Lisa Snell, Reason Foundation
January 2005
This short but useful report exposes yet another game states play to avoid the spirit of No Child Left Behind: finding ways to label few or none of their schools as "persistently dangerous" - partly because students are supposed to be given exit visas from such schools. In 2003-2004, if you believe these state reports, only 52 schools in America were dangerous, including none in New York City or California, not even the schools where "three male students . . . forced a girl into a closet and sexually assaulted her," or "a student . . . smashed his ex-girlfriend's head through a trophy case." (Click here for more.) Though this report won't solve this particular NCLB problem, other than perhaps to shame the least honest states, it does offer a number of suggestions to reduce violence in schools - the point, after all, of this provision. A starting point is to create incentives for schools to reduce crime. If better data were available to parents about crime at each school, and if parents were able to exercise real choice among schools, market forces would focus schools' attention on this problem. For school leaders already focused, Snell suggests the "broken windows" approach that has been credited with reducing ordinary crime in New York City: promptly address the little things that go wrong so as to create an environment less conducive to more serious crimes. There's no proof yet that this works in schools, but it could hardly be worse than the usual approach, which is to adopt every crime prevention fad or violence-reduction nostrum and add massive amounts of security. Snell also argues for smaller schools, which are usually less violent. Of course the data are muddied by the number of small private and parochial schools, but the results seem to hold even after controlling for factors like poverty. Whichever strategy is chosen, we owe it to our children to reduce the 5.4 percent of students who skipped school for safety concerns and the 9 percent who were threatened or injured by a weapon in school in 2003. This accessible and useful report is available online at www.rppi.org/ps330.pdf.
