Monday, December 8, 2014
British Principal Who Resigned Believes He Was Seen as a Threat
BIRMINGHAM,
England — As a Sikh and second-generation Briton running a public
school made up mostly of Muslim students, Balwant Bains was at the
center of the issues facing multicultural Britain, including the perennial question of balancing religious precepts and cultural identity against assimilation.
But in January, Mr. Bains stepped down as the principal of the Saltley School and Specialist Science College,
saying he could no longer do the job in the face of relentless
criticism from the Muslim-dominated school board. It had pressed him,
unsuccessfully, to replace some courses with Islamic and Arabic studies,
segregate girls and boys and drop a citizenship class on tolerance and
democracy in Britain.
“I
suppose I was a threat, giving these children more British values, for
them to be integrated into society,” Mr. Bains said in his first
interview since the controversy over his departure.
His
experience has helped bring to life the often deeply emotional and
highly contentious conflicts unearthed by a British government
investigation this year into whether organized groups of conservative
Muslims were having undue influence on public schools.
The
topic has become especially sensitive at a time when Britain is
concerned about the radicalization of young Muslims in the country and
their involvement with jihadis in Syria and Iraq. The investigation was
prompted by an anonymous letter, sent last year to local officials in
Birmingham, alleging an organized Islamic takeover of British schools in
Muslim neighborhoods.
Conducted
by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and
Skills, or Ofsted, the inquiry found the allegations to be overstated.
But the agency found much that was troubling about Muslim efforts to
promote changes in secular public schools, and it has recently widened
its investigation to 46 schools across the country.
The
investigation found that five schools in Birmingham, including Mr.
Bains’s, shared a pattern of behavior similar to what was described in
the anonymous letter. The letter also cited Mr. Bains’s impending
resignation, a month before it was made official and which only a few
knew about, suggesting that the author was someone with detailed
knowledge of the schools.
“The Sikh head running a Muslim school,” the letter said, “will soon be sacked and we will move in.”
The
investigation found that some teachers and school board governors at
the other schools were encouraging homophobia, anti-Semitism and support
for Al Qaeda, sometimes inviting speakers who endorsed the
establishment of a state run under Sharia law.
One
school stopped music and drama lessons as well as Christmas and Diwali
celebrations, and subsidized trips to Saudi Arabia for Muslim students.
In
another school, the report found, girls and female teachers were
discriminated against, and compulsory sex education, including
discussions about forced marriage, was banned. Girls and boys seen
talking for too long or considered flirtatious were reprimanded, while
boys were given worksheets that said a wife had to obey her husband.
The
report, released in July, highlighted Mr. Bains’s case and concluded
that there had been a “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action,
carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an
intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in
Birmingham.”
Muhammad
Khan, the chairman of the board of governors at the time, who is no
longer at the school, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Three governors who were also present at meetings with Mr. Bains also
refused to comment on his allegations.
Muslim
leaders in Britain have condemned the report’s findings, saying it was
wrong to conflate conservative Muslim practices with an alleged agenda
to Islamicize school systems.
Mr.
Bains, 47, was born to Indian immigrants in a suburb of Coventry
notorious for prostitution and violent crime. He grew up listening to
stories of how his father, a teacher in Punjab State, walked 30 miles
each day to and from school. He would study by candlelight because his
village had no electricity. After arriving in Britain and securing work
as a laborer, he put his son and daughters through college.
“It
made me value education more, and because it is free in this country,”
Mr. Bains said. “I lifted myself out of poverty because of education. If
I could do it, if I could break the cycle, other children could, too.”
His background, he said, is that “I’m an inclusionist.”
He
added that he saw his role as being to “educate children to live and
function in a multicultural Britain, to be appreciative of the views of
other people, but also to express themselves.”
In
2012, he became head teacher of Saltley, a school where grades were
falling behind the national average. In spite of his ordeal throughout
2013, the school achieved its best General Certificate of Secondary
Education grades ever — roughly equivalent to the high school diploma in
America.
Britain’s school inspectorate judged the school as one of the
most improved state schools that year.
“But
I never got a single congratulation” from the school’s governing board,
a mix of elected parents and other people from the community and
members appointed to represent the staff and the local government, Mr.
Bains said. “It was emotional harassment.”
The
chairman of the governing board took to challenging his day-to-day
decision making, Mr. Bains said. In one instance he was required to
justify every decision he made during a three-month period, Mr. Bains
said, including why he had students walk on the right side of the
corridor instead of the left, what he said at assemblies and why he made
changes to the school website. He had to print and distribute the
resulting 300-page document to each of the 15 members of the governing
board.
When
a student threatened six classmates with a knife, he expelled the boy, a
Muslim, in a decision supported by parents and the local authority. But
governors reinstated the boy. Because Mr. Bains did not suspend another
student, a white boy who had surrendered the weapon, talk spread among
staff that he was racist and Islamophobic. He discovered a Facebook post
and text messages calling on parents and students to protest against
him, he said, and later learned that the message had even been
circulated among local mosques.
“Some
of the children would come in and tell me, ‘Mr. Bains, they’re going to
egg your car today, so you better move your car,’ ” he said. “I felt
very isolated, I was despondent. I was a head teacher going into work
without any power.”
The treatment, he said, lasted 11 months, beginning just two months after he was appointed head teacher, until he resigned.
By
then, all non-Muslim governors except one at his school had left. He
was immediately replaced by a friend of the chairman of the board of
governors. A number of staff members at other schools cited in the
government investigation also resigned because they disagreed with the
attitudes taken by some administrators. They also claimed that teachers
had been appointed based on their religious zeal, not their teaching
qualifications.
The
government report partly vindicated him, Mr. Bains said. But if nothing
changes, he said, “then it means anyone can just go in and destroy a
school and get away with it.”
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