Challenging the Misperception That Schools Are Dangerous Places

Dr. Dewey Cornell discusses his article that appeared in a special section of American Journal of Orthopsychiatry focused on gun violence. He argues that school safety should focus on the everyday problems of bullying and fighting while applying established preventative public health interventions.

View the abstract of the article.

Dr. Dewey Cornell is a forensic clinical psychologist and Bunker Professor of Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Cornell is also the director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project. His research interests include the prevention of youth violence and bullying, as well as the facilitation of healthy student development through a supportive and structured school climate.

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry publishes articles that clarify, challenge, or reshape the prevailing understanding of factors in the prevention and correction of injustice and in the sustainable development of a humane and just society.

Visit the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry website.

Marla Bonner: Hello, I'm Marla Bonner. Welcome to APA Journals Dialogue, a podcast featuring research from the Journals program of the American Psychological Association.

In this episode, we discuss an article published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, written by Dr. Dewey Cornell. Dr. Cornell is a forensic clinical psychologist and Bunker Professor of Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Cornell is also the Director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project and his research interests include the prevention of youth violence and bullying, as well as the facilitation of healthy student development through a supportive and structured school climate.

In his commentary, "Our Schools Are Safe: Challenging the Misperception That Schools Are Dangerous Places," Dr. Cornell argues that school safety should focus on the everyday problems of bullying and fighting while applying established preventative public health interventions. Here with us to discuss his work today is Dr. Cornell. Welcome!

Dr. Cornell: Good to be here, thank you.

Marla: So we've been hearing so much about school shootings. Why shouldn't we be more focused on improving school security?

Dr. Cornell: Well, school security certainly is important, but school security isn't the only appropriate response to school shootings. I think we need to take a careful look at how frequently school shootings occur, what seems to cause them, and how we might prevent them.

Marla: And in your commentary you mention that we should not be surprised that in a country with "tremendously high rates of gun violence" that some of this violence takes place in schools. You also provide and analogy to a flood. Can you elaborate on that?

Dr. Cornell: Well you know, this spring we've had a lot of rain across the United States, and a lot of cities were flooded. This got me thinking about the effects of floods on communities. If a town is flooded, the school is going to be flooded too, because the school is part of the town and I think the same is true for violence.

We have a flood of violence in the United States. Our homicide rate is 7 or 8 times higher than other developed nations. It's been that way for decades. We have more than 300 shootings every day in the United States: more than 80 fatalities by firearms. So, in a sense, I think we're flooded with violence in this country, and so it shouldn't be surprising that schools get caught in this flood too.

Let me stretch this analogy just a little bit further. If the school is flooded, this city council is going to want to take action to prevent floods, but they're not going to say, let's put sandbags around the school building or let's, you know, stock every school with boats and Coast Guard sailors. They're going to step back and say, all right, this is a community problem. What's causing the flood? Do we need to improve the river banks? Do we need flood levies? Do we need to work on the draining system? They're going to look at the big picture and not just focus on the schools like flooding only happens in schools.

In fact, the same is true for school shootings. Schools are one of the safest places that students could be. My colleagues and I just published a study on where shootings take place across the United States. We looked at 18,000 shootings. Schools and churches were the safest places with the least amount of shootings of any type that result in homicide. Shootings in schools and churches get a tremendous amount of publicity. They're terrifying things to think about and they're tragic. We expect to be safe in schools and churches so when we're not, it's really newsworthy, but that shouldn't make us think that schools are somehow more dangerous than other places. Most shootings take place in people's homes. There's a far higher homicide rate in residences than just about any place else.

I like to point out that there are more shootings in restaurants than in schools, but we don't talk about restaurant violence. We don't have conferences on restaurant violence like we do on schools. No one has called for us to arm restaurant employees. We don't want our wait persons to be carrying firearms the way that some have recommended that we have teachers or security officers armed in our schools. There are some real negative consequences to the misperceptions that schools are dangerous places.

Marla:That's actually a very interesting and helpful analogy — thank you for your elaboration on that.

You explain that behavioral threat assessments are a promising alternative to zero tolerance discipline. How does threat assessment differ from the zero tolerance approach?

Dr. Cornell: Well, if you think about it, behavioral threat assessment is really the antithesis of zero tolerance. Zero tolerance says everyone gets the same consequence regardless of how serious their misbehavior. If they go an inch over the line, they're going to be suspended from school or have some other really severe consequence.

Threat assessment is quite the opposite. Threat assessment says "Well, how serious is this behavior? What was the context in which it occurred? And what kind of response, what kind of measured response is appropriate?" And so, I think it is not only the antithesis of zero tolerance, I'd go so far as to say that it is the antidote to zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance is a policy that really has turned out to have a poisonous influence on our schools. You know, initially, everyone thought that zero tolerance was a good idea, that we needed to be strict and uncompromising with our students, that that would send a strong message, that it would make our schools safer, but in reality it doesn't work and it has not has positive effects at all.

In fact, students who are suspended from school are more likely to misbehave in the future, more likely to fail and to drop out of school. And so we are finding that school suspension, which has sort of become the go-to form of discipline under zero tolerance is really counter-productive. It really doesn't help. And then what we are finding in our research on threat assessment is that when schools use the threat assessment approach, their suspension rates go down. And so it really is having the opposite effect of zero tolerance.

Marla: So with that said, how would such assessments apply to students whose parents may refuse such evaluations to avoid stigma, for example?

Dr. Cornell: If a student is identified as making a threat of violence in school before there is any threat assessment or anything, there is going to be a huge potential for stigma. When a student is identified as threatening a school shooting or any other kind of serious act of violence, typically they are suspended or expelled, sometimes arrested. I've seen students who have spent months in jail over threatening statements they made that were taken out of context, blown out of proportion; the student wasn't really planning or able to carry out what they had talked about doing.

This is without threat assessment. Really, threat assessment is the best way to avoid stigma because it gives the schools a way to assess the student's behavior, try to resolve the problem or conflict that underlies that behavior, and avoid going to extreme measures in every case. So I would say threat assessment is a way to avoid stigma.

In fact, our research, a randomized controlled trial in 40 schools, found that students who did a threat assessment are three times less likely to get a long term suspension, seven times less likely to get transferred to a different school, which is a typical response to students who make threats that are seen as serious. And they are four times more likely to get counseling services at the school compared to students who make threats in schools that don't use a threat assessment approach.

Marla: So with a team at the University of Virginia you developed the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines. How did you develop these guidelines?

Dr. Cornell: I worked with the FBI and their study of school shootings and I looked at the report of the Secret Service, all of whom recommended that schools have threat assessment teams. I was kind of left scratching my head a little bit, "How do we do this?" No one in education was familiar with threat assessment in 2000 and 2002 when these reports came out so I set up a work group with some local school administrators and school psychologists and school resource officers and we developed some guidelines, some procedures.

We had the good fortune to field test them in some schools, began a program of research, and eventually developed a manual, Guidelines for Responding to Student Threats of Violence. And we have used that manual to train teams in thousands of schools; we've done a series of controlled studies to see what the impact is in those schools and we've gotten really very good results over about a ten or twelve year period.

Marla: So you mention impact. What exactly was the impact on the schools that implemented the Virginia Guidelines?

Dr. Cornell: Well, we've examined different outcomes in different studies, but what we find consistently is that the schools are able to resolve the students' threats without violence occurring. They usually develop an individualized plan for that student that might involve some counseling, some other support that seems appropriate.

And at the school level, our measures have shown improvements to the school climate. We've seen reductions in bullying. Students who complete school climate measures report a more positive school climate where they feel the discipline system is fair, feel more respected by teachers and school staff. And we're seeing suspension rates dropping not just for the students who make threats, but what we're seeing is these schools moving away from zero tolerance automatic suspension practices.

In Virginia when we had over a thousand schools using our threat assessment model, we compared those schools to the other schools in the state, controlling for lots of potentially confounding variables. The schools using our model had declines in short term and long term suspensions, and the longer they used our model the greater their reductions in suspensions. We've seen very good results across a number of different studies.

Marla: And what is the next step in your work?

Dr. Cornell: Well, last year Virginia legislation mandated that all public schools in the state have threat assessment teams, and we have a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to evaluate that big transition in our school system. We're evaluating the schools as they use threat assessment. We're trying to identify best practices, we're going to develop a training program in those practices, and then we're going to a randomized control trial to show that those practices produce positive outcomes, particularly reductions in school suspensions.

I guess one thing that I want to point out is that there's a huge racial disparity in school suspensions in Virginia and across the country. Black students in particular are suspended in a much higher rate than white students, and there's a great deal of effort among school systems to try to reduce that racial disparity. One of the things we've found with threat assessment is that when schools take the time to evaluate student misbehavior, follow our guidelines, go through our decision tree in a threat assessment, their disciplinary consequences do not have racial disparities.

That is, there's no differences between white and black students in suspension rates, or transfers to alternative schools, and also no differences for white versus Hispanic students in the research that we've just conducted. We're very pleased to see that this approach seems to reduce racial disparities in school discipline.

Marla: Well thank you Dr. Cornell for joining us today and for all that you continue to do to help reverse misconceptions and to contribute to safe and supportive school environments. We really appreciate your time today.

Dr. Cornell: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about my work.

Marla: To read this article and others from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, the official journal of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, please visit our website at: www.apa.org/pubs/journals/ort/.

Thank you for joining us. I'm Marla Bonner, with APA Journals Dialogue.