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Last year, a buddy of mine invited me to participate in an education think-tank group. About twelve of us met on a Saturday morning in a conference room downtown. We had a diverse group of participants: Teachers born and raised in Hawaii, TFA alumni, department heads, a professional development consultant, a special education coordinator, and political education advocates.

Over sandwiches and coffee in a room with no windows on a sunny Saturday morning, we proceeded to let all our frustrations fly. By the end of the meeting we hadn’t come to any conclusions, but a seed was planted. Some time during the meeting, I made a comment about teachers needing to be the drivers for education reform.

I started conversing with excellent teachers that had, over the years, become disenfranchised with the system. I wanted to know what had gotten to them, and how we could change it. One of the biggest complaints I heard was about student behavior.

I was a ‘floater’ at Campbell my first year, which means I didn’t have a classroom of my own. Instead, I ‘floated’ from classroom to classroom between bells. I got used to the barrage of F-words, B-words, and homophobic slurs flying around every time I walked between classrooms, but I made it my mission to stop every kid I saw wearing a T-shirt with a half-naked stripper, marijuana leaf, or profanity plastered on the front. I was cursed out at least a half-dozen times.

The first couple times, I immediately wrote to the administration, but with each email I sent, the deafening silence of my inbox increasingly rattled my sense of right and wrong and my role as a teacher within a school. I didn’t stop intervening, but I did stop reporting it to the administration.

One day, I walked into the boys’ bathroom to find a student holding a joint. Since he knew I wouldn’t be able to identify him if he got away from me, he bolted out the door, hoping the whole incident might just disappear.

He was a larger guy and I was training for the Honolulu marathon at the time, so it wasn’t hard for me to catch up. I thought it was almost comical the way he desperately weaved and turned sharp corners while I lackadaisically bounded after. After a minute, he stopped. I walked up to him as he was bent over, covered in sweat, and breathing heavily. “All done?” I asked. He shook his head yes. “Follow me.”

In the Vice Principal’s office, I was given a verbal warning for chasing a student and I managed to segue that into a conversation about my previous emails. I was told that security’s duty was to secure the campus and keep kids safe, and that while they were capable of citing a student for violating dress code, it was not their duty. I was also told that the administration was too busy to address every issue in which a teacher has a run-in with a student on the open campus, and that my duty as a teacher was to be the instructional leaders of my classroom, not an enforcer of codes of conduct outside my classroom. I was told that, as a teacher, if I didn’t have time to follow up on conflicts with students that I initiated, I needed to choose my battles more carefully. The message was clear — don’t bother.

In a few conversations with long-standing community members who work at the school, I was told that this is just the culture in Hawaii, and that white teachers from the mainland just have trouble adjusting to it.

Tell that to Kamehameha Schools.

I don’t believe that the problems within our schools can be blamed on the culture or our kids. Even my “bad” kids actually have great hearts. They have just lacked guidance. Our kids are kind and loving and caring and they have unlimited potential, but our schools are not being proactive about directing that potential in a positive way.

Many teachers have turned to blaming the parents. I understand that great parents make a huge difference. I have great students with great parents and I appreciate them and wish every parent could be like that, but the reality is that not every parent is going to be a great parent. And between the the Internet and increasing work-hours, the job is getting harder all the time.

Parents, in turn, believe that schools are places where kids are supervised and molded into responsible adults. That is not true. For at least six to eight hours a day, five days a week, students from 7th to 12th grade are in a values vacuum. Schools view their responsibility to be instructors of subject matter, devoid of formal reinforcement of manners and respectful behavior, and too many teachers have fully adopted the mantra that they are not the parents to the point that the kids are left nearly entirely unguided on social norms.

Our kids’ culture is being shaped by a “Lord of the Flies” system that is thriving between the cracks directly under our noses.

A few months back, I had to opportunity to visit Richmond LPS, a turn-around school in Oakland where students in gang-ridden neighborhoods attend a school made up of portable buildings in a parking lot surrounded by a chain link fence. But even without fancy buildings and beautiful landscape, there is a positive culture within the school of respect and success that is shaped by an administration that understands that “choosing battles” means fighting the little battles so that the big battles never have a chance to surface. The leadership meet the students at the gate every morning to shake their hand and enforce dress code. We need to bring practices and leadership attitudes like that to our schools here.

It is no coincidence that in transformational teacher Ron Clark’s book, The 55 Essentials, every “essential” for learning is behavioral. We, educators, teachers, and school leadership, need to take greater ownership of this issue.

We can fight and point fingers, or we can take action in our schools and start addressing the issue. I say we take action.

Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.