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

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Policies and Reforms: Reactions, Responses, and Adaptations

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, The University of Chicago Consortium for School Research

• Samantha Guz, The University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

• Kelsey Berryman, American Institutes for Research