School “Hardening” Measures: Do They Work?

• In Event: What Is School Safety, and Who Gets to Have It? An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Abstract

Objective. The goal of this research is to examine the causal effects of school hardening measures, such as heightened security and police presence, on the incidence and severity of shootings in K-12 public schools in the U.S. from 1995 to the present. This is part of a larger project that investigates a variety of potential policy levers for preventing school shootings.

Theoretical Framework. We approach this study from the perspective that schools are central, organizing social institutions shaped by carceral ideology through which youth experience surveillance and policing at a formative time in their development (Shedd, 2015). As Kupchik (2010) notes, “strategies such as police in schools, security cameras, and zero-tolerance measures resonate with widely shared ideas about crime prevention: that more police and punishments will keep us (and our children) safe.” We seek to question these notions in the context of school hardening measures and test them formally.

Methods. We begin with a descriptive analysis of the implementation of school hardening practices over time. We then apply recent methodological advances for detecting dynamic effects of staggered policy changes on rare events (Schell, Griffin, & Morral, 2018) to analyzing the effects of school hardening investments on school shooting incidence and severity through a Bayesian autoregressive model.

Data. We use over 25 years of detailed data on nearly two thousand shooting incidents that occurred on K-12 public school grounds. We link these incidents to a new panel database on school hardening investments and policy changes. These variables are compiled from the Education Commission of the States State Policy Database and requested data from multiple federal agencies, including for grant programs implemented by the Bureau of Justice Affairs (BJA), the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Significance. School shootings impose enormous costs on society. These include direct costs to victims – but also broader psychological costs to students, parents, school staff, and communities. Concerns over school shootings have fueled billions of dollars in investments in school security and policing. Despite these intensive (and expensive) efforts, we know little about their effectiveness in preventing shootings, and their consequences for marginalized youth grow increasingly apparent.

If school hardening efforts keep kids safe from school shootings, that benefit should be considered. However, school hardening measures are not costless – beyond their monetary expense, they have been linked to negative student outcomes. Further, these costs are not borne equally across groups. Black students are more likely to be subject to many school hardening initiatives, and some school hardening initiatives have widened Black-White disparities in experiences of exclusionary discipline. Before the U.S. invests further in systems of surveillance, policing, and punishment in schools, policymakers should at least know whether the safety claims made about these investments are valid.

Authors

• Lucy Sorensen, University at Albany - SUNY

• Laura Bellows, University of Virginia