Different Ways of Measuring School Safety

Evaluating any aspect of education in the United States is a complex task. There are geographic variables: from city to city, from county to county, and from state to state. There are various types of schools: public, private, and charter — and within those three categories, numerous subcategories. There are various levels: some localities operate a K through 6 elementary school, while others opt for K through 5; similar choices exist for ways to figure secondary education up through grade 12.

The generalizations which human thought naturally seeks are therefore difficult to produce accurately. It is more informative to ask about schools within one of the fifty states than to ask about national statistics. It is more productive to ask about a county’s or a city’s schools than to ask about statewide averages. It is most significant to learn about one specific school.

While people often investigate national trends in education, they usually also have in mind one particular school. Yet one must inspect national statistics, if for no other reason than it is the mode of the current time to discuss education in this way.

This includes the grim and troubling topic of school shootings.

According to a September 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there were 108 deaths in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools in the years from 2000 to 2021. Confusingly, the same source gives an average annual of between 40 and 60 violent deaths at American schools. The discrepancy may arise from including non-firearm deaths.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) lists 573 shooting fatalities from 1970 to 2022 in schools, a rate nearly double the NCES figures.

The contrast between the NCES numbers and the CHDS numbers highlight the need to pay attention to statistical methodologies.

By contrast, Statista reports that there were 21,156 homicides in the United States in 2021. That is part of a long-term downward trend in the annual number of homicides which began in 1991, when there were 24,700 deaths by homicide.

This would yield a general result of roughly five to eleven deaths per year in school shootings, with perhaps approximately 21,000 homicides per year outside of schools.

One might conclude that schools are not such terribly dangerous places after all.

Yet the number of shooting deaths, or even the larger number of violent deaths, is only one way to measure the safety, or lack of safety, in schools.

Significant other forms of harm can, and sadly do, happen to students, like graduating without the ability to accurately manipulate the quadratic formula, or to present well interpersonally in job interviews. It is a tangible harm for students to complete a K-12 program without being able to conceptualize abstractly the grammar of their native language or of a second language which they have studied.

In sum, it is harmful to students not to receive the full content of a legitimate curriculum. Their lives are diminished if they cannot find Paraguay on a map, or explain General Pershing’s significance in WW1. They have lost something if they have not read the works of Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Locke, P.G. Wodehouse, or H.P. Lovecraft.

To keep students safe is first to reduce even further the small number of deaths which do occur in schools, but also to ensure that the lives thus saved are enriched and enlivened by significant learning.

What’s the Difference Between Homework and Studying? And Why Does It Matter?

At some point during the K-12 years, students should — but sometimes don’t — conceptualize the distinction between “doing homework” and “studying.” Until these two activities are understood as separate, a student’s progress remains suboptimal.

As long as studying remains a mysterious activity, often indistinguishable from doing homework, teachers often remedy the situation by assigning more homework to make up for the lack of studying. A concrete example:

A teacher might assign the students to “study pages 50 to 100” with the goal of being prepared for a classroom discussion of those pages three days from now and a written examination about those pages four days from now. This assignment will be productive if the students understand what it means to study and if they know how to study.

If the teacher suspects that the students do not know what studying is, and do not know how to study, then the teacher may well create homework to substitute for the studying that can’t or won’t happen. Such homework might be in the form of, e.g., a series of questions about the assigned pages: questions which the students must answer in written form, bringing those written answers to class after completing the homework outside of class time.

In response to those who argue that “teachers assign too much homework” or that “teachers give too great a weight to homework in the grading process,” one might answer that if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by teachers to explaining study skills; if more time, energy, and attention were devoted by students to learning study skills and to studying; and if both parents and society expected students to study; then less homework would be needed and less homework would be assigned.

There is a reciprocity: where there is more studying, there is less homework; where there is less studying, there is more homework.

Surveying school systems around the globe, one can find various configurations: some schools assign little homework, but students are expected to be able to study a text and prepare for discussions and examinations by studying the text. Other schools expect little studying, and students prepare for discussions and prepare for examinations by completing many homework assignments.

Studying is a skill which is part of the move toward independent learning. Homework is an activity which is part of dependent learning. The K-12 journey is, one hopes, a move from dependent to independent learning.