Racial Tensions and School Crime

Abstract

This article uses data on school crime and other characteristics from a study of U.S. public schools to contribute to our knowledge about the extent and correlates of school violence and property crime. Following a brief review of the literature, the authors describe their efforts to examine the link between racial tensions and school crime. Relying on the macro version of general strain theory (GST) developed by Agnew and racial contact/threat perspectives on school race relations, a more specific purpose for their article is to determine the extent to which school-based crime is at least a partial function of extant racial tensions in schools. Analyses of violent and property-related incidents across a weighted sample of 1,936 middle and high schools indicate that racial tensions is a significant, positive correlate of both types of school crime, net of other school climate, organizational, and demographic characteristics. They discuss these findings and describe directions for future research with these data.

Unequally Safe

“…One way that racial tension in school may shape feelings of safety is by increasing school-based crime. Prior research finds racial inequality and tension to be positively correlated with school crime after controlling for school climate and demographic characteristics (Eitle & Eitle, 2004;Maume, Kim-Godwin, & Clements, 2010).…”

The Role of Technology in Improving K-12 School Safety

“…Children from higher socioeconomic status (SES) families have been found to have a lower likelihood of being disciplined for student-and teacher-directed violence (Taylor, Davis-Kean, and Malan-chuk, 2007) and self-reported weapon-carrying (Coggeshall and Kingery, 2001;Wilcox and Clayton, 2001), yet several other studies have found no effect of family SES on involvement in suspendable offenses (Cavanaugh, 2009) and weapon-carrying (Cao, Zhang, and He, 2008;Horner, Rew, and Brown, 2012;Marsh and Evans, 2007;Wilcox, May, and Roberts, 2006) after accounting for other covariates. Although the proportion of students in poverty has a positive relationship to administrator-reported rates of school violence in several studies (Maume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010;Veliz and Shakib, 2012), this finding may be attributable to greater rates of disciplinary actions taken by school officials rather than actual violence as reported by students (Klein and Cornell, 2010). In general, researchers have not found that poverty is related to student victimization (Carbone-Lopez, Esbensen, and Brick, 2010;Koo, Peguero, and Shekarkhar, 2012;Peguero, 2013;Peguero and Jiang, 2014); however, one study found that it was positively associated with female (but not male) victimization (Peguero and Popp, 2012).…”

“…School disengagement (e.g., student absenteeism, 7 low test scores, dropping out) is positively related to rates of school violence (Eitle and Eitle, 2003;Maume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010). In addition, aggregate racial tensions are positively associated with school-level violent incidents (Maume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010).…”

“…The relationship of school demographic composition to violence is unclear. Taking multiple characteristics of the schools into account together, several studies have found that there is more violence in schools with a greater proportion of nonwhites (Eitle and Eitle, 2003;Klein and Cornell, 2010;Veliz and Shakib, 2012), whereas other studies have found that measures of racial heterogeneity or other indexes of diversity within a student body have generally been unrelated to school violence (Klein and Cornell, 2010, for threats;Maume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010). Studies have also found no relationship (Gottfredson and DiPietro, 2011;Peguero, 2013) or a negative relationship (Peguero and Jiang, 2014) between the racial or ethnic composition of the school and student-reported victimization.…”

“…Category definitions are based on population size and distance from principal cities, urbanized areas, and urban clusters. For more details see National Center for Education Statistics, undated.6 There is weak support that area/neighborhood characteristics are associated with school violence(Eitle and Eitle, 2003;Clark and Lab, 2000;Maume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010), although for discussions on, and challenges to, the causal effects of urbanicity on school violence, seeMaume, Kim-Godwin, and Clements, 2010;Veliz and Shakib, 2012;and Klein and Cornell, 2010.…”