Reason Foundation - Policy Areas > School Violence and Shootings

It Isn't the Bullying, Stupid, It's the Parenting

info@reason.org (Joanne Jacobs) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:20:00 EST

DC Examiner

Once again, this time in Finland, a teenage boy with Nazi fantasies went to school to kill. Calling himself Sturmgeist89 ("storm spirit"), Pekka-Eric Auvinen posted a YouTube video, entitled "Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007," before killing his principal, seven students and himself.

In Cleveland, Asa Coon achieved video fame: security footage from SuccessTech Academy shows the short, pudgy boy walking with a gun in each hand, passing a terrified student, searching for victims. The 14-year-old wounded two teachers and two students on Oct. 10 before killing himself. A photo of Coon's bloody body, snapped by a police officer with a cell phone, is circulating online. For a moment, the self-declared Satanist is a star.

The conventional wisdom casts school shooters as victims striking back at bullies. The conventional remedies, therefore, start at school. Programs try to teach children not to bully classmates by touting the virtues of other races, religions, sexual orientations, etc. This misses the point.

You have no right to assault other students, physically or verbally, for any reason. Period. Disabled kids? Fat kids? Nerds? Not OK. Bullying is not wrong because Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Walt Whitman or Helen Keller were admirable people. And it's not wrong because the worm might turn up with a gun. It's just wrong.

The Columbine killers and their imitators want to be famous. They're not seeking justice against bullies, just TV coverage and the online adulation of adolescent losers.

Coon's problems started early. His father abandoned the family; his mother was suspected of child neglect. Coon was suspended from middle school for attacking a classmate and arrested for hitting his mother. He attempted suicide while in a mental institution, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

SuccessTech was considered a safe school by Cleveland's standards. It fell victim to a very troubled kid.

The day Coon shot up SuccessTech, a 14-year-old named Dillon Cossey, was arrested in Plymouth Township, Pennsylvania on charges he planned a "Columbine-style massacre" at the local high school.

Two weeks later, Cossey admitted the charges and apologized. There are now reports that Cossey chatted online about web sites and videos with the Finland school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen.

His lawyer, J. David Farrell, meanwhile, portrayed Cossey as a victim of "protracted and profound peer abuse," and the boy says he told a friend, "The world would be better off without bullies." But Cossey told police he'd only been bullied a few times in middle school.

Homeschooled for 18 months, Cossey withdrew from reality. His MySpace page reveals his admiration for the Columbine killers and his fantasies of being a mercenary.

His parents supplied him with real weapons -- though no ammo -- to match his fantasies: His bedroom contained a .9 mm semiautomatic rifle, homemade grenades, knives and swords. He also had a swastika flag, neo-Nazi literature and a Columbine massacre video.

His mother, Michele Cossey, has been charged with buying him the .9 mm, a Ruger .22 handgun, a single-shot .22 rifle and black powder for the grenades.

Father Frank Cossey is on house arrest because he lied about his criminal record when he tried to buy his son a .22-caliber rifle. Dad was convicted of manslaughter in a 1981 drunk driving case.

Classmates would have rejected Cossey, if he'd stayed in school. They would have told Dillon he's crazy, which would have been useful feedback. Instead, he was nurtured, accepted and loved by the world's dopiest parents.

Sometimes, it's not bullies at school. It's mental illness and incompetent parenting.

How Schools Underreport Violence, Cheat No Child Left Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Reason magazine June 2005 Print Edition

On March 17, 2005, 15-year-old Delusa Allen was shot in the head while leaving Locke High School in Los Angeles, sending her into intensive care and eventually killing her. Four months before that several kids were injured in a riot at the same school, and last year the district had to settle a lawsuit by a student who required eye surgery after he was beaten there. In 2000, 17-year-old Deangelo Anderson was shot just across the street from Locke; he lay dead on the sidewalk for hours before the coroner came to collect his body.

Violent crime is common at Locke. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, in the 2003-04 school year its students suffered three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries, and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon. And that's actually an improvement over some past years: In 2000-01 the school had 13 sex offenses, 43 robberies, 57 batteries, and 19 assaults with a deadly weapon.

Sounds unsafe, doesn't it? Not in the skewed world of official education statistics. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, states are supposed to designate hazardous schools as "persistently dangerous" and allow their students to transfer to safer institutions. But despite Locke's grim record, the state didn't think it qualified for the label.

Locke is not unique. In the 2003-04 school year only 26 of the nation's 91,000 public schools were labeled persistently dangerous. Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia proudly reported that they were home to not a single unsafe school. That would be news to the parents of James Richardson, a 17-year-old football player at Ballou Senior High in Southeast Washington, D.C., who was shot inside the school that very year. It would be news to quite a few people: The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reports that during that school year there were more than 1,700 "serious security incidents" in city schools, including 464 weapons offenses.

Most American schools are fairly safe, it's true, and the overall risk of being killed in one is less than one in 1.7 million. The data show a general decline in violence in American public schools: The National Center for Education Statistics' 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety shows that the crime victimization rate has been cut in half, declining from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 in 2002, the last year for which there are complete statistics.

But that doesn't mean there has been a decline at every school. Most of the violence is concentrated in a few institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of U.S. schools (1,600) accounted for about 50 percent of serious violent incidents--and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents. The "persistently dangerous" label exists to identify such institutions.

So why are only 26 schools in the country tagged with it?

The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn't always useful or accurate.

Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, now three years old, parents are seeing more and more data about school performance. Each school now has to give itself an annual report card, with assessment results broken down by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency. Schools also are supposed to accurately and completely report dropout rates and teacher qualifications. The quest for more and better information about school performance has been used as a justification to increase education spending at the local, state, and national levels, with the federal Department of Education alone jacking up spending to nearly $60 billion for fiscal year 2005, up more than $7 billion since 2003.

But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they're using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools' failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington--which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014--has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.

The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.

Prospering Cheaters

Under No Child Left Behind, if schools fail to make adequate yearly progress on state tests for three consecutive years, students can use federal funds to transfer to higher-performing public or private schools, or to obtain supplemental education services from providers of their choice. In addition, schools that fail for four to five consecutive years may face state takeovers, have their staffs replaced, or be bid out to private management.

Wesley Elementary in Houston isn't a school you'd expect to be worried about those threats. From 1994 to 2003, Wesley won national accolades for teaching a majority of its low-income students how to read. Oprah Winfrey once featured it in a special segment on schools that "defy the odds," and in 2002 the Broad Foundation awarded the Houston Independent School District a $1 million prize for being the best urban school district in America, largely based on the performance of schools like Wesley.

It turned out that Oprah was righter than she realized: Wesley was defying the odds. A December 31, 2004, expos� by The Dallas Morning News found that in 2003 Wesley's fifth-graders performed in the top 10 percent in the state on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading exams. The very next year, as sixth-graders at Houston's M.C. Williams Middle School, the same students fell to the bottom 10 percent.

The newspaper obtained raw testing data for 7,700 Texas public schools for 2003 and 2004. It found severe statistical anomalies in nearly 400 of them. The Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth districts are now investigating dozens of their schools for possible cheating on the TAKS test. Fort Worth's most suspicious case was at A.M. Pate Elementary. In 2004, Pate fifth-graders finished in the top 5 percent of Texas students. In 2003, when those same students were fourth-graders, they had finished in the bottom 3 percent.

In the Winter 2004 issue of Education Next, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and Brian A. Jacob of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explored the prevalence of cheating in public schools. Using data on test scores and student records from the Chicago public schools, Jacob and Levitt developed a statistical algorithm to identify classrooms where cheating was suspected. Their sample included all student test scores in grades 3-7 for the years 1993 to 2000. The final data set contained more than 40,000 "classroom years" of data and more than 700,000 "student year" observations. Jacob and Levitt's analysis looked for unexpected fluctuations in students' test scores and unusual patterns of answers for students within a classroom that might indicate skullduggery.

They found that on any given test the scores of students in 3 percent to 6 percent of classrooms are doctored by teachers or administrators. They also found some evidence of a correlation of cheating within schools, suggesting some centralized effort by a counselor, test coordinator, or principal. Jacob and Levitt argue that with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the incentives for teachers and administrators to manipulate the results from high-stakes tests will increase as schools begin to feel the consequences of low scores.

Texas' widespread cheating likely was a response both to high-stakes testing and to financial incentives for raising test scores. The Houston school district, for example, spends more than $7 million a year on performance bonuses that are largely tied to test scores. Those bonuses include up to $800 for teachers, $5,000 for principals, and $20,000 for higher-level administrators.

Texas is not the only state where schools have cheated on standardized tests. Teachers provided testing materials to students nearly a dozen times in 2003 in Nevada, for example. And Indiana has seen a raft of problems, including three Gary schools that were stripped of their accreditation in 2002 after hundreds of 10th-graders received answers for the Indiana Statewide Testing for Education Progress-Plus in advance. A teacher in Fort Wayne took a somewhat subtler approach in 2004, when school officials had to throw out her third-grade class's scores after she gave away answers by emphasizing certain words on oral test questions. In January 2005 another Fort Wayne third-grade teacher was suspended for tapping children on the shoulder to indicate a wrong answer.

Phantom Dropouts

If you want to make a school's performance look more impressive than it really is, you don't have to abet cheating on standardized tests. Instead you can misrepresent the dropout rate.

In 2003 The New York Times described an egregious example of this scam in Houston. Jerroll Tyler was severely truant from Houston's Sharpstown High School. When he showed up to take a math exam required for graduation, he was told he was no longer enrolled. He never returned.

So Tyler was surprised to learn, when the state audited his high school, that Sharpstown High had zero dropouts in 2002. According to the state audit of Houston's dropout data, Sharpstown reported that Tyler had enrolled in a charter school--an institution he had never visited, much less attended. The 2003 state audit of the Houston district examined records from 16 middle and high schools, and found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2002 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.

The Manhattan Institute's Jay P. Greene argues, in his 2004 paper "Public School Graduation Rates in the United States," that "this problem is neither recent nor confined to the Houston school district....Official graduation rates going back many years have been highly misleading in New York City, Dallas, the state of California, the state of Washington, several Ohio school districts, and many other jurisdictions." Administrators, he explains, have strong incentives to count students who leave as anything other than dropouts. Next to test scores, graduation rates are an important measure of a school's performance: If parents and policy makers believe a school is producing a high number of graduates, they may not think reform is necessary. Greene writes that "when information on a student is ambiguous or missing, school and government officials are inclined to say that students moved away rather than say that they dropped out."

Greene and his associates have devised a more accurate method for calculating graduation rates. Simplifying a bit, it essentially counts the number of students enrolled in the ninth grade in a particular school or jurisdiction, makes adjustments for changes in the student population, and then counts the number of diplomas awarded when those same students leave high school. The percentage of original students who receive a diploma is the true graduation rate.

Using Greene's methodology, the national high school graduation rate for 2002 was 71 percent. Yet according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2002 the national high school "completion rate," defined as the percentage of adults 25 and older who had completed high school, was 85 percent. As Greene notes, "There were a total of 3,852,077 public school ninth-graders during the 1998-99 school year. In 2001-02, when that class was graduating, only 2,632,182 regular high school diplomas were distributed. Simply dividing these numbers produces a (very rough) graduation rate estimate of 68%." The states show similar discrepancies between their reported graduation rates and the number of students who actually receive diplomas.

As Sharpstown High School's former assistant principal, Robert Kimball, told The New York Times, "We go from 1,000 Freshman [sic] to less than 300 Seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!"

The problem isn't limited to Texas. In March researchers at Harvard's Civil Rights Project released an analysis of state graduation rates for 2002, in which they derived their figures by counting the number of students who move from one grade to the next and then on to graduation. The report found serious discrepancies between the rates calculated by the Civil Rights Project and those offered by education departments in all 50 states. In California, for example, the state reported an 83 percent graduation rate, but the Harvard report found that only 71 percent of students made it through high school.

The Civil Rights Project's paper also found a high dropout rate among minorities, which California officials hides behind state averages. Almost half of the Latino and African-American students who should have graduated from California high schools in 2002 failed to complete their education. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, just 39 percent of Latinos and 47 percent of African Americans graduated, compared with 67 percent of whites and 77 percent of Asians.

Moving the Goalposts on Proficiency

A subtler way to distort data is to report test scores as increasing when in fact more students have been excluded from taking the test. One egregious example of this practice took place in Florida, which grades schools from F to A based on their standardized test scores. Oak Ridge High School in Orlando boosted its test scores from an F to a D in 2004 after purging its attendance rolls of 126 low-performing students.

The students were cut from school enrollment records without their parents' permission, a violation of state law. According to the Orlando Sentinel, about three-quarters of the students had at least one F in their classes, and 80 percent were ninth- or 10th-graders--a key group, because Florida counts only the scores of freshmen and sophomores for school grades. More than half of the students returned to Oak Ridge a few weeks after state testing.

The Sentinel also reported that in 2004 some 160 Florida schools assigned students to new schools just before standardized testing in a shell game to raise school grades. In Polk County, for example, 70 percent of the students who were reassigned to new schools scored poorly on Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test, suggesting they were moved to avoid giving their old schools a bad grade.

Florida is not alone. In a third of Houston's 30 high schools, scores on standardized exams have risen as enrollment has shrunk. At Austin High, for example, 2,757 students were enrolled in the 1997-98 school year, when only 65 percent passed the 10th-grade math test. Three years later, 99 percent of students passed the math exam, but enrollment had shrunk to 2,215 students. The school also reported that dropout figures had plummeted from 4.1 percent to 0.3 percent. Rather than a sudden 20 percent drop in enrollment, the school had used a strategy of holding back low-scoring ninth-graders and then promoting them directly to 11th grade to avoid the 10th-grade exam.

States are also excluding a higher percentage of disabled students and students for whom English is a second language. (Needless to say, these exclusion rates are not reported with the test score data.) And states often report that their test scores are going up when they've merely dumbed-down their standards by changing the percentage of correct responses necessary to be labeled "proficient" or by changing the content of the tests to make them easier. Of the 41 states that have reported their 2004 No Child Left Behind test results so far, 35--including all of the states showing improvement--had schools meet the targets not by improving the schools but by amending the rules that determine which schools pass and which fail.

For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last October that Pennsylvania's "improvements" were a result of lower standards, not improved performance. These changes, approved by the federal government, allowed schools with lower graduation rates, lower standardized test scores, or lower attendance than in previous years to win passing marks. In 2004, 81 percent of the state's schools met No Child Left Behind's adequate yearly progress benchmarks using the new standards. But the Inquirer analysis found that if the same rules used in 2003 had been used in 2004, the number of schools falling short of the yearly benchmark would have grown from 566 to 1,164. Instead of 81 percent meeting the benchmark, just 61 percent would have succeeded. When the Pennsylvania Education Department announced in August that only 566 of 3,009 public schools failed to meet federal standards, it neglected to mention the role the rule changes played in the "significant gains" made.

This sort of thing has been going on for a while. Back in 2002 Education Week reported that "a number of states appear to be easing their standards for what it means to be 'proficient' in reading and math because of pressures to comply with a new federal law requiring states to make sure all students are proficient on state tests in those subjects within 12 years. In Louisiana, for instance, students will be considered proficient for purposes of the federal law when they score at the 'basic' achievement level on their state's assessment. Connecticut schoolchildren will be deemed proficient even if they fall shy of the state's performance goals in reading and mathematics. And Colorado students who score in the 'partially proficient' level on their state test will be judged proficient."

The federal government actually gives a seal of approval to states that are lowering the standards they had before Bush's era of "accountability." For example, the U.S. Department of Education allowed Washington state to lower its high school graduation rate from 73 percent to 66 percent and still meet No Child Left Behind requirements--with the promise of an 85 percent graduation rate by 2014. Apparently, the feds are spending billions to compel states to reduce their academic standards.

Lying by Omission

But the most common way school data deceive people is through omission. State and local education officials simply do not define their terms for the media or the general public. As we've already seen, "persistently dangerous" doesn't mean the same thing to officials that it means to you and me.

Another example: My local newspaper lists area schools that have met No Child Left Behind goals and are compliant with federal law. The article will tell you that every subgroup, from low-income children and Hispanics to special education children, is proficient in reading and in math. It will not say that in California, in order for yearly progress for each subgroup to be considered adequate, only 13 percent of the children in each group must be proficient. Imagine the difference--and how much more helpful it would be to a concerned parent trying to decide what is best for her child--if the newspaper article said, "Here is a list of schools where at least 13 percent of children in each group are proficient."

The newspaper should also explain what it really means to be "proficient" in reading. To be considered proficient for the third grade in California, you must score at the 51st percentile in reading and the 63rd percentile in math on California's standardized STAR test. In other words, all it really means when my school is listed as meeting "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind is that at least 13 percent of third-graders in every subgroup scored at the 51st percentile on the reading test.

Most parents assume that "proficiency" means grade-level performance. But proficiency standards are so different from state to state that students with the same skills will have very different proficiency rates. In third-grade reading, for example, Texas sets its cut score--the correct number of responses or percentile ranking a student needs to be considered proficient--at the 13th percentile. Nevada sets its cut score at the 58th percentile.

All this only scratches the surface of the ways schools use statistics to mislead parents and the public. From reporting teachers' salaries without including benefits as part of their compensation to reporting per-pupil spending while excluding billions in spending on school buildings and infrastructure, the list of deceptions goes on and on.

The No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to let parents and policy makers identify and fix failing schools. More important, it was supposed to give kids a right of exit out of failing or dangerous institutions. But that's meaningless if "failing" and "dangerous" can be defined away. Despite the violence at Locke High School, the teaching failures at Wesley Elementary School, and the high dropout rates at Sharpstown High School, the average kid in those institutions is no closer to escaping now than before the law was passed. And despite the glut of information being offered to parents--and the glut of dollars being spent on education--most families rarely see the facts about their schools' performance.

No Child Left Behind was sold as a way to make the schools more accountable. Instead, it has encouraged and abetted them as they distort the data and game the system. That may be the worst deception of all.

Lisa Snell is director of education at Reason Foundation.

Break Up LAUSD's Violent Schools

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Los Angeles Daily News

A 14-year-old ninth-grader was arrested for having a loaded handgun on campus at Sylmar Senior High last month.

A 15-year-old student suffered a broken jaw in a gang fight in front of Crenshaw High School in December.

According to Los Angeles Police Department statistics, there were three sex offenses, 17 robberies, 25 batteries and 11 assaults with a deadly weapon at Locke Senior High School last year. Similarly, Jordan Senior High School students suffered five sex offenses, 16 assaults with a deadly weapon, 25 batteries and 65 property crimes.

Seven campuses across Los Angeles had racially motivated brawls in the 2003-2004 school year.

Most Los Angeles schools are safe. But imagine sending your kids to one of the several large high schools that continue to buck the national trend of less violence in public schools. A new plan by the Small Schools Alliance would reduce the violence that plagues these schools by creating several smaller schools with 500 or fewer students in Los Angeles.

It's important to note that overall, school violence is down. The National Center for Education Statistics found the nationwide crime victimization rate at schools decreased from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 victimizations in 2002. And just 2 percent of schools accounted for approximately 50 percent of the serious violent incidents.

We do know that violent crimes are more likely to occur in large schools. Thirty-three percent of schools with 1,000 or more students experienced a serious violent crime, while just 4 percent to 9 percent of small- and medium-size schools had a similar occurrence.

Smaller schools experience fewer incidents because school funding and decision-making are concentrated at the school level rather than upstream at the school district. Small-school principals have more control and less red tape, which allows them to execute policies that actually reduce school conflict and violence on their campuses.

A growing body of evidence suggests that reducing school size also improves student learning. Data collected by researchers at the Universities of Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois show that smaller school sizes improve student performance (grades and test scores) and produce lower drop-out rates.

In recognition of this trend, two urban districts in California — San Francisco and Oakland — have moved their school budgeting practices to the school level. San Francisco, with 116 schools and 60,000 students, is in its fourth year of using a weighted student formula for funding and giving more decision-making power to principals and their School Site Councils, made up of parents and school staff. Since implementing the plan, San Francisco's test scores have improved every year.

In light of the relationship between large schools, school violence and student achievement, the national small schools movement is receiving great financial support because of its promise. In the past decade, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided $745 million in grant money to promote small schools, including a $51.2 million gift to New York City's public schools to fund 67 small, theme-based high schools, each of which will limit enrollment to a maximum of 500 students.

Chicago has also announced that about 60 of its worst schools will be closed and replaced by 100 smaller schools with new staff and new programs.

Los Angeles should do the same. The winner of the upcoming mayoral election should work with, push and cajole the Los Angeles Unified School District to replace the area's most dangerous schools with smaller schools to ensure our students are given the best possible learning environment and don't have to worry about being a crime victim on campus.

Lisa Snell is director of education and child welfare at Reason Foundation. She formerly taught speech courses at California State University, Fullerton.

Study: 75 Percent of Large School Districts Do Not Share School Crime Data On Web Sites

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Los Angeles (January 27, 2005) — There were 14 sex offenses, 53 robberies, and 22 assaults with deadly weapons at Los Angeles' Locke High School during the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 school years. In April 2003 there was a lunchtime brawl at the school involving an estimated 300 students. Yet, Locke doesn't qualify as a "persistently dangerous" school by California's standards.

In New York, three male high school students forced a girl into a school closet and sexually assaulted her. Another male high school student smashed his ex-girlfriend's head through a school trophy case. The New York Daily News reports that neither incident was counted as "dangerous" by the Education Department.

A new Reason Foundation report shows that not only are schools underreporting and downplaying violent incidents, they are also failing to share crime data with parents. The Reason analysis found 75 percent of large school districts do not post school crime statistics on district or state education Web sites.

"As a parent you are far more likely to find crime data about your child's school in the newspapers than you are on the district's Web site," said Lisa Snell, director of education at Reason Foundation and author of the report. "And it is part of a pattern. Schools consistently underreport violence figures and then make it extremely difficult for parents to learn what criminal activity is taking place on campus. We need higher standards of transparency and accountability."

The study found only Los Angeles, New York City, Florida, and Pennsylvania offer Web sites with searchable databases or spreadsheets with multiple years of school crime data and detailed reports by type of crime.

To improve the safety of public schools and to provide parents with accurate information about school crime, the Reason study recommends creating uniform reporting standards so that there are consistent definitions for school violence that make it possible to compare data from individual schools, regardless of location. The report also advocates using actual incidents of school violence, not things like expulsions or arrests, to measure dangerous schools and suggests including crime statistics in student report cards that are distributed to parents.

Full Report Online

The full report, School Violence and No Child Left Behind: Best Practices to Keep Kids Safe, is available online at www.reason.org/ps330.pdf.

About Reason

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Contacts

Lisa Snell, Director of Education, Reason Foundation, (951) 218-1171
Chris Mitchell, Media Relations, Reason Foundation, (310) 367-6109

School Violence and No Child Left Behind

lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 18:00:00 EST

Executive Summary

Most schools in the United States are relatively safe. Data on school crime points to a general decline in school violence in public schools in the past decade. The National Center for Education Statistics 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety provides the most recent data on school violence. This ongoing statistical survey has found that the crime victimization rate at school declined from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 such victimizations in 2002.

While the general data show a decline in school violence, this is not true for every school. Reason Foundation recognizes the general decline in school violence, but we are most concerned with policies for those schools that still have a high rate of crime and incentives to underreport crime. It is critical that parents have information about which schools are safe and which schools have crime on campus.

Most school violence is concentrated in a few schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999-2000 school year 2 percent of schools (1,600) accounted for approximately 50 percent of serious violent incidents and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents.

In the 2003-2004 school year, only 52 of the nation's 92,000 public schools were labeled "persistently dangerous" under the No Child Left Behind Act, entitling students to move to a designated “safe” school. Based on the small number of schools that were labeled as dangerous, in September 2003 the Education Reform Subcommittee held a field hearing in Denver, Colorado to study how states are implementing No Child Left Behind’s persistently dangerous schools provision. The hearing suggested some states are significantly underreporting the number of unsafe schools to sidestep the law’s requirements. Testimony from a National Center for Education Statistics expert revealed that in 2001, 6 percent of students reported they had carried a weapon on school property, and the same percentage feared being attacked at school. A year earlier, in 2000, students were victims of about 700,000 nonfatal violent crimes while on school property. However, only 0.0006 percent of the nation’s schools have been designated as “unsafe” by their states.

If most violence is concentrated in a few schools, parents need to be aware of which schools are violent or safe in order to make the best decisions about where to enroll their children. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, students enrolled in a "persistently dangerous school" have the right to transfer to a safer school in the district. Yet, evidence suggests that schools have unreasonable definitions of “dangerous,” underreport school crime, and do not provide parents with accurate information about school crime.

In a content analysis of 80 large school district Web sites including the member districts of The Great City Schools (which consists of most large urban school districts) and the 50 largest school districts as reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, 75 percent of large school districts have no school crime data at district- or state-level Web sites. However, a few school districts provide parents with detailed information at the school level on the specific incidents of school violence that would allow parents to evaluate the type of crime happening in their child’s school or potential school. Leading the way is Florida. Because of Florida’s state violent incident reporting system, parents can find information on school violence at every school in the state. Some districts provide aggregate school violence incidents for the entire district in annual reports or other documents, but most of the data are dated. Some districts like Sacramento, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico provide somewhat dated crime statistics at the school level for selected years though not in a database format. Only New York, Los Angeles, Florida and Pennsylvania provide searchable databases or spreadsheets with multiple years of school crime data and detailed reports by type of crime. The Florida and Pennsylvania state systems also provide data on charter schools.

Parents need more information on school violence and legislators should require school districts to provide parents with more information about the safety of their schools and more choices for smaller and safer schools. But beyond the mere reporting of violence is the curbing of it. In determining how to lessen school violence, we compared the effectiveness of various approaches suggested or practiced by schools or those who study schools. We offer several recommendations for improving the safety of public schools and providing parents with accurate information about school crime:

Revise the state and federal law to loosen or eliminate restrictions on school choice. The act of choosing and the related imperative for schools to make themselves “choice-worthy” is the key to any serious anti-violence policy. Forced assignment to schools and the resulting mismatches and detachment beget boredom and violence and create schools that are unresponsive to parental demands for safer schools.
Encourage smaller schools, competition, and new school capacity. Strong evidence points to the correlation between school size and school violence. Private and charter schools cater to parents’ demand for smaller schools. Legislation should require school districts to move away from school consolidation toward smaller schools.
Encourage legislators to provide school administrators with incentives to focus resources on a “broken windows” approach to preventing school violence. Cleaning up school facilities and getting tougher on smaller crimes help prevent more serious crimes.
Create uniform reporting standards. At the state level, and perhaps even the federal level, there should be consistent definitions for school violence incidents that make school crime data comparable across individual schools so parents can make informed decisions about the safety of their schools. Pennsylvania and Florida demonstrate the usefulness of consistent crime data across all schools in one state.
Follow federal guidelines for defining “persistently dangerous” schools. The federal government should require states to use more accurate definitions for dangerous schools and include all types of violent incidents including rape and assault.
Use school violence outcomes—not processes—as a measure of dangerous schools. Schools should use the actual incidents of crime and not the processes, such as expulsion or criminal prosecution, to judge the violence in a specific school. Measures of detentions, expulsions, or school transfers are not measures of school violence.
Make crime statistics part of school report cards. Crime data should be required as part of a school’s report card alongside academic data and teacher experience.
Report crime data in a timely fashion. Persistently dangerous schools should be labeled based on the previous school year’s data and that data should be reported to parents in a timely fashion.
Include similar schools’ rankings. Crime data reporting should include rankings of similar schools to help parents compare the violence level between schools.
Enforce the unsafe school choice option for student victims. Students who are the victims of school crime should immediately be allowed to transfer to a safer public school. If a safer public school is not available, the student should be provided with a school voucher to attend a private school.

School Violence Tolerated

info@reason.org (Walter E. Williams) — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Creators Syndicate

I'm wondering just when parents, especially poor minorities, will refuse to tolerate day-to-day school conditions that most parents wouldn't dream of tolerating. Lisa Snell, director of the Education and Child Welfare Program at the Los Angles-based Reason Foundation, has a recent article about school violence titled "No Way Out," in the October 2004 edition of Reason On Line (www.reason.com).

As Snell reports, Ashley Fernandez, a 12-year-old, attends Morgan Village Middle School, in Camden, N.J., a predominantly black and Hispanic school that has been designated as failing under state and federal standards for more than three years. Rotten education is not Ashley's only problem. When her gym teacher, exasperated by his unruly class, put all the girls in the boys' locker room, Ashley was assaulted. Two boys dragged her into the shower, held her down and fondled her for 10 minutes.

The school principal refused to even acknowledge the assault and denied her mother's request for a transfer to another school. Since the assault, Ashley has received numerous threats, and boys frequently grope her and run away. Put yourself in the place of Ashley's mother. The school won't protect her daughter from threats and assault. The school won't permit a transfer. What would you do? Ashley's mother began to keep her home. The response from officials: She received a court summons for allowing truancy.

Then there's Carmen Santana's grandson, Abraham, who attended Camden High School. After two boys hit him in the face, broke his nose and chipped his teeth, Abraham was afraid to go to school. Guess what. His grandmother was charged with allowing truancy when she kept him home while she tried to get permission for him to finish his senior-year studies at home. Lisa Snell reports that "more than 100 parents have removed their children from Camden schools because of safety concerns. The school district's response: a truancy crackdown."

Nationwide, there were approximately 1,466,000 violent incidents that occurred in public schools in the 1999-2000 school year. Violent incidents, according to the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, include rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attack or fight with or without a weapon, threat of physical attack with or without a weapon, and robbery with or without a weapon. Most school violence occurs in inner-city schools. During the 1999-2000 school year, 7 percent of all public schools accounted for 50 percent of the total violent incidents, and 2 percent of public schools accounted for 50 percent of the serious violent incidents.

Students aren't the only victims of school violence. Between 1996 and 2000, teachers were the victims of approximately 1,603,000 non-fatal crimes at school. There were 1,004,000 thefts from teachers and 599,000 incidents of rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault.

I'm sorry if I'm out of touch with modern times, but this kind of student behavior is completely intolerable. Moreover, there are no signs on the horizon that things are going to get any better. Psychobabblers try to lay the violence at the feet of poverty, single parenthood and discrimination. That's nonsense. Years ago, when I attended predominantly black schools (1942-1954), there were single-parent households, gross poverty and societal discrimination. During those times, today's school violence would have been unimaginable. Even to curse a teacher was unthinkable.

Today's school violence occurs because it's tolerated. I'm betting that a punishment like caning or six months' incarceration at hard labor would bring it to a screeching halt. You say, "Williams, that's cruel and unreasonable!" I say it's cruel and unreasonable to permit school thugs to make schools unsafe and education impossible for everyone else. Short of measures to immediately end school violence, parents at the minimum should be able to transfer their children out of unsafe failing public schools. Or, do you believe, as the education establishment does, that parents and children should be held hostage until they come up with a solution?

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University and serves on the Board of Trustees of Reason Foundation.

Strategies to Keep Schools Safe

info@reason.org (Alexander Volokh) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Thu, 01 Jan 1998 13:28:00 EST

Introduction

School violence is a serious problem, especially in public schools. Improving the quality of American education is difficult without also addressing school violence, since regardless of how good the teachers or curriculum are, violence makes it difficult for students to learn.

School violence wears many faces. It includes gang activity, locker thefts, bullying and intimidation, gun use, assault—just about anything that produces a victim. Violence is perpetrated against students, teachers, and staff, and ranges from intentional vendettas to accidental killings of bystanders. Often, discussions of school violence are lumped together with discussions of school discipline generally, as both involve questions of how to maintain order in a school.

We divide school violence-prevention methods into three classes—measures related to school management (that is, related to discipline and punishment), measures related to environmental modification (for instance, video cameras, security guards, and uniforms), and educational and curriculum-based measures (for instance, conflict-resolution and gang-prevention programs). All methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

Our research leads us to the following conclusions:

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. As William Modzeleski of the U.S. Department of Education put it, "There is no one program, no silver bullet, so that you can get one program up and say, Here it is if you put this program in your school, you are going to resolve violence." If all schools were the same, in demographically similar neighborhoods, with similar crime rates in the surrounding community, with similar-quality teachers and similarly committed staffs, and similar budgetary constraints, then we could feel safe advocating a common policy for all schools. But schools are self-evidently not like that. The ideal violence-prevention policy will likely be different for each school.

For most anti-violence interventions, evidence of effectiveness is either sparse or mixed. Many programs have been imperfectly monitored or evaluated, so few data on results exist. Those programs that have been monitored work in some cases and not in other cases.

Yet programs that "don't work" in some overall sense may work at individual schools. Every case study of an anti-violence program that works at some school should be an individual cause for rejoicing, even if we wouldn't want to mandate that same program everywhere. Since programs work in some places and not in others, the only reasonable agenda for fighting school violence is to encourage individual schools to experiment and to find what "works" in their particular circumstances.

As in any field, out of the many hot, new solutions, some are real, and some are unsubstantiated fads. Moreover, since school violence research is sparse and mixed and since there are so many variables that it is even difficult to recognize success or failure-the most reliable way of distinguishing between the real and the faddish is to subject individual schools, in their experimentation, to the discipline of competition. Schools choose their anti-violence programs; parents choose their children's schools.

Many traditional anti-violence remedies, mostly those related to discipline and punishment, have been limited at public schools, either legislatively or judicially (through constitutional interpretation). This is not because these methods should not be used at schools at all if parents choose their children's school, they should be able to delegate authority to schools to use discipline measures, up to and including corporal punishment. But these methods have been limited at public schools because the government must provide safeguards against the abuse of its power in circumstances where education is compulsory and attendance at specific schools is mandatory. These safeguards involve notice and hearing requirements and other procedural roadblocks to punishment—all necessary, given the mandatory and monopoly nature of the service, but all making it difficult for schools to effectively choose a disciplinarian approach. These constraints on public schools may be one reason why private schools have less violence than public schools, and it may be one reason to encourage private schools as educational providers.

This paper concludes with a discussion of what some private schools are doing, including the results of our interviews with principals of several Catholic schools. We further suggest that compulsory education laws may be contributing to violence in public schools.

Our general conclusion is to encourage innovation and experimentation in schools through decentralization and deregulation. Incentives matter, so effectively addressing school violence must include some level of parental choice, and an emphasis on private, voluntary, contractual methods rather than compulsory ones.

School Violence Prevention

info@reason.org (Alexander Volokh) lisa.snell@reason.org (Lisa Snell) — Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:00:00 EDT

Introduction

Our research leads us to the following conclusions.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. As William Modzeleski of the U.S. Department of Education put it, “There is no one program, no silver bullet, so that you can get one program up and say, ‘Here it is—if you put this program in your school, you are going to resolve violence.’” If all schools were the same, in demographically similar neighborhoods, with similar crime rates in the surrounding community, with similar-quality teachers and similarly committed staffs, and similar budgetary constraints, then we could feel safe advocating a common policy for all schools. But schools are self-evidently not like that. The ideal violence-prevention policy will likely be different for each school.

Yet programs that “don’t work” in some overall sense may work at individual schools. Every case study of an anti-violence program that works at some school should be an individual cause for rejoicing, even if we wouldn’t want to mandate that same program everywhere. Since programs work in some places and not in others, the only reasonable agenda for fighting school violence is to encourage individual schools to experiment and to find what “works” in their particular circumstances.

As in any field, out of the many hot, new solutions, some are real, and some are unsubstantiated fads. Moreover, since school violence research is sparse and mixed—and since there are so many variables that it is even difficult to recognize success or failure—the most reliable way of distinguishing between the real and the faddish is to subject individual schools, in their experimentation, to the discipline of competition. Schools choose their anti-violence programs; parents choose their children’s schools.

Many traditional anti-violence remedies, mostly those related to discipline and punishment, have been limited at public schools, either legislatively or judicially (through constitutional interpretation). This is not because these methods should not be used at schools at all—if parents choose their children’s school, they should be able to delegate authority to schools to use discipline measures, up to and including corporal punishment. But these methods have been limited at public schools because the government must provide safeguards against the abuse of its power in circumstances where education is compulsory and attendance at specific schools is mandatory. These safeguards involve notice and hearing requirements and other procedural roadblocks to punishment—all necessary, given the mandatory and monopoly nature of the service, but all making it difficult for schools to effectively choose a disciplinarian approach. These constraints on public schools may be one reason why private schools have less violence than public schools, and it may be one reason to encourage private schools as educational providers.