Research Suggests New Ways to Diminish School Violence

How do school officials know what kind of violence problem they might have? When does a specific school cross the line from having an average level of school violence to having a dangerous level of violence? What kind of violence prevention program will work?

According to USC researcher Ron Astor, there is little local school site information on school violence issues, making it difficult for school officials, teachers, parents and students to know the answers to these and other questions.

Astor, professor in the USC School of Social Work and the USC Rossier School of Education, said that although nationally actual school violence has decreased in the past 12 years, the perception of danger remains high. So, he said, “the national practice of lecturing students about character and about how to get along doesn’t penetrate enough minds to produce a safer school environment.

“Students and educators have a wealth of knowledge about safety in their schools, and, ironically, their views are almost never factored into pre-packaged interventions,” said Astor. “By ignoring the importance of local student-initiated information,” he explained, “cities, states and even the nation as a whole may be wasting huge amounts of public funding on programs that are not needed and may not work regionally or at the local level.”

“Programs that distinguish between danger and safety are stronger. You can reduce the amount of violence in a school and still have kids feeling unsafe. For instance, you can have a lot of security guards, but they may not help kids feel safer,” he explained. “Instead, you could be making the school like a prison, feeling basically unsafe. This could have a huge impact on student attendance, drop-outs and on their feelings regarding learning.”

Rather, his research suggests efforts to collect detailed information directly from the students, staff and community about when and where incidents take place is successful in reducing violence and infusing a sense of safety in schools.

Using two student-centered processes – monitoring and mapping – schools can create grassroots programs, empowering students and teachers to adapt programs that reduce violence. In both the short and long run, these types of programs will be more effective than the “one size fits all” curricula currently endorsed and used by most school districts, he said.

The monitoring process involves a school district conducting a survey of violence at each of its schools and repeating the assessment over time to determine which violent acts are more prevalent, which grade levels are victimized more and how violence levels compare at schools.

The second process – mapping violence-prone areas – leads to grassroots problem-solving in schools.

For example, Astor said, if all students and teachers in a school district are asked 100 questions about their experiences, knowledge and apprehensions about safety at their school, the responses could be ‘pinpointed’ on a map indicating school and surrounding areas that contain risk, or are “undefined” spaces (places that may not be considered anyone’s responsibility to monitor or maintain – such as lobbies, halls and elevators – and, therefore, seen as dangerous or violence-prone).

Besides the precision it provides, the survey relieves the respondents of dealing with specific people and concentrates the discussion on places and times when incidents take place most often.

The results would enable school district leaders to make policy decisions and choices about which anti-violence programs to adopt for the district as a whole and for individual schools, he said.

This is particularly relevant under the nation’s No Child Left Behind Law, Astor said. Under the law, parents who have a child in a “persistently dangerous school” are allowed to shift their child to a safer school. “But, who’s to know what’s safe and what’s not? The vast majority of schools in the U.S. would not be able to answer that question,” he said, pointing out that none of California’s 9,000 schools are designated as persistently dangerous.

Astor said school districts and elected officials in Los Angeles are moving forward with a pilot program designed along the lines of his research. He serves on Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa’s Educational Advisory Resource Council and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Interagency School Safety Working Group. The LAUSD has started the mapping assessment in a pilot group of schools and hopes to develop it across the city.

Astor recently outlined his approach in an Urban Policy Brief, published by USC’s Urban Initiative, titled “Zero Tolerance for Zero Knowledge: Empowering Schools and Communities with Data and Democracy.”

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