Amanda K. Miller and Kathryn Chandler, National Center for Education StatisticsOctober 2003
Recall the recent flap about states (with rare exceptions) reporting that few or none of their public schools are "persistently dangerous"? (See, for example, http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=04Dangerous.h23&keywords=%22persistently%20dangerous%22.) Remember the sarcastic comments that followed, as in, "Try telling the parents of the south Bronx and eastern Brooklyn that there are only two persistently dangerous schools in all of New York State"? And the obvious conclusion: that leaving it to states to devise their own definitions of dangerous schools and their own methods of tabulating such data is a formula for uneven underreporting? If you need more convincing, look at this valuable new NCES report on school violence in 1999-2000. (Another source of danger to the Republic is that it takes NCES three years to produce such studies, but that's a different issue.) In this case, principals did the reporting, Westat conducted the survey (a sample of 2270 elementary, middle and high schools), and the definitions were clear and uniform. What we learn could justly be termed chilling: 71 percent of public schools had at least one "violent incident" during that school year, 20 percent had a least one SERIOUS incident (rape, attacks with weapons, robbery, etc.), and 7 percent of the schools accounted for half of the total (1,466,000) violent incidents that occurred. It seems reasonable to conclude that at least seven percent of U.S. public schools might fairly be described as dangerous. That's roughly 6,000 schools. If you confine it to the 2 percent of schools that account for half the SERIOUS violent incidents, we're still talking 1,700 schools. Of course, one would never know that from the NCLB data reported by states. But you'll learn plenty more from this lengthy, technical NCES study, including lots about the characteristics of schools that are and aren't associated with high levels of violence. You can find it on-line at http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2004314