Wide Scope, Questionable Quality: Three Reports from the Study on School Violence and Prevention. Executive Summary

This booklet summarizes three reports on drug-use and violence-prevention efforts and school-crime patterns in American schools. The reports are based on findings from the Study on School Violence and Prevention, which investigated the extent of problem behavior in schools. The results indicate that schools in general were safe, but certain schools had significant problems that affected instruction and made some teachers and students feel unsafe. The relatively higher rates of discipline problems in middle schools suggest that greater attention to prevention efforts in middle school may be warranted. Schools should focus on improving prevention activities by strengthening efforts to adopt, retain, or discard programs based on their effectiveness. While fighting did occur and the presence of weapons was not unheard of, the combination of the two was rarely seen in the same school. Theft was much more common than robbery, and while teachers may have been verbally abused, they rarely were attacked or threatened with a weapon. The fear of disorder did not seem to interfere with learning. Schools followed similar discipline procedures, but they varied considerably in how they recorded and used incident data. Schools that recorded high violence differed markedly from other schools in their size, location, and socioeconomic makeup. These violent schools tended to be in urban areas with a high percentage of minority students. (RJM)