Educational Researcher

http://er.aera.net How Safe Are Our Schools?

Matthew J. Mayer and Michael J. Furlong EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 2010 39: 16 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X09357617 The online version of this article can be found at: http://edr.sagepub.com/content/39/1/16

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How Safe Are Our Schools?

Matthew J. Mayer and Michael J. Furlong
Schools are basically safe places for children. School violence and disruption, although in decline through the mid- to late 1990s, remains a concern. National surveys that inform research, policy, and practice have been designed for different purposes and can present conflicting findings. Common standards of risk and harm that could advance policy and practice are lacking. Progress in the field of school safety has been hindered by the lack of a coherent conceptual structure to guide measurement and research.This article identifies some of the conceptual and methodological challenges that must be addressed and calls for a 10-year national strategic plan to improve school safety. Keywords: at-risk students; school psychology; student behavior/ attitude; violence

ach day parents watch their children go off to school, trusting the system of education to keep them safe. Because the experiences of their children and periodic media coverage may increase their concern, parents and others naturally ask: How safe are our schools? The response of researchers has been that schools are generally safe (Dinkes, Cataldi, & Lin-Kelly, 2007), but this alone has not fully quelled these concerns because of a lack of consensus about what constitutes safety. Do the relatively rare yet tragic high-profile school shootings represent a greater concern than the long-term psychological effects of dayto-day bullying, intimidation, and incivility experienced by students at school? What is the connection between school safety statistical reports based primarily on survey indicators and the real-life experiences of students in schools? General Awareness of School Violence and Disorder Aspects of school violence have been a concern throughout modern American history (see Cornell & Mayer, this issue of Educational Researcher, pp. 715) but came to the forefront with the issuance of the 1978 report Violent SchoolsSafe Schools: The Safe School Study Report to Congress (U.S. National Institute of Education, 1978). A report in 1984, Disorder in Our Public Schools (U.S. Department of Education, 1984), pointed to ongoing issues with school disorder nationally, concomitant with increases in juvenile crime (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Although not widely recognized, school violence incidents peaked around

1993 and were described as an epidemic in the early 1990s (Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998). The National Center for Education Statistics began issuing annual data reports on school safety in 1998. News coverage of school shootings involving multiple victims during the 1990s further focused public attention on school safety. Despite this attention to violent school events, there was limited consensus about what constitutes school violence and disorder and how to gauge accurately and reliably the overall safety status of American schools. Those behaviors that typically fall under the term school violence constitute a small percentage of the constellation of behavioral events at school. Conceptually, it is possible to consider the relations depicted in Figure 1, understanding that its compartments are not empirically derived but that they informally and broadly summarize behavioral events in schools. There are no extant data that map precisely to all of these categoriesthis limitation leads us to a key consideration. Having neither a quantitative referent base of a broader array of student behaviors associated with school violence nor definitive means of quantifying unacceptable, marginal, and acceptable behaviors at school, highly variable interpretations of the seriousness of school violence incidents are possible. For example, how is meaning attached to the observation that 909,500 secondary students (3.4%) experienced theft at school in 2006 or that 43% of middle schools reported weekly incidents of school bullying during the 20052006 school year (Dinkes, Kemp, & Baum, 2009)? Considering the 767,000 violent crimes at school reported in 2006 spread across 26.4 million students ages 12 to 18, each attending school for about 165 days (assuming absences), does the resultant rate of 1.76 victimization experiences per 10,000 studentschool days represent a major problem? These data suggest that a child has about a 1 in 5,700 (5,681) chance of being a violent crime victim on a given day during the school year, or about 1 violent incident at a large comprehensive high school every other day. Presenting the same data in different ways may lead parents and guardians to feel more or less comfortable regarding their childrens safety based on varying probability estimates. These rates vary based on race/ethnicity, urbanicity, gender, and other key variables. However, it remains unclear how seriously the statistics should be taken relative to adult views of what constitutes a reasonable degree of safety and how unsafe behaviors are considered relative to the much more common proacademic and prosocial student behaviors that occur daily in schools. School safety stakeholders often read and interpret statistics reporting prevalence and incidence data. Prevalence is generally
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Overall School Behaviors School Violence, Disruption, and Problem Behaviors

School Disorder Outsider Adult Shootings at School School-Associated Shootings (e.g., Columbine)

Marginally Acceptable Behaviors

Theft

Serious Violent Crime Personal Attack

Appropriate, Positive, Engaged Behaviors

Bullying, Intimidation, Incivility

FIGURE 1. Conceptual representation of school disorder compared with overall student behaviors. Adapted from School violence and disruption by M. J. Mayer, 2008, SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology, pp. 880-888, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. given as the number (or rate) of incidents of a condition of interest (event or disease) present in a population at a given point in time. Incidence is generally given as the rate of new events emerging within a specified time frame, as in the instances of new disease outbreak annually, and represents the risk of experiencing the condition. As discussed by Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski, and Jimerson in this special issue of Educational Researcher (pp. 2737), the public could perceive schools as unsafe based on media reports of the incidence of school-based homicides (e.g., 21 during a particular year), although the actual prevalence of school-based homicides is extremely low (the typical school would experience such an occurrence once every 6,000 years). The school safety waters are further muddied when the concept of harma relative constructis considered. Do horrific school shootings, albeit rare, yet devastating for all involved, constitute a public health risk? Statistically, based on an average of 21 student deaths per year, nationally, from 1996 to 2006, the answer would likely be no and lead to the conclusion that schools are among the safest places for Americas youth (Modzeleski et al., 2008). However, this provides little consolation to the bereaved families, friends, teachers, and others affected, not to mention parents who fear that similar harm may befall their children while in school. Conversely, should widespread and long-term day-today bullying, intimidation, and incivility in schools be considered a serious public health risk factor? In this instance, the answer would probably be yes, based on recent data wherein 32% of secondary students reported being bullied at or around school (Dinkes et al., 2009) and several lines of research that point to pronounced long-term psychosocial harm to large numbers of affected youth (Arseneault et al., 2006; Bierman, 2004; Boxer, Edwards-Leeper, Goldstein, Musher-Eizenman, & Dubow, 2003; Ladd, 2003; Nansel et al., 2001). Thus far, the school safety field lacks consensus on how to approach these matters, and this situation is impeding movement toward forming a national safe school agenda. Despite limited consensus on essential school safety indicators, researchers have developed a picture of trends in school violence and disorder at the national level taken from multiple data sources, including but not limited to (a) School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), (b) School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS), (c) Center for Disease Controls (CDC) Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), and (d) Monitoring the Future Study. Data from these sources originate from local community officials (e.g., law enforcement), administrators, teachers, parents, students, and others and represent official and unofficial accounting of discrete or grouped incidents, personal experiences, lawand rule-breaking behavior, and so forth. Based on these and other sources such as school records and administrator records, schoolgenerated data can be used to monitor violations of school rules (e.g., fighting, bullying, theft); survey data can be used to assess victimization events (e.g., being physically attacked, threatened with a weapon); other data may address self-reports of student fear, anxiety, or avoidant behaviors (e.g., avoiding parts of the school building, missing school due to fears for personal safety). Examination of SCS trend data derived from personal interviews suggests major declines in school crime overall since around 1993, with some leveling off from 2001 to 2006 (see Figure 2). In contrast, the CDCs YRBSS data derived from anonymous school-based surveys show continuing or increasing problems during roughly the same period for high school students reports of having been threatened or injured with a weapon and missing school due to safety concerns (see Figure 3). In fact, contrary to other data suggesting sharp declines from 1993 onward in indicators of school safety problems, the CDCs Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) indicated, During 19932007, a significant linear increase occurred in the percentage of students who did not go to school because of safety concerns (4.4% 5.5%) (Eaton et al., 2008). When examining these findings in toto, how is it possible to conclude whether schools are becoming more or less safe over time or how safety indicators compare with some broadly accepted tolerance level? This question is addressed below in the section on major data trends. The situation presented in this section sets the stage for discussion of definitional and measurement issues, research-to-practice linkage, and making practical meaning for those in the trenchesparents, students,
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180 160 Rate per 1,000 students 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 At School 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 92 78 Year 72 74 73 61 64 55 73 60 55 48 56 46 63 49

144 155 150 135 121 102 101 Away From School 138 139 129 119 117 117 95

FIGURE 2. Rate of total crime against students ages 12 to 18, per 1,000 students, at and away from school, 19922006. Total crime includes theft, violent crime, and serious violent crime.

school personnel, education leaders, and local government grappling with school safety challenges. Definitional and Measurement Issues Federal, state, and local agencies collect, analyze, and report school violence data using highly variable methods, with data reflecting infractions of criminal law and/or school rules as well as victimization episodes (Leone, Mayer, Malmgren, & Meisel, 2000). For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation administers the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which provides general arrest data and the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which, as of September 2007, reported detailed incident data from 37% of law enforcement agencies, representing approximately 26% of reported crime nationally (Justice Research and Statistics Association, 2009). There are no standardized methods of collecting and reporting school-based crime incidents nationally, and most data come from anonymous self-report surveys that do not
12 Percentage of Respondents 95% C.I. 10 8 6 4 2 0 Threatened or Injured With a Weapon at School (past year) Missed School for Safety Concerns (past 30 days)

allow tracking specific respondents over time. For example, no national database provides a record of the same students school safetyrelated experiences annually throughout secondary school. Reporting driven by the No Child Left Behind law has been of limited value because of the variable approaches used across states and, in particular, the unrealistic standards adopted by many states linked to the persistently dangerous schools component of the Unsafe Schools Choice Option in the law (Mayer & Leone, 2007). For example, in the entire nation, only 52 schools in six states were classified as persistently dangerous in 20032004 (Snell, 2005). Testimony at a 2003 House Congressional Hearing indicated that the major cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Detroit, Cleveland, San Diego, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., had no persistently dangerous schools (United States, 2004). Above and beyond the impact of No Child Left Behind, problems exist nationally with several major violence data collection and reporting approaches.

1993 7.3 4.4

1995 8.4 4.5

1997 7.4 4

1999 7.7 5.2

2001 8.9 6.6 Year

2003 9.2 5.4

2005 7.9 6

2007 7.8 5.5

FIGURE 3. Results of Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey, 19932007.

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We believe that the low number of schools identified as persistently dangerous is also a byproduct of ambiguity and a lack of consensus over which safety indicators and databases are most salient and what is actually being measured. Crime incident data can lead to biased estimates of the extent of violent acts and number of perpetrators in a community because they reflect arrests, not adjudications and convictions, and do not include behaviors that escape law enforcement due to lack of detection, victims failure to report crimes, or system inability to pursue cases. Victimization self-reports via the NCVS are also vulnerable to problems, including sampling frame and instrumentation, and respondent errors, such as poor recall, comprehension difficulties, and telescoping effects (inaccurately recalling sooner or later than events occurred; Biemer, Groves, Lyberg, Mathiowetz, & Sudman, 1991). Major national surveys have demonstrated risk of bias driven by extreme response sets (responses that tend to be anchored at one part of a scale; Furlong, Sharkey, Bates, & Smith, 2004) and inferential limitations due to uses for which the surveys were never validated (Furlong & Sharkey, 2006). For example, citing work by Bachman and colleagues, Furlong and Sharkey reported on the Monitoring the Future Study, where validity of questions about substance use was not empirically established. Large-scale surveys tapping into similar domains can vary significantly with respect to analysis goals linked to instrumentation design and can produce data that are incongruent across differently defined and targeted populations, types of violence or disorder, and time frames (Leone et al., 2000; Reiss & Roth, 1993; Sharkey, Furlong, & Yetter, 2006). More localized surveys have demonstrated problems in terms of consistently following standardized administration protocols, directions to respondents differing across administrations, and local survey providers often being untrained and unprepared for survey administration (Cross & Newman-Gonchar, 2004). Beyond survey administration issues, there are problems with how results and other school safety data are organized, interpreted, and disseminated among schools and allied agencies. There is no uniform school safety data collection and recording framework, and practices vary, for example in the recording of duplicated versus unduplicated (e.g., counting multiple suspensions of a particular student as one suspension) counts and protocols for reporting based on individuals versus incidents. Systems-change initiatives (e.g., positive behavioral supports) that often use outcome measures such as office disciplinary referrals have been criticized for not necessarily capturing the most relevant data reflecting violence and disruption in a school (Morrison, Peterson, OFarrell, & Redding, 2004). Likewise, differing approaches to recording suspension data across school districts can result in reliability and validity problems, hindering meaningful interpretation (Morrison, Redding, Fisher, & Peterson, 2006). A noteworthy investigation in New York State uncovered serious underreporting of school violence in many schools, where about one third of a sample of audited schools failed to report approximately 80% of violent incidents (Office of the New York State Comptroller, 2006). The State of California, in fact, started formal school crime reporting twice, and both efforts were discontinued because it was evident that not all crimes were being reported and that reporting was influenced by administrator idiosyncratic interpretation of the reporting requirements (California Legislative Analyst Office, 2002).

Beyond considering definitional and measurement issues, questions emerge regarding linkage to theory. Linkage to Theoretical Models School safety and order encompass a wide range of student and adult behaviors and systemic processes, going beyond a narrower focus on school violence. Cross-cutting threads in school safety involve well-run schools with positive student engagement and outcomes and overall psychological and physical safety for all stakeholders. A reasonable expectation for researchers and other stakeholders in the social and behavioral sciences would be that major national surveys of important social issues (e.g., violence, drug use, health habits) would be linked to established theoretical foundations and well-conceived conceptual frameworks. But this is not necessarily the case. Johnston, OMalley, Schulenberg, and Bachman (2001) provided insightful discussion of how theory applied to drug abuse meshed more or less well with goals of the Monitoring the Future Survey. Several key points they raised with respect to drug use might be applied to violence and other socialpsychological concerns. First, the history of social and behavioral inquiry, including research on substance abuse, includes dozens of theoretical models and their derivatives, addressing (a) types of involvement; (b) stages of development; (c) sets of social, emotional, and behavioral factors purportedly linked to outcomes; (d) foundational theories of human behavior; and (e) units of measurement and analysis. Second, no theories are embraced by most of the field, and theory development remains in process. Third, citing comments of Merton (1957), Johnston et al. (2001) pointed to much of the research embracing middle-range theories that map to minor testable hypotheses; this research did not entail a coherent explanatory approach driving variable selection but, rather, a more general orientation to relevant variables. Fourth, citing Cattells (1966) description of an inductive-hypothetico-deductive spiral, Johnston et al. argued that in the absence of coherent theory, a somewhat more eclectic approach is necessary, where through iteration, particular theoretical positions drive specific empirical tests, which in turn influence refinement of theory. Taken as a group, these considerations suggest that the school violence field is developing in a manner similar to other areas of social-behavioral research, such as substance abuse, in that at present it lacks a unifying framework and is more often studied in a piecemeal fashion within discipline domainseducation, psychology, sociology, criminology, and public healththat communicate incompletely with one another. This theoretical fragmentation may contribute to the so-called research-to-practice gap. The desire to better understand the status of school safety is linked to future research, policy, funding, and programmatic implementation to address need. Developing theoretical coherence is critical for purposes of developing a system of meaning that informs research, practice, and planning for the future. For school violence and safety data collection and analysis, the interest often is focused on learning more about (a) victimization experiences; (b) characteristics of the individuals and schools; (c) systemic factors, such as how the schools system of rules is understood and implemented; (d) risk and protective factors across ecological levels; and (e) related contextual variables, such
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as neighborhood mobility or crime and violence in the local school community. Researchers are both constrained and liberated at times by their choice of theoretical approaches. More parsimonious approaches such as radical behaviorism may be useful for understanding discrete behaviors and related interventions but offer relatively little breadth and depth to inform the understanding of and responses to school safety needs. Highly eclectic approaches, while providing convenient lenses through which to view and consider diverse phenomena, lack theoretical coherence and can inhibit systematic research and development of effective prevention approaches. Researchers need to work with models that (a) propose theory that promotes understanding of complex social-emotional-behavioral issues, (b) provide a foundation for evidence-based interventions, and (c) support scientific investigation that is responsive to emerging knowledge and withstands the challenges of experimental science. These trade-offs map to researchers understanding of school violence data, especially when they seek fundamental meaning as well as integrity of analysis. Thinking About the Nature of Trend Data There are limited and incongruent national-level measurements of school violence and disorder that span considerably different time periods, making long-term trend analysis challenging. The School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects victimization and related data from student respondents, was administered in 1995, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007, with plans to continue biennial surveys. The larger NCVS survey, reported annually since 1972 (redesigned in 1992), which currently reaches a national probability sample of about 76,000 households, taps into more general crime victimization experiences of the overall adult U.S. population, as well as the experiences of secondary students. The National Center for Education Statistics School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS), which collects data from elementary and secondary administrators, was originally administered in the 19992000 school year, with biennial data collections, excepting the 20012002 school year. The CDCs Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), which collects information biannually from students in Grades 9 to 12, addresses a wide range of health- and safety-related behaviors, including behaviors related to school violence and victimization. The Monitoring the Future annual survey of high school seniors, beginning in 1976, includes questions on student victimization experiences at school (with data on 8th- and 10th-grade students from 1991 onward). Other related information is available from the Schools and Staffing Survey, which includes teacher reports of school climate and specific problems at school such as physical attack and threats on teachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009). Recent reports from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice have documented significant declines in school violence and disorder since the early 1990s (Dinkes et al., 2007). We opened the door to this discussion earlier, suggesting that from about 1993 to 1999 there were striking declines in recorded school crime (see Figure 2), whereas other indicators suggested less pronounced changes or even increases (see Figure 3). Some of the trend differences across surveys can be understood as a function of previously discussed definitional and measurement
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issues, as well as respondent ages, response coding rules, and patterns of concordance of different surveys over time. Stakeholders examining year-to-year changes in data need to be mindful of point versus interval estimates (e.g., means and confidence intervals). Statistics from national school safety surveys using probability samples include interval estimates that are driven by standard error. Although it is tempting to read the data as point estimates, this can be misleading. For instance, the 25% increase in serious violent crime from 201,800 in 1997 to 252,700 in 1998 seems noteworthy but is statistically nonsignificant at the .05 level as a result of high standard errors. Other factors must also be considered when evaluating trend data for change. Major national surveys reviewed here use complex sampling designs (clustering, stratification, and unequal selection probability weighting) that can entail multiple methods for calculating the standard error of statistics, which are typically larger than those of a simple random sample due to the design effect (the ratio of the variance of a statistic under a particular sample design to the variance of that statistic under simple random sampling for a sample of equal size; Kish, 1964; Kish & Frankel, 1974). This, in turn, affects interpretation of change. Do seeming contradictions in trends based on different indicator variables constitute a problem, or are they a benefit, helping investigators better understand disparate aspects of school safety? Rand and Rennison (2002) discussed apparent contradictions between a NCVS-reported 15% drop in crime from 1999 to 2000 and a Uniform Crime Reporting Program report showing year 2000 figures at a stable level compared with previous year data. They noted that year-to-year changes in violent crimes across the two surveys moved in the same direction about 60% of the time. Rand and Rennison identified multiple aspects of the surveys that accounted for differing statistics on crime, including who was being measured, counting rules for multiple victims versus incidents, victimization measurement of persons versus households, and protocols for recording a series of victimizations. For example, if a student was victimized several times in one day by the same bully perpetrator, should this be recorded as a single victimization or several? Protocols can vary. In addition, socialenvironmental factors may contribute to differential reporting behaviors regarding crime and victimization, such as crime victims perception of system responses to their reports. Meaning and utilitynot just beautyrests in the eye of the beholder, particularly when public policy issues are involved. Above and beyond the topical content focus of a data collection system are the end users who dictate relevance and utility. Justice system officials developing policy, legislators addressing crime, law enforcement officials developing interventions, and criminologists studying these issues all would be interested in officially reported crime data to support their efforts. Epidemiologists studying patterns of violence, policy makers developing a national strategic agenda, lawmakers approving funding, and local human services agencies providing support programs are each uniquely dependent on victimization data collected through surveys. Specific survey data efforts such as the CDCs YRBSS may better support the work of epidemiologists than the needs of federal, state, and local policy makers trying to respond to violence and disruption in the schools. The YRBSS can help track the emergence and development of targeted risk behaviors of interest,

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much like a disease outbreak, and includes a number of school safetyrelated questions. However, it lacks the more comprehensive data collection tools that would be useful for designing school safety programming that spans ecological levels, addressing not only individual and interpersonal phenomena but systemic processes as well. Data collection that is well linked to a theoretical framework will tend to support the work of researchers aligned with that framework but may not necessarily provide valuable data for other stakeholders. This relates to a broader theme in multiple areas of educational, social, and behavioral research, where the linkage among theory, research-driven data collection, and practice can differ dramatically between researchers and practitioners. For example, researchers may design an intervention for students with learning disabilities that does not address the practical needs identified by teachers (MacMillan & Speece, 1999). Likewise, a school violence prevention researcher studying a new intervention in anger management would tend to focus on experimental conditions that may not align well with students ability to learn and use new anger management techniques and may not mesh well into the daily processes and procedures of schools (Mayer & Van Acker, 2008). Research-based data collectionhaving critical impact on research analysis and subsequent practicecan be designed for highly divergent researcher or practitioner needs. This leaves the concerned stakeholder with awareness that data collection and analysis systems are anything but unified and that they serve various purposes, often providing an incomplete view of what is happening in schools. These informational windows can overlap while retaining somewhat unique foci, with specific indicators providing different insights into day-to-day life at school. Current Indicators: What Is Going on in Schools? We return to the core question: How safe are our schools? We will focus on indicators from the NCVS and SCS, the CDC YRBSS, and the Monitoring the Future Study. NCVS data from 2006 show that student-reported violent crime in secondary schools including simple assault and serious violent crimes of rape, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assaultwas 29 per 1,000 students (Dinkes et al., 2009). In addition, these data varied by gender, race, age, and urbanicity. For the same year, the violent victimization rate was 32 and 25 per 1,000, for males and females, respectively (with no statistically significant differences for gender). Violent victimization rates per 1,000 students ages 12 to 18 at school were 27, 32, 26, and 44, for students reported as White, Black, Hispanic, and Other, respectively, where Other denoted students reported as Asians, Pacific Islanders, American Indians (including Alaska Natives), and those of more than one race. However, the differences of White, Black, and Hispanic each compared with Other were nonsignificant, and there were no significant differences among the first three categories of race. Younger students ages 12 to 14 experienced higher levels of victimization, compared with older students, ages 15 to 18, at 35 versus 23 incidents per 1,000 (p < .05). Violent victimization rates in schools for 2005, across urban, suburban, and rural settings were 34, 19, and 21 per 1,000, respectively, and urban schools were significantly higher than schools in other settings (p < .05). Data from the 2007 NCVS SCS on bullying/peer victimization show that almost 80% of students who reported being bullied at

school indicated that it took place inside school, as opposed to outside the building on school grounds, on the bus, or elsewhere. In 2007, 32% of secondary students reported being bullied at or around school during the prior 6 months, with 11% of students reporting that they had been pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on, and 8.8% reporting having been injured. As was the case with violent victimization, a larger percentage of younger students reported being bullied, with percentages ranging from 42.9% of 6th-grade students to 23.5% of 12th-grade students. Rates of bullying in 2005 were similar in suburban and rural schools (28.9% and 29.0%, respectively), with slightly lower values in urban schools (26.0%) and no statistically significant differences between any pair of settings. Urbanicity data were not publicly released for the 2007 NCVS survey due to methodological redesign. Percentages of White, Black, and Other students bullied were similar (34.6%, 30.9%, and 34.6%, respectively, nonsignificant), with lower values for Hispanic and Asian students (27.6% and 18.1%, respectively). Reported percentages for White students were significantly different compared with Hispanic (p < .001) and Asian (p < .0001) students, and percentages for Black students were significantly different from those for Asian students (p < .001). Males and females reported being bullied (30.6% and 33.7%, respectively) at different levels (p < .05). A growing body of research has demonstrated that above and beyond the harmful effects of bullying (Arseneault et al., 2006; Ladd, 2003; Nansel et al., 2001), students psychological wellbeing is affected negatively by constant low-level aggression in schools and an overall atmosphere of incivility (Boxer et al., 2003; Skiba et al., 2004; Thomas, Bierman, & the Conduct Problems Prevention Research Group, 2006). Mayer (in press) found evidence across multiple NCVS SCS data sets of day-today low-level aggressive behaviors of intimidation and incivility in school accounting for a much larger part of students anxiety, fear, and avoidant behaviors compared with a model incorporating less frequent, and high-profile, theft and personal attack. CDC YRBSS data indicate continuing problems in schools with students threatened or injured with a weapon at school. Rates have remained relatively stable from 1993 to 2007; in 2007, 7.8% of students in Grades 9 to 12 reported being threatened or injured with a weapon at school during the preceding 12 months. The percentages reported by males (10.2%) were significantly higher compared with females (5.4%; p < .0001). Percentage rates for 9th-grade students (9.2%) were about 50% more than that of 12th-grade students (6.3%), with the difference highly significant (p < .01). Some significant differences existed across racial and ethnic groups, with reported percentages for White students at 6.9%; Black, 9.7%; Hispanic, 8.7%; and Asian, 7.6%. Significant differences were present in percentage rates between White and both Black (p < .01) and Hispanic students (p < .05; data parsed by urbanicity were unavailable for 2007). What about more general threats of harm to students? Monitoring the Future survey results show that from 1976 to 1996, about 20% to 25% of high school seniors reported being threatened without a weapon (no injury involved). Data from 2007 show little change, with 26.1% of seniors reporting receiving threats without a weapon (no injury involved), with disaggregated data showing males (30.5%) and females (21.2%), and Whites (26.3%) compared with Blacks (27.0%).
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These highlights taken from national surveys point to continuing safety problems in schools. Some of these indicators are at less than half the levels seen in the early 1990s, when school violence was considered by many as having reached epidemic levels (Elliott et al., 1998), which suggests that progress has been made toward the reduction of school violence incidents. However, there is no definitive proof of what drove the reductions, and other statistics have remained fairly consistent. As a group, these data suggest that significant violence, bullying, and related threatening and intimidating behaviors continue in schools (Mayer, in press), a circumstance associated with students experiencing fear and anxiety and altered academic and social-emotional trajectories (see Cornell & Mayer, this issue). While considering these data on school violence and disorder, it may be instructive to consider an analogy to the harm caused to children by child abuse and neglect. The literature in psychiatry, psychology, education, social work, and juvenile justice paints a general picture of great difficulties children experience as a result of multiple forms of abuse and neglect (Johnson, Cohen, Brown, Smailes, & Bernstein, 1999; Keiley, Howe, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 2001). Research on resilience (Luthar & Cicchetti, 2000; Masten et al., 1999; McGloin & Widom, 2001) suggests that some factors act as buffers or sources of protection that reduce the odds of having deleterious developmental outcomes. There is general agreement regarding the likelihood of harm from severe abuse. However, the effects for children who experience chronic, long-term neglect, although overlapping, are somewhat different. Children who experience neglect over the long haul are generally at elevated risk for poor academic performance, developing limited social communication skills, experiencing poor peer relations, and having some degree of emotional-behavioral difficulties (Hildyard & Wolfe, 2002; Kendall-Tackett& Eckenrode, 1996; Widom & Maxfield, 1996). The harm is real. Yet social systems aimed at protecting children from abuse and neglect may not respond as well in such instances because (a) much of the damage occurs very slowly over time, (b) there is no highly tangible evidence of harm (e.g., bruises on the body) often associated with physical abuse, and (c) the systemic resources required to ameliorate such long-term neglect are more extensive and require long-term strategic approaches. Much like instances of obvious severe physical and sexual abuse, the educational and community systems respond quickly and decisively to instances of extreme violence in the schools (e.g., school shootings). The harm is clearly evident, but the systems try to stabilize the situation through crisis intervention to make sure no further harm occurs as a result of the violence. Despite the attention that incidents of deadly violence have received, situations of serious but not life-threatening disruption or violence are more common, and more difficult for educational systems to address. In fact, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a student claiming harm resulting from chronic harassment at school that school authorities did not adequately address. In light of this ruling, it is possible to consider these ongoing day-to-day problems as constituting a form of systemic educational neglect when not meaningfully addressed. Like neglect on an individual level, the persistence in schools of lower level bullying, harassment, threatening behaviors, and incivility is more difficult for
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systems to resolve. As is the case with prolonged neglect, there can be serious long-term harm to children who attend schools where such toxic climates exist. But is the situation in schools a stand-alone concern, or is it linked to the larger community in which the school is situated? We next consider several related community-based factors. Community Factors: Gangs, Guns, and Infusion of Community Violence Into Schools Schools exist within and connected to local communities, where effects of gang activity, access to guns, and neighborhood violence can intrude on schools. Youth gang members age range varies, with most members in their early teens to mid-twenties. Youth gang violence affects urban, suburban, and rural communities, with noted problems in a number of inner-city environments. Results from the 2006 National Youth Gang Survey indicate that in 2006 law enforcement in 3,400 cities (population of 2,500 or more) reported gang problems. National estimates for 2006 point to more than 26,000 youth gangs and 785,000 youth gang members (U.S. Department of Justice, 2008). Percentage of law enforcement reporting gangs ranged from about 15% in rural counties to 51% in suburban counties and 86% in larger cities. Youth gang members are at increased risk for violent victimization, as well as engagement in more delinquent and violent behaviors, compared with nongang members (Gatti, Tremblay, Vitaro, & McDuff, 2005; Thornberry, Huizinga, & Loeber, 2004), with routine behaviors of drug and/or alcohol involvement mediating the link between gang membership and risk for increased victimization (Taylor, Freng, Esbensen, & Peterson, 2008). Summarizing key results from the Rochester Youth Development Study and the Denver Youth Survey, Thornberry, Huizinga, and Loeber (2004) reported that, in the Rochester study, using longitudinal data based on a sample of elementary and middle school students at risk for delinquency, male and female gang members accounted for 63% of all delinquent behaviors (not counting gang fights). In the related Denver study, gang members accounted for 80% of all serious and violent crime in the sample. Exposure to community violence among youthsometimes involving gangshas been linked to development of posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, reduced self-esteem, and avoidant behaviors (Lynch, 2003; Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998; Margolin & Gordis, 2000). Guns have played a key role in community and school-related violence and are a deeply embedded part of American culture. The United States has among the highest rates of firearm-related deaths for youth and adults among industrialized nations (Mercy, Krug, Dahlberg, & Zwi, 2003). According to data from the CDC WISQARS (Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System), 2,958 children and adolescents, ages 5 to 19, were killed by firearms in the United States in 2005some were suicides and some of the homicides involved adult perpetrators of teen victims. Of these deaths, approximately 14 were schoolrelated homicides. Questions emerge as to the circumstances surrounding gun access and usage in these school shootings. Many of these issues are addressed later in this special issue in the article by Borum and colleagues concerning school shootings. Here, we highlight what is known about youth access to guns. Several factors have been linked to juvenile access to guns and child and adolescent gun-related deaths: (a) illegal gun markets

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(Braga & Kennedy, 2001); (b) prevalence of local firearm ownership, accounting for 47% of the variance in firearm-related youth deaths (Murnan, Dake, & Price, 2004); (c) increased likelihood of having loaded and unlocked guns at home among families in communities with high crime and gang activity (Vacha & McLaughlin, 2004); (d) widespread practice, in homes with children (2 million or more), of storing loaded and unlocked guns (Okoro et al., 2005; Schuster, Franke, Bastian, Sor, & Halfon, 2000); (e) higher weapon-carrying rates among inner-city youth, compared with suburban and rural youth, in school and community (Sheley, McGee, & Wright, 1995); and (f ) relatively easy availability of firearms, per student self-reports (Brown, 2004; Sheley & Wright, 1998). Clearly, managing gun access by youth is a national-, state-, and community-level challenge far beyond the purview of schools. What is known about the infusion of community-level violence into the schools? Most school violence studies have focused on school or student characteristics but have not concurrently analyzed data across multiple levels of the ecology (Watkins, 2008). Three recent studies addressed this issue. Welsh, Greene, and Jenkins (1999) studied communities and schools in Philadelphia, finding that schools could offer programming that mitigated the harmful effects of community violence and that schools were not necessarily at the mercy of nearby community violence. That study, which received methodological criticism (Hoffman & Johnson, 2000), stood somewhat alone until a study of schools in Chicago addressed similar issues (Kirk, 2006). The Chicago study likewise found that schools could be successful while embedded in a community experiencing high violence rates, with school program effects operating somewhat independent of community factors. The research also identified the ameliorative role of families active participation in school activities and administrationan outcome negatively associated with poverty (Evans, 2004)and found an association of reduced delinquency with increased academic engagement of students. Watkins (2008) examined community, school, and student influences on weapon carrying in school, analyzing survey responses from a subset of students in Grades 8 to 12 from the 19941995 administration of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The analysis, while having limitations, showed no systematic relation between student weapon carrying and surrounding community poverty, residential turnover, and community violent crime. The previous discussions suggest the need for continued research to better explain factors and processes across ecological levels. There may be more questions than answers regarding school violence, what is going on in Americas schools, and what can be done about it. Unanswered Questions and Next Steps in Research, Policy, and Practice Although there are dozens of unanswered questions about school violence and disorder and the current safety of schools, it is important to identify a core set as high-priority targets. These questions pertain to this articles focus on the overall safety of schools but go further to address other concerns associated with school safety. Here we identify five key questions that we argue

should take priority in a strategic agenda for research, policy, and practice in the coming years. 1. What are the standards of risk for harm, and how should they be defined? Earlier sections of this article posed questions about acceptable risk based on daily or annual probabilities of being victimized or otherwise experiencing harm. The field needs to begin the gradual process of developing a consensus for a framework with which it can address risk of harm to students in a manner that bridges the needs of all relevant constituentsstatistical analysts, researchers embracing varying theoretical frameworks, policy makers, educational leaders, teachers and allied school and agency professionals, and parents and other stakeholders. These standards of risk not only need to satisfy the technical requirements of research but must map in a meaningful way to those of the people making decisions about how to keep schools safe and must resonate with families and others on a commonsense level. 2. What are acceptable and unacceptable degrees of risk, and how do they mesh with societal commitment to address the risk? It is easy to do a little historical research in education, going back to formative debates and legislative enactment surrounding Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and similar initiatives for change. Virtually every such initiative has avoided the politically hot topic of setting a less-than-perfect goal and has unrealistically sought 100% attainment of a goal (reading achievement, school safety, etc.). Does seeking perfection automatically set schools and communities up not only for failure but for a process where stakeholders tend to rationalize away seemingly unobtainable goals? Effective planning is usually linked to attainable goals. Educators and policy makers do not know what acceptable risk means with regard to school safety, nor do they have a way of defining what they really expect to do about it. Collectively, there is a need to begin asking these questions. 3. What should be measured, how should it be measured, and to what does it connect? Measurement of school safety not only must link to the previous two questions but must provide meaningful information to all stakeholders. Research, policy, and practice should be linked to some type of theoretical orientation, as discussed earlier in the article. Federal agencies managing the major surveys relating to school safety (NCVS, SCS, YRBSS, SSOCS) are not following an approach that reflects a common need to inform research, policy, and practice. It would be difficult to argue that these efforts theoretically align with the common research orientations used by allied disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences that address at-risk youth and related factors. The next steps are to articulate a transdisciplinary framework that can better meet these measurement objectives. 4. What are the primary research questions and the methodologies to answer them? There needs to be a strategic plan (in our view, within a 10-year completion cycle) developed by the field to suggest key areas to be researched and generally preferred methodological approaches for that research. One of the problems thus far has been the disorganization and lack of coherence in the field, resulting in fragmented, duplicated, and inefficient efforts. Federal agencies, foundations, and others supporting research in school safety should have a guidepost by which to formulate
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longer term planning and foster efficient use of scarce resources. Researchers, although free to pursue any research questions of interest and concern, should be able to work in a more coordinated way tackling what most consider the high-priority unanswered questions. Toward this end, the major federal agencies and allied professional organizations could establish a combined interagency and transdisciplinary task force whose charge over a period of 18 to 24 months would be to establish a 10-year agenda for moving school safety research forward. 5. What future structures and approaches will help not only bridge the research-to-practice gap but promote increased effectiveness and synergy across research, policy, and practice? Paradigm shifts and systems change hold the potential to drive longer term improvements where our collective efforts bear richer fruits. For example, the early work of the Child and Adolescent Service System Program in the 1980s and subsequent Systems of Care approaches represent a confluence of streams of change in empirical research, policy development, and service delivery systems over the past 30 yearsalbeit a painfully slow process. School safety efforts could benefit from taking some historical lessons (what worked well and not so well) from the 30-year Systems of Care saga (Stroul, 2002). Similarly, there are some valuable lessons to be gained by examining the challenges and successes of the now more than 400 schools that have implemented multiyear projects via the Federal Safe Schools/Health Student Initiative (Furlong, Paige, & Osher, 2003; Furlong, Sharkey, Felix, & Osher, 2007). The proposed taskforce to address Question 4 could also be given the task of addressing this question. Conclusion In this article we asked, How safe are our schools? We found that the extant data show that the safety of Americas schools has improved over the past decade but that significant concerns remain with regard to violence, theft, bullying, and intimidation, and associated harm to students. In addition, there exist neither standards for assessing the degree of seriousness of problem student behaviors nor standards of harm that distinguish between crisis events or experiences and chronic low-level victimization. Determination of what constitutes safety remains fluid and relative. Discussion of related issuesgeneral public awareness of school safety, taking meaning from current statistics, challenges working with trend data, mechanisms of survey data collection and analysis, theory-research-practice linkages, and school community factorsunderscored the many facets driving answers to the core question of safety. Most noteworthy, discussion of the third unanswered question in the previous section ended with a call for a transdisciplinary theoretical approach. The field has been driven by many midrange theories, but among the most prominent models are social-ecological, developmental, social information processing, and public health. Future progress depends on advances in theory, including ways to combine our most useful conceptual frameworks. We concluded that there must be a coherent national agenda that better focuses efforts to understand school safety challenges and more effectively bridges the research-to-practice gap. A first step in that direction is to identify key questions and launch a longer term national strategic plan.
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As with Americas broader societal ills, school violence and disruption will likely remain a concern for years. Stakeholders (research, policy, practice, and concerned community members) are interdependent, and long-term solutions will require improved collaboration and shared investment. Collectively, there is need to identify and address key unanswered questions that will inform future actions making schools safer. Finally, it will be critical to articulate a practical and achievable vision for linking research, policy, and practice toward those ends.
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AUTHORS

MATTHEW J. MAYER is an assistant professor of educational psychology in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, 10 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901; mayerma@rutgers.edu. His research includes analyzing national data and modeling school violence and disruption processes. MICHAEL J. FURLONG is a professor the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; mfurlong@education .ucsb.edu. His research focuses on school violence prevention research. He is the editor of the Journal of School Violence. Manuscript received June 23, 2009 Revision received November 4, 2009 Accepted November 4, 2009

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