After Jonesboro, Ark.; West Paducah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss., and especially Littleton, Colo., concerns about school violence led to widespread media coverage and a national discussion. Mostly, this was positive. It reignited a debate about the easy availability of guns (though the Democrats, reading too much into that debate, lost votes in the 2000 election by appearing too pro-gun control). The fallout from the seemingly contagious acts of school violence also led to considerable national soul-searching about the problems of young people. Hundreds of schools and community groups held forums on bullying, social exclusion, parental neglect and other school problems that don’t receive enough attention. All useful.
The problem comes when parents and school officials overreact to news reports-and misread the evidence. A policy brief released this week by The Justice Policy Institute (cjcj.org) found that “youth are unduly associated with crime and violence in the news.” One study of local California TV coverage found that nearly 70 percent of news stories on violence featured young people, while youth arrests made up only 14 percent of arrests for violent crime in California. Part of that is the nature of news-a 16-year-old killer will always be more newsworthy than a 30-year-old killer-but it does present a skewed picture, especially when FBI statistics show that youth homicides are at their lowest rates since 1966.
The biggest misconceptions involve what happens on school property. According to the Justice Policy Institute, 99 percent of all youth homicides in the United States take place outside of school. While 71 percent of respondents to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last year believed a school shooting was likely in their community, the actual odds of being killed in an American school in 1999 were less than one in 2 million. This year, with school shootings down, the odds are even better. “Schools were and are one of the safest places for young people to be in America,” says Vincent Schiraldi, the report’s author.
Remember how politicians repeatedly cited a study that showed that “in 1940 the worst school problems were talking, gum chewing, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of line, wearing improper clothes and not putting paper in the wastebasket; today, the top school problems are drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery and assault”? Even after Mike Males, a reporter for the Phi Delta Kappan, exposed the “study” as a hoax in 1993, the myth persisted.
In fact, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, guns and so forth are all top issues in school today. And not just with parents and teachers. A survey released this week by the youth organizations Do Something (dosomething.org) confirms that all of these problems are of major concern to students themselves.
But there was no golden age, and the level of teen violence has changed little over the years. In 1940, the year of the “study,” 37,000 American teens died from violence or disease, triple the teenage death rate of today. The FBI reported that the average age of criminals was 19. But because only 40 percent of teens graduated from high school in that era (compared to more than 90 percent today), the past looks rosier than it actually was.
“If the public schools of today kicked out pregnant girls; warehoused the handicapped, disabled and troubled students away from public view; and excluded three fourths of all minority and low-income students, we’d have a fair facsimile of the public high school of 1940,” Males wrote.
Actually, public schools, particularly those with “zero tolerance” policies, are moving in that direction. In the last quarter century, the rate at which students were suspended or expelled from school almost doubled-from 3.7 percent of all students in 1974 to 6.8 percent of all students in 1998. This is partly due to an increase in the number of assaults over time, but that increase stopped more than a decade ago-before the onset of zero tolerance. The rates of victimization today are almost exactly the same as they were in the late 1980s. In other words, schools cracked down after the problem itself stabilized.
Better late than never, perhaps, but not without a cost. Teens suspended from school are, by one study, three times more likely to become dropouts. Half of all states have no requirement that suspended or expelled students receive any alternative education. They get to sit at home, hang out and get into trouble, deprived of the education they desperately need.
The lesson in all of this as the kids head back to school is this: Removing chronic troublemakers from public schools is necessary, even imperative. One of the major advantages that private schools have is that they can do so, letting other students learn in peace. We need more alternative schools for those who habitually disrupt their schools.
But let’s work harder at distinguishing the truly bad apples from the ones who are just having a little difficulty growing up. Not every scuffle need lead to a suspension (the policy in many districts), and not every toenail clipper need be viewed as a potential weapon (also the policy in many areas). For schools and overly worried parents, a little common sense can make a big difference.
