David Marks ECI 696 Response to School Violence - Against the Numbers
In 1976, I was in 8th grade and lined up for track practice stretching when one of the team captains came up to where I was on the ground, jumped on top of me and proceeded to punch me several times in the face. Earlier in the day I had been verbally harassing him over a girl, and he had told me to stop several times, but I had continued unrelenting. The coaches may or may not have seen the altercation on the ground that day, but regardless, the whole incident took less than a minute, and practice continued from that point as if nothing had happened. The reality is from that point forward, nothing more did happen stemming from the incident, no referral, no consequence from an adult, and no other repercussions from other members of the team. There was an issue, and it was handled, and everyone went about their business.
I think I remember that incident even more vividly now because of the sharp contrast upon which I compare it with similar incidents that I encounter every single school year as an administrator. Please don’t misunderstand the above illustration to in any way condone violent acts as the way students should be resolving their issues, but imagine if you will that same scenario in today’s schools. It is likely that the perpetrator would be written up and at the very least seen by an administrator. This was not a fight, this was an assault, so there might be a referral to the police, and possible criminal charges would be investigated. If the school had a zero tolerance, or a policy related to assaults, the student might be referred to an alternative school, or in a worst-case scenario, expelled. As the victim, I would likely be seen by several individuals, including an administrator and counselor. I would be asked to do multiple statements, both in writing and verbally, and I might be referred for further counseling, either individually, or as a group. If the media got hold of it, there might be a story either locally or at the state or national level, depending on the severity of the act. Then there is social media, where this might be played out over and over via YouTube or pictures posted on Facebook or Twitter. What was a 60 second encounter that basically settled a situation of animosity almost 40 years ago would now be a major incident that would take many people being involved to sort out.
This paper will try to cast some light on not only how we got to this complex reactionary stance over school violence.. We will look at some of the basic numbers on school violence, and how they tend to refute the idea that schools are somehow more dangerous than they have ever been. Many policies have been developed as a reaction to this idea of schools being increasingly unsafe, and the paper will focus on two in particular, police officers stationed within a school, and zero tolerance policies.
The University of Virginia, through their Curry School of Education, runs a Youth Violence Project, which published the following statistics to answer several commonly circulated myths in relation to school violence:
Myth 1. Juvenile violence is increasing.
Facts: According to FBI national arrest statistics, the arrest rate of juveniles for violent crime (murder, robbery, rape, and aggravated assault) peaked in 1994 and has declined each year since then (Snyder, 2004). This rate is lower now than in any year since at least 1980. The most dramatic decline in juvenile violence is seen for homicides, the category with the most complete and reliable data. As shown below, there were more than four times as many juveniles arrested for murder in 1993 than in 2010.
Juvenile Arrests for Homicide: 1993 to 2010
Myth 2. Juveniles are more violent than adults.
Facts: Juveniles account for just 12% of all violent crimes cleared by arrest (Snyder, 2004). The peak years for violent crime occur in young adults.
Age at arrest for violent crime, 2010
Myth 3. School violence is increasing.
Facts: The rate of violent crimes in U.S. public schools has declined since 1994 (Defoe et al., 2002). The serious violent crime rate (total number of murders, aggravated assaults, robberies, and rapes per 100,000 students) in 2007 was less than a third what it was in 1994.
Serious Violent Crime Rate in U.S. School (Crimes Per 1,000 Students)
Myth 4. School homicides are increasing.
Facts: Media attention to several school shootings resulted in a series of copycat crimes during the late 1990’s, briefly interrupting an otherwise downward trend (National School Safety Center, 2003).
Homicides by students on school grounds during school day
Myth 5. There is a realistic possibility of a student-perpetrated homicide at your school.
News media attention to school shootings in the 1990’s made them seem like frequent events, but actually homicides committed by students at school are rare events when you consider that there are more than 53 million students attending 119,000 public and private schools in the United States (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). According to the National School Safety Center (2003), there were 93 incidents in which a student murdered someone at school during the ten years from the 1992-93 school year to the 2001-02 school year. Considering that 93 incidents occurred in ten years, you can expect 9.3 incidents per year in the nation’s 119,000 schools. This means that the annual probability of any one school experiencing a student-perpetrated homicide is 9.3 ÷ 119,000, which is .0000781 or about 1 in 12,804. In other words, an educator can expect a student to commit a murder at his or her school once very 12,804 years. (Youth Violence Project, 2014)
Even students themselves seem to be overestimating as to the level of risk they encounter at schools. In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Adolescence, the results of a 2008 survey conducted in Boston Massachusetts looked at student perceptions on peers who were carrying guns to school. Over 5% of students reported carrying a gun, 9% of boys and 2% of girls. Students substantially overestimated the percentage of their peers who carried guns; the likelihood that a respondent carried a gun was strongly associated with their perception of the level of peer gun carrying. Most respondents believed it was easier for other youth to obtain guns than it was for them. (Hemenway et. al., 2011)
Reaching back to those much higher statistics of the early to mid-1990’s, one of the prevalent policy decisions made by school leaders was the idea of “zero tolerance”. An understanding of the inception of this idea can probably best be understood through an explanation put forth by Steven J. Teske in a study done for The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing in 2011:
The history and etymology of the term “zero tolerance” can be traced back to the 1980s during State and Federal efforts to combat drugs, or what became known during the 1980s as the “war on drugs.” It was not long before the term was applied to various subjects, including environmental pollution, trespassing, sexual harassment, to name a few. Arguably, its widespread application to minor offenses can be attributed to the “Broken Windows” theory of crime (Kelling & Coles, 1997). This theory analogizes the spread of crime to a few broken windows in a building that go unrepaired and consequently attract vagrants who break more windows and soon become squatters. The squatters set fires inside the building, causing more damage or maybe destroying the entire building. The broken windows theory argues that communities should get tough on the minor offenses and clean up neighborhoods to deter serious crimes. Thus, it becomes necessary to punish minor offense violators. By the early 1990s, school systems began to adopt this “Broken Windows” approach, or zero tolerance, for minor chool infractions by suspending students for up to 10 days. These infractions typically involved fighting, disruption in school, and smoking. (Teske, 2011)
As much as the intent is to make schools safer places, much research has been done that indicate that these zero tolerance policies have had the opposite effect. The American Psychological Association formed a Zero Tolerance Task Force, and they issued a review with recommendations in August of 2006. According to the report's findings, schools are not any safer or more effective in disciplining children than before these zero tolerance policies were implemented in the mid 1980s. The research also shows that while school violence is a serious issue, violence in schools is "not out-of-control." Furthermore, the evidence suggests that zero tolerance policies do not increase the consistency of discipline in schools. According to the report, rates of suspension and expulsion in schools vary widely and can actually increase disciplinary action for those students who are temporarily withdrawn from school. The research also shows that schools with higher rates of suspensions and expulsions have a less than satisfactory rating of climate and governance and spend a disproportionate amount of time disciplining students. The evidence also shows that zero tolerance policies have not been successful at decreasing racial biases in disciplining students. The report found that a disproportionate number of students of color are still overrepresented in expulsions and suspensions, especially for African Americans but also for Latinos. "This uneven representation of discipline," said the report chair, Cecil Reynolds, PhD, professor at Texas A&M University, "may happen because neither teachers nor school safety or security personnel are trained to evaluate or understand cultural differences that may influence behavior." (APA, 2006)
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (1998), schools with no reported crime were less likely to have a zero tolerance policy than schools that reported incidents of serious crime. This might not sound surprising because safe schools would presumably be less likely to resort to such drastic measures as a zero tolerance policy (Skiba & Peterson, 1999). The study found, however, that even after schools with zero tolerance policies had implemented them for more than four years, those schools were still less safe than schools without such policies (National Center for Education Statistics, 1998). Skiba and Peterson (1999) found virtually no data to suggest that zero tolerance policies reduce school violence. Instead, data indicated that, in many cases, such policies have a negative effect on students' emotional health and graduation rates (Hyman and Perone, 1998). Skiba and Peterson argue, zero tolerance strategies have begun to turn our schools into supplemental law enforcement agencies, but they have demonstrated little return despite a decade of hype.
This final statement serves as a transition to the next school safety initiative that has come into place out of the perceptive increase in violence in our midst. It is difficult to ascertain the origins of school police officers because over the past half century a number of school law enforcement programs have evolved. In some states, school district officials can make arrangements with local police and sheriffs' departments to have officers assigned to serve as School Resource Officers (SROs) and provide law enforcement services in the schools, while in other states school district officials have the authority to create independent police departments. According to Burke (2001) and Girouard (2001), the concept of the SRO originated in Flint, Michigan during the 1950s, but it is clear that there were law enforcement officials (not necessarily SROs) serving in schools prior to 1950. The history of the Indianapolis Public School Police, for example, dates back to 1939 when the schools hired a “special investigator” who served in that role for more than a decade and became the “supervisor of special watchmen” in 1952. Then, in 1970, the agency was reorganized and became the Indianapolis Public School Police (Coy, 2004). To provide another example, the Los Angeles School Police Department was originally created as a security section in 1948 and metamorphasized into an independent police agency which, as of this writing, has more than three hundred sworn personnel who serve in a variety of positions ranging from campus police officer to members of the special response team.
While it is not clear when the practice of having sworn police officers patrol school grounds began, it is clear that prior to the 1990s there were relatively few sworn officers serving in schools and that, owing to the increase in public concern about school violence, the number of school police personnel increased throughout the 1990s (Beger, 2002 and Girouard, 2001). As the number of school police officers increased, the officers formed associations to protect their professional interests such as the Arizona School Resource Officers Association, the Florida Association of School Resource Officers, the Texas Association of School District Police, the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officers, and the National Association of School Resource Officers. A cursory examination of the last of the aforementioned organizations, the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), serves as an example of the growth in the number of school police officials. Although NASRO is a relatively young organization, having been formed in 1991, in a decade and a half NASRO built a roster of more than 15,000 members.
Knowing that the numbers of school-based police officers have steadily increased, what has been their effectiveness? Are schools safer with them in the building? Actually, several criminologists and legal scholars have expressed concerns that some strategies designed to make schools safer—particularly the growing number of school resource officers (SROs)—might actually criminalize student behavior and lead to a substantial increase in the number of school-based arrests. SROs are sworn law enforcement officers assigned full-time to patrol schools. As they become more common on school campuses, it is argued, discipline problems traditionally handled by school principals and teachers now are more likely to be handled by a school police officer ( Hirschfield, 2008). Thus, as a scuffle between students becomes assault or disrupting class becomes disorderly conduct, it is expected that the number of youths referred from public schools for delinquent and criminal prosecution will climb, especially for behaviors that pose no legitimate threat to school safety ( Beger, 2003, Brown, 2006, Dohrn, 2001, Dohrn, 2002, Hirschfield, 2008 and Lawrence, 2007). According to Dohrn (2002), American schools have been transformed into “prisonlike” facilities, replete with locked doors, metal detectors, camera surveillance, and greater police presence (p. 283).
To bring the paper full circle to the original incident at track practice, and to reiterate the preceding statements in simpler terms, delinquent activities on school properties have traditionally been handled by teachers and administrators, the introduction of law enforcement officers into schools has transformed student misconduct into a matter to be dealt with by the criminal justice system. If a pupil was threatened or attacked by a peer and reported the incident to a teacher, for example, it is doubtful that school officials would file a report with the police. In contrast, today there are police officers in many schools to deal with incidents of delinquency. What was once considered schoolyard bullying may now be treated as assault. Hence, the presence of officers in schools could lead to an increase in the rate of reported juvenile crime thereby creating the illusion that school violence has increased. (Theriot, 2009)
So in conclusion, it is evident that more research is needed to understand why these restrictive policies, zero tolerance and school-based policing, continue to be prevalent in schools, despite the statistical evidence that indicates schools are safer in many instances not because of these initiatives, but despite them. Further confounding is the research that indicates that these two movements have actually led to negative consequences for student achievement and indicate discriminatory outcomes for certain groups in the schools.
But to change these policies, it is likely that there would need to be a fundamental altering of perceptions about safe schools. When a group of other teachers and administrators were asked about these ideas, each saw zero tolerance as being a necessary evil in light of what they thought were schools at risk of violence. School police officers were seen as being a desirable deterrent on a campus, even though they could not necessarily articulate what it was in their presence on campuses that made them inherently safer. The ultimate challenge will be to make the shift from these ideas that seem to be of very little benefit towards more effective measures to curb the instances of school violence on campuses.
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