Student and Teacher Safety in Chicago Public Schools: The Roles of Community Context and Social Organization

• In Event: Roundtable Session 116
  In Roundtable Session: Leading and Teaching in Diverse Contexts

Abstract

Schools serving students from high-crime, high-poverty areas find creating safe, supportive learning environments particularly challenging. Employing neighborhood, school, and student-level data, this paper describes school safety issues in Chicago, the types of schools that struggle the most with safety, and how school and neighborhood characteristics, such as poverty and crime, affect school safety. Although external conditions strongly define the level of safety in schools, schools’ internal social-organizational structures – teacher, administrator, and parent collaboration; instructional focus; leadership quality; and disciplinary practices – produce very different climates. The quality of relationships between staff, students, and parents most strongly defines safe schools in Chicago. Indeed, disadvantaged schools with high-quality relationships are found to be safer than advantaged schools with low-quality relationships.

Authors

• Matthew Philip Steinberg, University of Chicago

• Elaine M. Allensworth, University of Chicago

• David Wilson Johnson, University of Chicago