School Violence

A Timely book for educators: Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence

Mark H. Moore, Carol V. Petrie, Anthony A. Braga, and Brenda L. McLaughlin, Editors; National Research Council

In this book, experts from a range of disciplines use a variety of perspectives (including criminology, ecology, and developmental psychology) to review the latest research on the causes of youth violence in the nation's schools and communities and on school-based interventions that have prevented or reduced it. They describe and evaluate strategies for the prevention and treatment of violence that go beyond punishment and incarceration. The book offers a new strategy for the problem of youth violence, arguing that the most effective interventions use a comprehensive, multi disciplinary approach and take into account differences in stages of individual development and involvement in overlapping social contexts, families, peer groups, schools, and neighborhoods.

School shootings, like the one at Columbine High School, have placed much attention on violence in the nation's schools. This example of Columbine suggested a growing fear that these events would continue to occur - and perhaps even escalate in scale and severity.

Can we make sense of the tragedy of a school shooting and draw objective conclusions from this and similar incidents? Deadly Lessons is the outcome of the National Research Council's effort to learn lessons from six case studies of lethal student violence. They are powerful stories of parent, teachers and troubled youths, presenting the complexity of a young shooter's social and personal circumstances in much detail.

The cases presented in this book point to possible causes of violence and suggest where interventions may be most effective. The reader will come away with a better understanding of the potential threat, how violence might be prevented, and how healing might be promoted in affected communities.

For each of the six case studies, Deadly Lessons summarizes events leading up to the violence, provides details from personal interviews about the incident, and examines the impact on the community. The case studies include:

• Two separate incidents in New York in which three students were killed and a teacher was seriously wounded.
• A shooting on the south side of Chicago in which one youth was killed and two wounded.
• A shooting into a prayer group at a Kentucky high school in which three students were killed.
• The killing of four students and a teacher and the wounding of ten others at an Arkansas middle school.
• The shooting of a popular science teacher by a teenager in Pennsylvania.
• A suspected copycat of Columbine in which six students were wounded in Georgia

For educators who are concerned about these terrible incidents, Deadly Lessons offers a fresh perspective on the most fundamental of questions: Why?

For more information one might look to the National Center for Educational Statistics. They have published their findings from the School Survey on Crime and Safety in Crime and Safety in America's Public Schools. This report presents an analysis of the 2000 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS). SSOCS is a nationally representative sample of public elementary and secondary schools. Principals were asked about the amount of crime and violence, disorder, disciplinary actions, violence prevention programs, teacher and parent involvement in prevention efforts, crime and safety practice, crisis management plans, and barriers to school safety. While the SSOCS collects a wide variety of information, this report provides national estimates on the major topics covered in SSOCS.

A cautionary note: In an article entitled Monster Hype by Joel Best (professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware and the author of Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists) published in Education Next (Summer, 2002) we learn that school violence has actually been declining in recent years. Researchers at the National School Safety Center (NSSC) examined media reports from the school years 1992-93 to 2000-01, they identified 321 violent deaths at school. Not all of these incidents, however, involved student-on-student violence: they included, for example, 16 accidental deaths and 56 suicides, as well as incidents involving nonstudents, such as a teacher killed by her estranged husband, who then shot himself, and a nonstudent killed on a school playground during the weekend. Even if one includes all 321 deaths, the average fell from 48 violent deaths per year during the school years 1992-93 through 1996-97 to 32 per year from 1997-98 to 2000-01. If accidental deaths and suicides are eliminated from the data, the decline remains: from an average of 31 deaths per year in the earlier period to 24 per year in the later one.

If you'd like to look at the statistics yourself, the Center for the Prevention of School Violence has pulled them all together for us. Here you will see a number of reports which contain statistics about school violence and related issues. Included are other documents which provide statistics, research findings, and information about school violence incident reporting in the United States.