Engaged Students, Safer Schools

Several weeks ago, as I was wrapping up a tour of the cheerful and purposeful Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, the head and I passed construction workers erecting a tall, iron fence near the school's historic administration building. "For the security of President Obama's daughters?" I asked, observing the Secret Service officers nearby. "No, his daughters have been here for five years; the fence is for the safety of all our students." Like at many schools, a very open campus may not seem wise anymore, in light of recent, high profile events.

Last week, arriving in Boston for a meeting of the Association of Independent Schools of New England (AISNE), I was greeted in the airport by headlines and television reports of the killing of a 25-year-old teacher in her school in nearby Danvers, Massachusetts. A 14-year-old boy allegedly slit her throat in a school bathroom after she asked him to stay after school to make up some homework. It had been an awful week for school violence. Two days earlier, a 12-year-old student in Sparks, Nevada shot and killed a teacher and himself, wounding two fellow 12-year-olds in the process.

At the opening of the AISNE conference, executive director Steve Clem noted sadly the Danvers tragedy and then reflected upon the prior year's meeting, which had coincidentally followed the unspeakable horror of Sandy Hook.

With my background in research, I try to find answers in statistics. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, violent deaths at schools have actually declined significantly over the last two decades. The most recent rates are a third lower than in the early 1990s. Homicide among young people, regardless of location, has dropped by nearly half. Youth suicide has declined over the last decade. (See "The School Safety Outlook" in the 2013-14 NAIS Trendbook for more information).

But even with these positive trends, violence seems ever-present in the world. For most of us, any violence is too much violence. And children are at far greater risk now than they were when our children’s grandparents attended school.

There is no simple explanation for the behavior that threatens our children, but experts do point repeatedly to several exacerbating factors: Children today are likely to feel more alone, less supported by families and communities than in days gone by. In trends that began in the 1960s, children find traditional family structures breaking down, parents working and finding less time to spend with their children, economic mobility taking families away from extended family members, church attendance falling, and the list goes on. Harvard professor Robert Putnam famously described us as a nation "bowling alone."

University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman, perhaps the most influential education researcher of the last century, called the bonds that have been breaking "social capital." And, he showed in a landmark study in 1980, that social capital is crucial in schooling. When students are surrounded by adults — family, the families of friends, teachers, school leaders — who share a commitment to the same school values, education works much better. Students are reinforced in their studies, and more importantly in their belief in themselves, by the social environment of the school. It so happens, Coleman observed, that social capital is higher in private schools on average than in public schools, where students are not necessarily surrounded by adults committed to the same educational values.

I was reminded of Coleman, with whom I had the honor of working early in my career, as I was visiting NAIS schools the last two weeks. In Pasadena, California, his observations were so very clear. At St. Mark's School, I saw students from diverse backgrounds working actively together, engaged, in an innovation lab that teachers and parents had literally built themselves over the summer. It wasn't the technology or the flipped classrooms that impressed me per se; it was the old-fashioned eagerness and wonder in the faces of the 12-year-olds.

Sequoyah School, a self-described progressive school, offered its own version of social capital. The interactions among teachers and students, from cooking class to web design, reminded me more of a family than a school. The school reinforces these bonds with regular student camping trips that every teacher voluntarily joins in.

Schools need not be progressive or hi-tech or any other pedagogical flavor to build a strong sense of community. Every week I see our schools providing the engagement that is vital for student efficacy. Indeed, I hesitate to name any individually, for fear of slighting the many that provide equally strong support for their students. I will nevertheless mention one more. At Holton Arms, a school for girls in grades three through 12 in Bethesda, Maryland, I was given a tour by a ninth grader who had entered the school in eighth grade, as one of only two students to enroll at that non-transitional grade level. I asked her what she liked best about her new school. She broke my heart: "At my previous school I felt invisible," she said. "Here the girls and the teachers made me immediately feel at home."
 
There are no simple answers for troubled youth. Mental health issues are complex. Tragedies will happen in even the most caring school communities, public and private alike. But schools can be intentional about building social capital for their students. And students are safer—and smarter—when schools do.
Author
John Chubb

John Chubb was president of NAIS from 2013 - 2015. He passed away on November 12, 2015.