All in the Framing

The New York Times is running an article today about violence in Louisiana schools: After the Storm, Students Left Alone, Angry.  The article reports on a surge of  violence in Louisiana high schools, and provides an instructive look at why proper framing of issues matters for those of us looking to achieve positive social change.

Focusing on the John McDonogh High School in New Orleans, the article paints a picture of students gone wild, many living without parental supervision and lashing out during school.  An ominous lead clearly sets the stage and cast of characters:  A school that sounds more like a prison, populated by students who are obviously criminals:

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 31 — John McDonogh High School has at least 25
security guards, at the entrance, up the stairs and outside classes.
The school has a metal detector, four police officers and four police
cruisers on the sidewalk.

In the last six weeks,
students at McDonogh, the largest functioning high school here, have
assaulted guards, a teacher and a police officer. A guard and a teacher
were beaten so badly that they were hospitalized.

While this is clearly not an action to be condoned, by leading with the most inflammatory piece of the story, the writer sets up a dynamic whereby the individual students - rather than the devastation of the Hurricane and the failure of local, state, and national government to properly rebuild - bear the brunt of responsibility for the conditions in which they find themselves and which are the root cause of the school violence.   

This is a traditionally conservative framework - that of individual responsibility - and it permeates the rest of the piece. As we read further down, blame is laid on absentee parents, with little comment on the barriers that keep them away from their children:

Mr. Jackson said many parents whom he had spoken to were in Baton
Rouge, Houston or elsewhere. “That’s the question that’s buzzing in
everybody’s heads,” the McDonogh curriculum coordinator, Toyia
Washington Kendrick, said. “How could you leave your kids here, that
are school-age kids, unattended?”

The answer is as various as the
fragmented social structure, which the hurricane a year ago made even
more complicated. Some students describe families barely functional
even before the storm. Others say pressing economic necessity has kept
parents away.

Rachelle Harrell was living in Houston, working
as a medical assistant and trying to pay off a $1,300 electricity bill
in New Orleans. But she yielded to her son Justin and his cousin
Kiante, both 16, and sent them back to New Orleans on a Greyhound bus
while she stayed in Texas.

While individual responsibility is important, and students should be
punished for their actions, the real problems described by this article
are systemic in nature and do not lend themselves to easy solutions that address the actions of individual students.  While the story does make passing references to systemic
problems with the school system, for the most part it shirks all
responsibility to examine root causes, preferring instead to
focus on the more limited narrative of students run amok:

If the causes are complicated, the consequences seem evident to school
officials: a large cadre of belligerent students, hostile to authority
and with no worry about parental punishment at home. 

Punishing students and ratcheting up security in an ever expanding cycle will neither return missing parents, nor free those
parents from the obligations that keep them away.  It
will not bring new books to the classroom or new teachers into the
schools. In its framing, the article moves readers away from positive solutions to what are clearly systemic problems in Gulf Coast communities.  Worse, it lays blame for those problems solely on the survivors of the hurricane because it is easier to point fingers than to confront serious failures on the part of public institutions.

A well-framed story would have focused on the systemic, root causes of these problems and how public institutions could help Katrina survivors back in their feet.  It would have delved into those "complex causes," to create a greater understanding of the problem in the mind of the public.  With this piece, the Grey Lady had a chance to help the victims of Katrina and move the public forward in its understanding of the effects that the storm continues to have, and the role that public institutions can and must play if we are to truly help the Gulf Coast recover from the disaster.

Instead, they chose to highlight the negative actions of a few bad apples in a framework that completely isolated those actions from their causes.  As a result, the public will be less informed than it could be, and we're that much farther from making real progress in the Gulf.