Schools as Protective Factors: Understanding the Buffering Effects of Schools on Exposure to Community Violence

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Education Policies and Reforms: Reactions, Responses, and Adaptations (Table 10)

Abstract

This paper explores how schools as organizations address the needs of students who are exposed to high levels of violent crime in the communities where they live. A broad, cross-disciplinary body of research attests to the significant, negative impacts of violence exposure on students’ performance. However, students’ exposure to violence in their communities and its relationship to their performance in school must be understood in context -- that is, as a link in the concatenated processes that connect material conditions with racialized inequities in academic performance. This mixed-method paper empirically describes a critical, protective role that schools as social institutions play within that chain with implications for interrupting cycles of violence and addressing racial inequity beyond academic achievement and attainment.

Authors

• Rebecca Hinze-Pifer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• David Orta, The University of Chicago

• David Wilson Johnson, University of Chicago

• Alyssa Blanchard, University of Chicago Consortium on School Research

• Samantha Guz, University of Chicago

• Kelsey Berryman, American Institutes for Research