The 2022-23 school year was a particularly violent year for educators.
In Florida, a high school student beat a paraprofessional unconscious. A 15-year-old in Georgia left her teacher with difficulty walking. And a group of students in Texas sent their assistant principal to the hospital after an assault.
Recent headlines suggest the 2023-24 school year may not be much different.
Such violence at school disrupts teaching and learning and has elicited calls to reform school discipline policies.
As a policy researcher who studies school safety and discipline, I have seen two camps form with polarized and politicized views on school discipline. On the one side are those who seek more restorative responses to misconduct that emphasize building relationships with students and discipline policies that keep kids in school. On the other are calls for greater use of exclusionary and punitive practices like suspension.
In my view, making schools safe requires school leaders not to get caught up in this either/or debate. Instead, I believe it requires recognizing a shared goal of safe schools and the need for a comprehensive approach to achieving it.
Behavior and the pandemic
Recent reports suggest these high-profile incidents of violence in schools are part of a general increase in student misconduct over the past couple of years. This contrasts with a decline over the prior decades.
For example, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 84% of public school leaders felt the pandemic negatively affected student behavior. Another survey found two out of three teachers and leaders perceived more student misbehavior in 2021 than in 2019.
Studies have shown that students who feel unsafe going to school have worse attendance rates than those attending schools with less violence and misbehavior. They also score lower…
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