Poster #40 - The Need for Fresh Air: The Effects of State-Mandated Recess Laws on Discriminatory Bullying

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

School recess has gained increasing attention as a policy lever for improving child development, social behavior, and school climate. While a growing literature documents the physical and cognitive benefits of unstructured play, little is known about whether legally mandated recess affects the incidence of discriminatory harassment among elementary school students. This gap is consequential, given rising policy interest in recess mandates and ongoing concerns about race-based, sex-based, and disability-based bullying in American schools. This paper asks whether state-mandated elementary school recess laws causally affect discriminatory bullying allegations. The key conceptual distinction is that treatment is not recess versus no recess; recess was nearly universal before any law was passed, but rather legally protected mandatory recess versus discretionary recess that administrators could curtail for instructional time or as punishment. We use school-level panel data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) spanning 2012–2022, a universe survey of all public elementary schools in the United States. The CRDC records annual school-level counts of harassment and bullying allegations by category, including race-based, sex-based, and disability-based incidents. We merge this with policy data from the Classification of Laws Associated with School Students (CLASS) database to construct a treatment indicator for strong mandatory recess law adoption. Our identification strategy exploits the staggered adoption of strong mandatory recess laws across five states, Rhode Island (2016), Florida (2017), New Jersey (2018), Arkansas (2019), and Illinois (2021), against a donor pool of 38 clean, never-treated states. We employ Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (Arkhangelsky et al., 2021) with permutation-based inference, which is well-suited to settings with few treated units where conventional clustered standard errors are unreliable. Outcomes are analyzed across three margins: allegations per 100 students, a binary extensive margin indicator, and raw counts via PPML, following the Chen and Roth (2024) critique of log transformations with zero-inflated outcomes. We find that strong mandatory recess laws increase sex-based bullying allegations, with the effect driven entirely by the extensive margin; more schools begin reporting at least one allegation, while the volume of allegations at already-reporting schools remains unchanged. Dose-response analysis reveals that weak mandatory laws produce a precise null, indicating that legal enforceability rather than policy awareness is the active ingredient. We find no evidence of effects on race-based or disability-based bullying allegations. These findings suggest that mandatory recess laws change the visibility of sex-based harassment in official administrative records. The results are consistent with either a supervision and detection channel, whereby increased adult presence during recess surfaces previously unreported incidents, or an exposure channel, whereby more unstructured peer interaction time mechanically increases harassment opportunities. Distinguishing between these mechanisms is an important direction for future work and has direct implications for how policymakers and researchers interpret trends in school bullying reports.

Author

• Neiva Joseanna Fortes, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author