Learning in Harm’s Way: Neighborhood Violence, Inequality, and American Schools

• Author: Elizabeth Pelletier,Paul Manna
• Date: 01 November 2017
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716217734802

ANNALS, AAPSS, 674, November 2017 217

DOI: 10.1177/0002716217734802

Learning in

Harm’s Way:

Neighborhood

Violence,

Inequality, and

American

Schools

By

ELIZABETH PELLETIER

and

PAUL MANNA

734802ANN The Annals of The American AcademyLearning In Harm’s Way

research-article2017

Is a school’s geographic proximity to violent crime

related to characteristics of its student body and to

students’ academic performance? Our understanding

of the educational impacts of students’ exposure to

violence has been constrained because of various tech-

nical and financial limitations that have made research

in this area problematic. The work presented here lev-

erages advances in the availability of geo-coded data on

incidents of crime to overcome the limitations of prior

research in this area, showing that a school’s proximity

to violent crime is associated with common measures of

educational inequality and also with school perfor-

mance. We discuss the implications of our findings for

future research and public policy.

Keywords: education; inequality; schools; crime; vio-

lence; GIS

The relationship between schooling and stu-

dents’ exposure to violence often takes

center stage in policy debates and the national

discourse when whole communities are trau-

matized by a horrific event such as the shooting

Elizabeth Pelletier is a research associate in the Justice

Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she focuses

on criminal and juvenile justice policy. She previously

researched education policy as a Fulbright grantee at

the University of Toronto.

Paul Manna is the Isabelle and Jerome E. Hyman

Distinguished University Professor of Government at

the College of William & Mary, where he chairs the

Department of Government and is faculty affiliate in

the W&M Public Policy Program. His work explores

intergovernmental policy implementation, bureau-

cracy, education, and applied research methods.

NOTE: The authors acknowledge the Roy R. Charles

Center at the College of William & Mary, and its

donors, for supporting this project with a W&M

Summer Honors Fellowship. In addition, we thank

Salvatore Saporito, Melissa McInerney, Keenan Kelley,

Rachel Brooks, Molly Michie, Rachel Lienesch, Rob

Marty, Daniel Casey, Ashley Napier, Rachel Smith, and

Andrew Saultz for helpful feedback and guidance.

Correspondence: pmanna@wm.edu

218 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (Peralta 2013). Yet tens of thousands

of American children attend schools in dangerous neighborhoods where violence

is an almost-daily occurrence (Osofsky 1999, 34; see also Bieler and La Vigne

2014; Stein et al. 2003; Richters and Martinez 1993a; Bell and Jenkins 1993).

Research on how children’s exposure to chronic violence affects schools and aca-

demic performance is substantial but severely constrained; our focus here is

overcoming the limitations of prior work so that research in this area can speak

directly and more powerfully to policy.

The Coleman Report—the landmark education study whose implications are the

centerpiece of this collection of research—did not directly examine the links between

students’ exposure to violence and their academic success, but Coleman and his col-

laborators did highlight important links between the environmental conditions that

students experience outside school and their classroom performance. In the report’s

opening pages, the authors encouraged readers who envision a child at school also to

recognize that “home and total neighborhood are themselves powerful contributors

to his education and growth” (Coleman et al. 1966, 2). Key findings moved the

authors to conclude as such. Among those points were these specific arguments

(Coleman et al. 1966, 319–25): that students who feel that they have a low sense of

control over their immediate environment tend to struggle more in school, that a low

sense of control is exhibited by students who believe that luck rather than hard work

is associated with success, that the environment can intervene to prevent students

from getting ahead, and that such people have fewer chances to succeed in life. A

perceived inability to confront challenging home or neighborhood environments,

combined with the lower performance in school that such a view prompts, can snow-

ball over time and lead a student to believe, as the report noted, “that nothing he

could ever do would change things” (Coleman et al. 1966, 321). That snowball effect

is even larger, due to peer effects, when students attend schools each year where

many others have similarly low senses of control over their environments due to the

conditions they experience outside school.

The specific home and environmental factors that Coleman et al. (1966) stud-

ied did not include violence in the communities where children attend school.

Still, the mechanisms that likely lead students to perceive that they have limited

ability to control their environments, which Coleman described, are entirely

consistent with subsequent bodies of research on child development and student

academic success. The links between exposure to violence and the mental health,

development, and educational achievement of children are now well docu-

mented. Scholars have found school and neighborhood violence to be associated

with students having more trouble with school authorities; worse teacher ratings

of student functioning; and lower grades, attendance, standardized test scores,

graduation rates, and college attendance rates (Bowen and Bowen 1999; Henrich

et al. 2004; Ozer 2005; Grogger 1997; Sharkey 2010; Burdick-Will 2013). What

is important to note is that children need not personally experience violence to

be academically affected by it. Carrell and Hoekstra (2008) found that an

increase in the number of children in a classroom who lived amid violence at

home was associated with lower peer math and reading scores and higher peer

disciplinary infractions and suspensions.