Education and Violence: How Does Public K-12 Education Affect County-Level Homicide Rates?

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3. Crime and policing

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how the relationship between education and violence unfolds in places, I examine the effects of education on homicides using three mechanisms: school enrollment, education attainment, and public education spending. This paper assesses these pathways: public K-12 enrollment, education attainment, and government spending. This paper also captures different spending emphases within educational spending to explore potential nuances within the spending effect. Theoretically, as a higher percentage of the population is engaged in conventional activities (Hirschi, 1969), we could observe a negative link between being in school and delinquency. Conversely, quitting school could be linked with adverse outcomes. One may also expect to see less crime as levels of education attainment rise as employment prospects improve (Becker, 1962; Lochner, 2004). Symbolically, spending could be a proxy of governmental emphasis while expanding resources for material success (Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994).

By testing the relationship between violence and enrollment, attainment, and spending amongst large counties in the United States between 2017-2019, I determine if the lifting effects from education can be applied to violence and tease out how such effect materializes. Using county-level data for a set of urban counties, I estimate negative binomial regression models. Racial demographics, local GDP levels, disadvantage are included to account for the larger contextual conditions. Results indicate that education attainment exerts credentialling effects and provides buffer for homicide. Simply being enrolled in school has no effect on homicides. However, dropout effects persist across most models. When examining returns from spending and spending patterns, we see that the relationship is more about a general emphasis on education rather than specifically how the money is spent within K-12 schools. Findings of this project contribute to the larger discussion of the education and crime relationship and yield important policy insights when considering violence reduction.

Author

• Tianyi Zhang, University of Missouri-St. Louis