Prevention Research in Schools

• Date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12280
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Author: Denise C. Gottfredson

VOLLMER AWARD ADDRESS

VOLLMER AWARD

Prevention Research in Schools

Past, Present, and Future

Denise C. Gottfredson

University of Maryland—College Park

The August Vollmer Award Address is intended to focus on contributions to justice

and on the recipient’s research and policy experiences. This is a story of one person’s

career devoted mainly to developing effective collaborations between researchers and

practitioners to produce useful knowledge. Her early work focused on delinquency

prevention in schools and included evaluations of two different efforts aimed at altering

school and classroom environments to reduce student misbehavior in Charleston, SC,

schools, and an organization development intervention intended to reduce violence and

related problem behaviors in Baltimore City, MD, schools. For many years, the author

directed a project that provided research expertise to the Maryland Governor’s Office

of Crime Control and Prevention. She also partnered with public agencies to develop

and implement randomized experiments to test the effectiveness of the Baltimore City

Drug Treatment Court, the Strengthening Families Program in Washington, D.C.,

and afterschool programs in Baltimore County, MD. She is currently implementing a

randomized trial of a gang prevention program in Philadelphia, PA, and a study of

the effects of School Resource Officers in Florida and California.

In this address, I reflect on my career in prevention research, focusing on researchabout

what schools can do to prevent delinquency and related problem behaviors. I describe

what was known in this research area when I began my career approximately 35 years

ago, what we have since learned, and what questions remain. The bottom line is that we

have made strong progress since 1980, but we still have a ways to go. For instance, we

now know a great deal about the characteristics of schools that predict levels of problem

behavior of students attending those schools, but we still lack a coherent theory to explain

I wish to thank Gary and Nisha Gottfredson for carefully reading and providing constructive comments on an

earlier version of this address. Direct correspondence to Denise C. Gottfredson, 350 Wild Rose Lane, Pittsboro,

NC 27312 (e-mail: gott@umd.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12280 C2017 American Society of Criminology 7

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 1

Vollmer Award Address Vollmer Award

the mechanism through which these school characteristics influence problem behaviors.

We also know a great deal about how we can use schools as a setting in which to deliver

effective prevention programming to reduce students’ risk for problem behaviors, but we

have not yet attempted to alter school environments (e.g., the ways schools are organized

and managed and the social relations among people in the schools) in meaningful ways.

Furthermore, we also now realize that achieving high-quality implementation of effective

innovations remains the principal challenge in reducing delinquency and related problem

behavior in schools. The problem of poor implementation might be ameliorated in the

future by incorporating elements of organization development and action research into the

design and application of prevention programs, funding these efforts adequately, rigorously

evaluating the outcome of these efforts, and improving them over time.

Schools and Delinquency Research 1980 and Now

Our understanding of how schools influence delinquency was slim in 1980 (G. Gottfredson,

1981). Although it was clear from the work of environmental psychologists that some aspects

of the school environment such as school size influence the individuals in them (e.g., Barker

and Gump, 1964), and although some work had been done to developmeasures of classroom

environments (Moos and Trickett, 1974), little was known about how attending one school

versus another might influence student outcomes.

Litigation concerning unequal education for Black and White students culminated in

the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling. This ruling spurred interest

in learning more about school effects. As documented by Gary Gottfredson (2012), after

this ruling, White families relocated in record numbers to suburbs, in effect segregating

inner city public schools and creating large imbalances across schools in social and material

resources. As this process unfolded, and as the historical rise in the proportion of poor

and minority youths participating in secondary schooling continued, inner city schools

became less safe, suspension rates for Black students soared, and large racial achievement

gaps became well documented. In response, researchers began to investigate whether and

how the characteristics of the schools attended might explain these inequalities. The research

methods employed in these early studies were crude: Researchers often compared school

averages on outcome measures without controlling for the characteristics of the communities

in which the schools were located, and they used blunt measures of the school characteristics

such as expenditure per pupil and educational backgrounds of the teaching staff.

Public interest in the social unrest and injustices after the “white flight” in the 1960s

continued to push this issue to the forefront. Media coverage of the plight of inner city

schools was extensive, emphasizing their general deterioration and safety problems. The

American Federation of Teachers was concerned about teacher safety. In response to these

pressures, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings in 1975 and 1976 about school

disorder and commissioned a Safe School Study (SSS) to learn more about school safety

issues. This major study was conducted in 1976 by the Research Triangle Institute for the

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