Last September, 44 states and the District of Columbia reported that they had no schools they considered "persistently dangerous," a classification required under NCLB - this despite NCES data released in October 2003 showing that 7 percent of schools in the nation - or roughly 6,000 - accounted for half of the almost 1.5 million violent incidents in schools that occurred in 1999-2000 (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=121#1524). Yet according to states' own definitions of what it means to be persistently dangerous, only 54 schools in the nation - the vast majority in Philadelphia - were so labeled. Now we discover that, according to statistics from the National School Safety and Security Services, the school year that just ended was one of the deadliest in more than a decade. According to preliminary data on school violence, there were 48 school-related violent deaths last year, more than the last two school years combined. And, interestingly, despite Philadelphia's higher-than-average number of persistently dangerous schools, just two of these occurred in the City of Brotherly Love. Further, of the 274 nonfatal school-related shootings and other violent incidents this year, just five were in Philadelphia schools. Clearly, as our own Checker Finn noted last October, "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."
"48 school deaths highest in years; Law enforcement cites gangs, budget cuts," by Greg Toppo, USA Today, June 29, 2004
"States report few schools as dangerous," by Erik W. Robelen, Education Week, September 24, 2003