Violence directed against teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic: A social–ecological analysis of safety and well-being.

Abstract

Violence against teachers is a public health crisis that has devastating effects on school personnel well-being, health, and retention, as well as students’ educational outcomes. In collaboration with national organizations, the American Psychological Association Task Force on Violence against Educators conducted the first national survey on educator victimization that included 4,136 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers from all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico during the pandemic. In the current study, 43.7% of teachers reported experiencing at least one verbal threat, physical assault, and/or property damage, with verbal threats being the most prevalent form of victimization during the pandemic. Using a social–ecological framework and logistic regression analyses, characteristics of teachers, school climate, and school organizational and community factors were examined as predictors of teacher victimization (i.e., verbal threats, physical, property violence) during the pandemic. Findings revealed that teacher role (i.e., special educators), negative and positive dimensions of school climate, as well as school organizational and community factors (i.e., percent of students receiving free and reduced lunch, instructional modality, school level, and urbanicity) significantly predicted greater teacher victimization. While findings revealed that in-person instruction significantly predicted teacher violence across aggressors, teacher victimization was reported across instructional modality (in-person, hybrid, remote). Results offer insights into possible contextual antecedents to teacher victimization, sense of safety, and well-being in schools. Implications for research and school practice are presented.

Teacher Victimization by Students, Their Parents, and School Staff: Prevalence and Links with Teachers’ Life Satisfaction in a Lithuanian Sample

“…and life satisfaction, the findings support the assumption that teacher victimization could negatively affect their life satisfaction. However, the cross-sectional design of this study limits making definitive causal claims and indicates that this assumption, to some extent evidenced in previous research [10,34,73,106], requires validation through stronger, longitudinal designs.…”

Addressing violence against educators: What do teachers say works?

“…Second, the Cronbach’s α for exclusionary discipline was, while acceptable, rather low (.67). We retained the factor for theoretical reasons, in line with other studies using this construct (Reddy et al, 2023). Third, while all U.S. states are represented in this data set, the sample is not truly nationally representative, as the likelihood of responding may have been influenced by teacher safety and well-being.…”

“…Responses were then dichotomized to represent whether one of the violence items in each set occurred at least once (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0), summed based on the theoretical factor structure, and again dichotomized to represent whether respondents experienced each violence type (e.g., verbal/threatening, physical, or property) at least once (coded as 1) or not (coded as 0). This procedure was adopted to be in line with other studies examining teacher victimization (Reddy et al, 2023), as well as examining the presence or absence of victimization behaviors that occur at low frequencies (e.g., physical assault).…”

“…Regression analyses controlled for four teacher characteristics (gender, race, years of experience, and role [i.e., general education, special education, specialists]) and two school characteristics (urbanicity [i.e., rural, suburban, and urban] and school level [i.e., elementary, middle school, etc.]). These covariates were included as they have been linked to violence against teachers in prior studies (Reddy et al, 2018(Reddy et al, , 2023, and thus, controlling for these variables could offer a more robust understanding of the association between school practices and violence against teachers. Gender (female = 0, male = 1), race (White = 0, Black = 1, Hispanic = 2, Asian = 3, multiracial = 4), role (general education = 0, special education = 1, specialist = 2), urbanicity (rural = 0, suburban = 1, urban = 2), and school level (pre-K-sixth = 0, pre-K-ninth = 1, middle school = 2, high school = 3, all grades = 4) were all dummy-coded prior to analyses.…”

Teacher Diversity as Interest Convergence? A Cautionary Note

“…This only worsened during the pandemic, wherein K-12 educators were most likely of all public sector employees to report anxiety, stress, and burnout (Mission Square Research Institute 2021). Furthermore, Reddy et al (2023) declared violence against teachers to be a "public health crisis." Using a national survey of Pre-K-to-12th grade teachers, their analysis showed that 43.7% of educators experienced at least one verbal threat, physical assault, and/or property damage, with teachers in urban communities reporting higher rates of verbal and threatening violence.…”