Jan 20, 2004

Next month, as part of what New York City officials are calling a crackdown on school violence, 150 additional police officers will be deployed to help their colleagues patrol the city's most dangerous schools. Plans are also under way to impose tougher disciplinary measures, including the swifter suspension of problem students.

These initiatives grew out of what has been portrayed by some public officials and much of the news media as a frightening spike in violence in New York City public schools. In reality, though, the facts do not support that conclusion. As a result, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Department of Education are pursuing solutions that fail to address the real problems: long-established administrative policies that inadequately distribute resources to schools.

Back in December, when the uproar over school crime reached a climax, what got lost was that the origin of all the commotion was really a backlog in processing suspensions of students, not any substantial increase in school crime. In mid-December, the Police Department reported that the major crime rate in the schools since the beginning of the fiscal year through Oct. 26 was flat compared with the same period for last year.

Figures updated through Dec. 7 and released a few days later by the Department of Education showed only a slight (2.35 percent) crime increase in schools.

Meanwhile, as this synthetic story was evolving, the mayor seized upon the good news that F.B.I. crime statistics identified New York City as the "undisputed safest large city in the nation." Based on the mayor's standard, the public schools, a city within the city with a population of roughly 1.2 million students and adults, are much safer than the entire Big Apple.

Here's how it works. According to Police Department data for 2003, there were 1,691 major crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand theft auto) per 100,000 city residents. To arrive at a comparable figure for the schools requires a few calculator gymnastics, including adjusting the figures to align within a common time frame and arbitrarily throwing in a 10 percent increase in major crimes as a nod to the Department of Education's recent revisions. Even accounting for all that, the comparable rate for the schools still comes out to be only 78 major crimes per 100,000 residents, including those committed by adult employees and interlopers.

While this is obviously just a rough estimate — especially considering that the school day is a shorter reporting period than a police day — this number undeniably contrasts favorably with the prize-winning citywide figure of 1,691. So why is the latter rate cause for civic rejoicing and the former an excuse to criticize public school students?

Obviously, if you are the student who is mugged in the stairwell, any number might be too high. But by focusing on individual students, officials are able to ignore deeper problems within the system.

The National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham undertook a study of the city's more than 1,100 public schools last year. Examining available data, we documented various relationships between factors that contribute to successful schools and student and administrative behaviors like attendance and suspensions.

Schools with higher attendance rates tend to have lower rates of suspensions, major crimes and police incidents. Schools with fully functioning libraries and modern computers average better attendance. Schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers and schools where teachers are absent more often tend to have more suspensions.

 Students, regardless of race or income, tend to do better in schools with adequate resources.

Unfortunately, we were also able to document a significant negative relationship between the race and income of students and the distribution of many essential resources like libraries and computers and enriched course work as well as factors like teacher qualifications. Our findings showed that schools with higher enrollments of black and Latino students and lower-income students tend to have fewer of those resources.

The city's policies for distributing essential educational tools have what civil rights attorneys would call a disparate, negative impact on these children.

 Grown-ups, not students, decide who receives what in New York City's public schools.

If politicians devoted more effort to making schools places where students want to be than to kicking them out, we would have both more peaceful and successful schools.

By John M. Beam, NCSC executive director