High school students’ standardized test scores are adversely affected by violent crime’s presence in Chicago schools, according to new research by Julia Burdick-Will, a postdoctoral researcher in Brown’s Population Studies and Training Center.
By linking high schools with the location of violent incidents from 2002 to 2010 — data made publicly available by the Chicago Police Department — Burdick-Will found an inverse relationship between violent crime rates in Chicago schools and student test scores, but not between crime rates and grades.
Violent crime likely affects learning through “cognitive stress and classroom disruption,” rather than through “changes in perceived safety, general school climate or discipline practices,” Burdick-Will wrote in her paper, which was published in the journal Sociology of Education last month.
Crime likely affects test scores but not grades because the metrics reflect “different kinds of achievement,” she said.
“Grades are more subjective — they come from teachers. They are a more global measure of more than actual content knowledge,” Burdick-Will said. Test scores, she said, reflect a student’s knowledge and ability to concentrate.
“Some kids will be doing ‘A’ quality work, but their class will only have gotten halfway through the textbook, leading to low standardized test scores,” she added, which suggests that “violent crime is an indicator of disruptive instruction.”
In her paper, Burdick-Will also offered alternate, non-causal explanations for the relationship between violent crime and student performance. For example, lower-achieving students are likelier to commit violent crimes, she said, meaning crime itself might not cause lower test scores.
“Perhaps the association between violent crime at school and achievement is really caused by students from disadvantaged neighborhoods bringing the violence they experience around their homes onto school grounds,” Burdick-Will wrote in her paper.
“Her research gets us thinking about educational policy in a broader and more sophisticated way. How do we address community problems not just schools?” said Josh Pacewicz, an assistant professor of sociology who was not involved in the research.
Burdick-Will also investigated the “influence of neighborhood poverty” on violence and school performance, finding “a lot of variation in high-poverty schools and neighborhoods,” she said.
She examined past research on students’ perception of the safety of their school environment, finding little connection between how safe students felt and the level of reported crime.
She found that nonviolent crime has a much smaller effect on student performance and does not influence students’ perceptions of their schools’ climates.
Burdick-Will said she now plans to further investigate how violent crime affects school choice and student achievement in certain neighborhoods, examining “patterns across the country.”
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