Study Shows 'Collateral Damage' Tied to Neighborhood Violence

Neighborhood violence hurts students' educational performance – even if those students haven't experienced the violence themselves, according to a new Johns Hopkins University study.

The study focused on students who were in Chicago Public Schools during the last decade, and found that being in class with peers from more violent neighborhoods can negatively impact students' scores on standardized math and reading tests by 10 percent.

“The violence is bad for everybody – even the kids who aren’t directly close to it are in schools that have students who have been traumatized, potentially, who have stresses that are distracting," says study author and Johns Hopkins sociologist Julia Burdick-Will.

Even students creating "minor distractions take time away from the teachers, they take counseling resources, and it makes it harder for the school to function," she says. "So, even in places where we don’t expect it, or maybe where we don’t expect to see the effects of urban violence, the effects are all over.”

The study, slated to be published Tuesday in the journal Sociology of Education, assessed administrative data from five cohorts of students in Chicago Public Schools, as well as school-level surveys and Chicago Police Department crime data. Chicago schools offered a prime opportunity to examine the so-called spillover effects of neighborhood violence, as many students are able to attend schools outside of their actual neighborhoods.

Along with decreased achievement levels, the study also suggests that schools with larger numbers of students from violent neighborhoods see more issues with discipline and students' perceived sense of safety.

According to the study, the findings "contribute to our understanding of how these trends in urban violence and school choice interact with one another to produce wide spread 'collateral damage' on a scale that is bigger than the few schools with high crime rates or a few students from the most violent neighborhoods."

Burdick-Will determined that, on average, high school students in Chicago public schools experienced about 70 violent crimes a year within a few blocks of their homes.

She says this presents a "constant reality" for them and for their classmates who go to school with them. And it's a reality that can prove detrimental to classroom performance.

"I think the results here show it’s really everyone’s problem," Burdick-Will says. "If we really want to improve our schools, we need to deal with the crime problems, all the social problems in our cities, because it’s not just the kids at schools in those neighborhoods that are affected, it’s everyone.”