“Disorderliness is the secondary school’s version of ‘broken
windows,’ a visible sign that no one cares,” say Tod Mijanovich,
M.P.A., and Beth Weitzman, Ph.D., of the university’s Robert F. Wagner
Graduate School of Public Service. “It serves to signal to students
a lack of consistent adult concern and oversight that can leave them feeling
unsafe.”
The fear engendered by disorderly schools transcends different neighborhood
conditions, races and family social and economic levels, say Mijanovich and
Weitzman, writing in the September issue of the Journal of Urban Health. Attending
a private school left children feeling safer, they say.
In general, kids’ unsafe feelings have been linked to significant depressive
and other psychiatric symptoms, poor academic performance and risky behavior.
Mijanovich and Weitzman used data from 3,290 students surveyed as part of
the Robert Wood Johnson’s Urban Health Initiative. About two-thirds
of the students attended urban schools and the other third lived in the suburbs.
The study covered city and suburban schools in and around Baltimore, Detroit,
Oakland, Philadelphia and Richmond.
The students were asked about their general sense of safety at school and
whether or not they had felt unsafe the day before. Since some interviews were
conducted on weekends, the researchers could compare school days with weekends
to judge whether safety was an issue of neighborhood or school-based feelings
of safety.
Children who had attended school the day before the interview had 46 percent
higher odds of feeling unsafe on that day than children who did not attend
school.
In the general assessment of school safety, both urban and suburban children
felt safer if their parents earned more money or had higher social standing.
But the strongest risk factor, running across different types of families,
neighborhoods and residential locations, was the sense of school disorder,
says Mijanovich.
“About 31 percent of both urban and suburban youths reported that their
schoolmates get away with anything,” he says. “School disorder
increased with increasing student age and was almost twice as prevalent in
public as in private schools — 33 percent vs. 18 percent.”
A family’s material resources can protect students from feeling unsafe
some of the time, but not always.
“Privileged families can lessen the risk of their children’s feeling
unsafe either by moving to well-off suburbs or by using private schools, but
few families can fully escape the major risk factor: a disorderly school environment,” Mijanovich
says. “A vicious cycle of school disorder and misconduct produces a culture
of low-level violence that represents a continuous threat to adolescents’ sense
of safety.”
However, he does not advocate a punitive approach to school discipline.
“It is more effective to promote teacher-student communication and trust
and to enforce rules fairly and consistently than it is to institute more punitive
measures,” he says. “The most powerful predictor of adolescent
well being discovered to date is having a feeling of connectedness to one’s
school, and students who perceive themselves to be fairly treated and who
are invested in their school life are less likely to engage in risky behaviors.”
