| abstract
| - School safety depends far less on the poverty and crime surrounding the campus than on the academic achievement of its students and their relationships with adults in the building, according to a new study of Chicago public schools. The report, to be released in May 2011 by the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago, finds that while schools in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods tend to be less safe than other schools, students’ level of academic achievement actually plays a bigger role in school safety than a school’s neighborhood. Furthermore, even in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods, the quality of relationships among adults and students at a school can turn one school into a safe haven while another languishes as a center of violence. “It was surprising, because you think it’s all about crime and poverty in the neighborhood, but we found what’s far more important is when you are concentrating together many students with a history of poor performance in school, that’s when you’re likely to have a very unsafe environment,” said Elaine M. Allensworth, a co-author of the study and the senior director and chief research officer at CCSR. “It makes sense when you think about it, because these kids are frustrated, they haven’t done well in school and haven’t been engaged in school,” which, in turn, may make them more likely to act out or to feel insecure in a school setting. Ms. Allensworth and co-authors Matthew P. Steinberg, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, and David W. Johnson, a research assistant at CCSR, compared nearly 120,000 student and more than 12,500 teacher responses from Chicago from 2009 surveys on school safety and climate to the city’s neighborhood crime statistics, neighborhood and school demographics, and student achievement test scores. In particular, the researchers looked at the incoming achievement scores of students entering middle and high schools. The authors also conducted case studies on three schools considered by their teachers and students to be “safe,” “typical,” and “unsafe.” Researchers found that teachers and students generally agreed on the level of safety in a school, and, regardless of the level of crime around the campus itself, schools were safer when their students came from safer neighborhoods. However, the strongest predictor of school safety was the previous academic achievement of incoming students. Researchers found differences in academic achievement accounted for fully half of the differences in students’ and teachers’ reports of school safety. Researchers said the link between school safety and academic achievement could be an important factor to take into consideration for low-performing schools struggling to turn around their students’ academic achievement. “Given that they are getting students with very low academic achievement, turnaround schools are going to immediately face substantial problems with climate around school safety,” Ms. Allensworth said. “They’re going to have to have good strategies to improve the climate—and then, when you have a school that’s more orderly and safer, it will be easier to work on issues of achievement.”
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