, summarizing the prevailing viewpoint. To his students, there was nothing remarkable about the incident. “If you’re going to say something like that, you should expect to get hit.”

After a decade of teaching lower-income kids in Title I schools, Norwood was not surprised by his students’ attitude. Most come from broken families in low-income neighborhoods mired in a culture of poverty and violence. Attitudes and expectations are radically different from those of the middle- and professional-class educators, politicians, journalists, and activists who have been driving educational policy in Virginia. The political class is, in a word, clueless about what’s happening in schools. The theories of bureaucrats in Richmond and district offices are unmoored from reality. Adult authority at his school is disintegrating, disorder is rampant, and the quality of education, which was never great to begin with, is tragic. (more…)