Can School-Based Parental Involvement Improve School Safety in Disadvantaged Urban Neighborhoods?

• In Event: 4303 - Relational Perspectives on Education

Abstract

School safety is at the forefront of national policy discussions. Incidents of school crime and violence also indicate that safety represents a considerable educational disparity with disadvantaged urban schools reporting disproportionately high rates of crime and violence. Theoretical reasoning suggests that school-based parental involvement may contribute to improved school safety, but little empirical work has tested this relationship. This study examines the relationship between school-based parental involvement and two measures of school safety (i.e. school crime and violence and student bodily harm) by merging five waves of the School Survey on Crime Safety, Common Core Data, and the American Community Survey. Results from analyses of 12,698 schools showed a strong negative relationship between school-based parental involvement and school crime and violence and student bodily harm, net of controls for school organizational features, safety practices, sociodemographic characteristics, and neighborhood-level crime. In disadvantaged urban schools, this relationship also remained strong, indicating that school-based parental involvement may be a tool for improving school safety in distressed urban settings. Furthermore, results offered no evidence to support visible measures of school security that have rapidly proliferated in response to safety concerns in urban schools.

Authors

• Daniel Hamlin, University of Oklahoma

• Angran Li, Zhejiang University