(Not) Tackling School Violence

I suppose you might accuse me of being unable to make up my mind. A couple of weeks back I wrote about how teachers unions were protecting rotten teachers, leading to chaotic classroom conditions. Then I suggested that the real problem might be funding choices that divert resources away from direct classroom instruction and support.

Well how would I know one way or the other? But it’s probably worthwhile listening to what teachers themselves have to say. I collected more than 300 comments spread across three 2026 threads on the CanadianTeachers Reddit community (here, here, and here). Those threads all focused on the problem of in-school violence. I’ve already written about the chaos in Toronto’s public schools, but here’s an opportunity to get a different picture from people actually slaving away on the front lines.

To organize the content, I asked an AI model to summarize the comments and identify major themes and insights. Before I share what I learned, I should first tell you about what I did not learn:

• There was compelling - and valuable - anecdotal evidence describing serious acts of violence. But there’s no way we could use that to draw conclusions about national trends. In fact, while some commenters felt things were getting worse, others noted that they only rarely encounter violence in their schools.

• Even though some hints of a consensus around certain ideas emerged, the self-selecting Reddit community can hardly be assumed to reliably represent all Canadian teachers.

If there was one idea that was absolutely clear from the comments, it’s that many teachers have lost confidence in the system’s ability to balance the needs of all students. Children suffering from serious behavioral difficulties are often allowed deny everyone else’s access to a safe learning environment.

This thinking raises questions about the design of inclusion policies. More directly, it notes how those responsible for those policies are rarely the same people who bear the immediate costs. Part of the reason for that is that incidents are inconsistently documented and seldom escalated. That’s something we’ve already seen in the Toronto District School Board’s hot mess of an event reporting system.

Another popular idea from the threads was that in-school violence was effectively being normalized by weak consequences. Students could throw chairs and hit staff and then face little more than a conversation with an administrator. The official message is pretty obvious. (And if there’s one thing kids do well it’s picking up on unspoken messages.)

Some of the teachers drew attention to the fact that non-violent students are themselves victims and are often ignored by the system. These kids are forced to spend long hours in unsafe environments, yet their needs and rights are often secondary to misbehaving classmates. Other teachers credibly portrayed themselves as employees forced to do their work in unsafe environments.

There were attempts to identify root causes for violent behavior. Some pointed to family dysfunction and parents who fail to establish appropriate boundaries. Weak community social services that fail to address problems in homes were also discussed.

There were also some proposed solutions, including:

• Better incident reporting

• Stronger workplace protections

• Meaningful consequences for violent behavior, including temporary removal

• Specialized classrooms or programs for violent children

• Stronger parental responsibility and better support from home

• Better mental-health interventions

An excellent test for the value of an incident response is whether the intervention actually changes anything the classroom moving forward. But for many teachers, it’s not clear anyone cares enough to even apply such tests.

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