The Myth of a Safe Classroom

If students don’t feel safe, they can’t learn. Even before I became a teacher, I learned this truism while studying child development in my psychology program. I didn’t think twice about it, and later, this core tenet of education became central to my teaching: “How do I make every student in my classroom feel safe?” Make. Feel.

After graduating from college, I spent two years teaching in Japan. During my second year, assisting a master teacher, we did an exercise in immersive empathy in our sixth-grade class. We prepared the students, who did not know what was coming, by letting them know they could ask to pause for any reason. In the exercise we taught a very basic English lesson, but added teacher behaviors that research showed were commonly used by ethnic majority teachers toward ethnic minority students: inconsistent punishment, showing favor in calling on students, and stereotyping. The goal was to support students in identifying those behaviors in class and consider how they would respond individually and collectively.

One student in that class was quiet, a bit bitter, and occasionally brilliant. She shared that during the exercise, she felt deep hatred for us as instructors and for her classmates, because as a member of the Burakumin, the undercaste in Japanese society, she never felt fully safe—not at school, not out in society, not at home. She knew that as long as she lived, the next indignity was just around the corner. Nonetheless, the student said that she loved the exercise because she felt like her lack of safety was finally something that her classmates understood, and that she didn’t have to experience alone.

The memory of this exercise and this student has stayed with me. When I was a child, my mother—born in the United States to parents with false documents a mere nine days off the boat—would bombard me with old, timeworn sayings she had learned from her parents and from her activism during the civil rights struggle. “We have to be three times better to make it,” she would say, and “Get your education; it’s the one thing they can’t take away.”

I remembered how I reacted to my teachers who told me that I should feel safe in the classroom. I mistrusted them. I knew I wasn’t safe and was in no mood to play act as if I was. I knew what it was like to feel marginalized in the classroom and in the streets, and to be targeted by the police as a youth of color. I knew from my grandparents what it was like to have been unjustly excluded from U.S. citizenship and all its protections and provisions, and to have to worry every day whether this would be my last free day in the country.

I think most of us educators understand this on some level, whether it was from the moment we heard about Columbine in 1999, or one of the more than 400 other school shootings since then. Maybe one of our students was among the nearly 400,000 who have experienced school shootings directly. We understand by now that with the utter lack of political response to protect the students and teachers of the United States, we cannot keep our students safe.

A rather stressful day to teach middle school is the day we have to do mandatory “lockdown drills.” The week prior, we brief the students on the procedure with a poorly conceived Chicago Public Schools video followed by a brief discussion. One of these times, a student I’ll call J fixated on a particular portion of the training. He pulled me aside after the discussion and said, “The video said we are to lock the door and sit in silence until the police arrive.”

“You know what happened in Uvalde,” he continued. “We discussed it in class. The police aren’t coming. I’m not sitting around waiting to be shot. If the gunman busts through that door, you would be the first person trying to jump him, wouldn’t you? We would have to take him down. We’d do it together.”

J was killed in a local shooting this past year. I never got to ask him if he said what he did so that he didn’t feel alone, or so I wouldn’t. Our whole school tried and failed to keep him safe. But I know that when he was at school, he knew he wasn’t alone. He knew that we would fight for him until our last breath.

When news began to circulate about the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids at public schools, we held short discussions with our upper-grade students about their rights and what we would do if ICE arrived at the school. It’s strange, because I realize that some folks will read this and think that we as educators are somehow conspiring against the current President. But the first of these discussions happened when our President was Barack Obama. And then Donald Trump. And then Joe Biden. And now again under Donald Trump.

After we study the ways that they can resist those who want to hurt them and their families, students often ask what we as teachers will do. “We will do everything we can to prevent them from entering the building and to disrupt them to protect you from harm,” is what I say. We cannot ensure their safety, but we can promise that we will fight and that they will never be alone.