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Gun violence is hurting America’s schools

Victims of this upsurge in mass shootings are not just innocent children, but also the reputation of the US as an education fountainhead

A few days after the May 24 Texas elementary school carnage in which a teenager massacred 19 children, a 10-year-old boy at a Florida school was arrested for threatening a mass shooting. The boy allegedly shared messages and photos of four assault rifles of the kind the Texas killer used, telling a friend to “get ready for water day” — alluding to a school-sponsored event in which students participate in water activities. Under public scrutiny and pressure over their botched response to the Texas shooting, authorities in Florida moved swiftly, arresting and marching him out in handcuffs.

At any other time, there would have been a national outrage at the treatment of the baby-faced boy. Not now. “While I understand the boy is 10 years old, his brain’s not fully developed, he’s a juvenile, I have to tell you: When a 10-year-old presses a trigger, the aftermath is the same regardless of the age,” the local sheriff explained.

America is in a crisis - a gun control crisis for certain, but also an education crisis. Young America is losing its way. Broken families, economic inequities, social tensions, and a surfeit of exposure to violence are aggravating an already permissive gun-ho culture in many parts of the country. There have been other copycat threats after the most recent carnages. Given what has happened, police and law enforcement, under attack for use of excessive force in other situations — notably in the reckless execution of young black men — cannot afford to take it easy. Not even against a ten-year-old who may have been showing off.

The major culprit of this upsurge in mass shootings is America’s indulgence towards guns. But its victims are not just innocent children, but also the reputation of the United States as an education fountainhead.

America’s biggest strength, its most potent weapon, is not its nuclear arsenal or military technology. It is the education system, particularly at the college and university level. Millions of people from across the world come to the US in search of a good education. Not just higher education students, a million of whom enroll in US universities each year, but also working professionals and immigrants, whose first act after settling down in America, if they happen to be parents, is to look for a good school district for their children.

This is particularly true of Asian and South Asian families. An Indian or Pakistani family will go to extraordinary lengths - including paying higher rent or mortgage, suffer long commutes, and even move cities — just so their children can go to the best schools, which are usually run by school boards that are part of the local government. In fact, you know an immigrant has really arrived and integrated into society when the parent runs for election to the school board. School boards have budgets going into billions of dollars: The New York City school district, the biggest among the nation’s approximately 1,000 school districts, has a budget of $38 billion, which is more than the defense spending of Brazil or Australia and more than the GDP of all but the top 100 countries. It spends more than $25,000 per student.

But all this comes to naught if students are unable or unwilling to take advantage of the facilities that only a few countries in the world are able to afford and offer. Asian immigrants are particularly adept at taking advantage of this. In some of the more elite school districts in Maryland, Virginia, California, Texas, and Washington, the excellence is driven by Asian students — Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and Koreans. They appear to place greater emphasis on education. And typically, many of them come from families that have at least one stay-at-home parent or from a larger family with grandparents.

Not that it precludes an occasional breakdown. One of the most bloody carnages in college history was carried out by Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean student, who massacred 32 people in VirginiaTech in 2007. In 2016, Manik Sarkar, an Indian PhD student, shot dead his estranged wife and his professor. Common to both incidents: easy availability of weapons.

The United States has about 100 million students, almost one out of every three in its population of 330 million. Some 80 million are enrolled in school grades one to twelve. Another 20 million are in college and university. According to the US News and World Report and the Wharton Business School, the United States is the world’s No 1 ranked country in education, based in part on its well-developed public education system.

But there are other studies that use different metrics and methodologies and arrive at a different ranking. For instance, the Global Citizens for Human Rights’ annual study measures ten levels of education from early childhood enrollment rates to adult literacy to put Denmark on top, followed by Finland, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea. The UAE is ranked 27th, ahead of India, South Africa, Brazil, and Pakistan.

As it is, the uptick of nativism and travel restriction because of various sanctions, bans, and Covid restrictions was robbing the US education system of its allure. Gun violence in schools will simply kill it altogether.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Washington