However, another study, from the Department of Education, reported no difference in worry about crime or in actual victimization for students at larger schools.

Even if smaller schools do help learning and reduce violence, reducing school size or class size may not be the most cost-effective method. In New York, some small, "model" schools were created by draining surrounding schools of their best students. John Devine, a small-school believer, says that creating small schools in isolation exacerbates the overall problems at the larger schools. A more thorough effort "would mean an expenditure of funds larger than any present-day politician would deem remotely reasonable or even imaginable." Similar cost problems plague the movement toward reducing class sizes in California, where the state government offers monetary incentives to schools that reduce class sizes. Many schools are now using spaces (auditoriums, libraries, cafeterias) that would otherwise go to other uses, hiring teachers that would otherwise be considered marginally qualified, and spending money that would otherwise have been spent on higher grades. Reducing class size is an idea that may work, but, like reducing school size, is an expensive idea if done for the sole purpose of reducing school crime, and is therefore not appropriate everywhere.

C. "More Education"

Other strategies—apparently the most popular among academics, who dislike punishment as a way of dealing with school crime and violence, and favor addressing "root causes"—mostly involve new educational programs to improve student and teacher conflict-resolution skills, prevent or discourage gang membership, or to enhance students’ self-esteem through new curricula.

1. Individual Conflict Resolution

We use the term "conflict resolution program" to lump together an assortment of violence-prevention programs. What makes them similar is their shared reliance on education instead of discipline as a way of preventing violence. From "Just say no to violence" (i.e., violence prevention) to "Can’t we all just get along?" (i.e., conflict resolution) is, educationally, a short step.

A number of school systems have reported positive results from conflict-resolution programs. In New York, the "Resolving Conflict Creatively Program" (RCCP), established in 1985, teaches conflict resolution and peer mediation. The K-12 curriculum focuses on preventing violence, resolving conflicts, and avoiding bias. Teaching strategies include role-playing, interviewing, group discussion, and brainstorming. RCCP coaches teachers in this new style of classroom management, which involves sharing power with students and thus helping them deal with their own disputes.

In a 1988–89 evaluation of three community school districts where this program was implemented, 67% of teachers observed less student name-calling and fewer verbal put-downs, 89% of teachers believed the mediation program had helped students take more responsibility for solving their own problems, and 71% of teachers reported that students were less violent. The test results of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade participants showed that they learned key concepts of conflict resolution and could apply them in hypothetical situations. Over 98% of respondents in the five schools said that the program gave children an important tool for dealing with conflicts. The report concluded that RCCP was exemplary and that participants’ assessments were extremely positive. Teachers believed that children’s attitudes had changed for the better as a result of RCCP.

Unfortunately, what is remarkable about such "success stories" is how little actual success they seem to show. Despite the popularity of programs like RCCP (such approaches have been dubbed "the most effective way of intervening" in violence problems), many such programs lack proof that they significantly reduce school crime. The RCCP study, for instance, produced percentages on many variables, none of which were actual measures of school violence. A review of three popular violence prevention curriculums—Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents, Washington [D.C.] Community Violence Prevention Program, and Positive Adolescents Choices Training—found no evidence of long-term changes in violent behavior or reduced risk of victimization.

A main function of such programs is often to give the impression that school officials and politicians are doing something—anything—about the problem. Another study, after reviewing the existing research on violence prevention, concluded that many schools are engaged in well-intentioned efforts without any evidence that the programs will work, and—worse—that some programs actually influence relatively non-violent students to be more violence-prone.

Another study surveyed 51 violence prevention programs around the country, including RCCP, and concluded that much more research needed to be done. Of the 51 programs, 30% conducted no evaluation, or had outdated or unavailable data. Another 10% collected no data aside from the number of people served. Another 16% did participant evaluations; 21% did outcome evaluations—but most of these evaluations were merely "before" and "after" measurements of participant attitudes and knowledge, using unvalidated measures with no control-group comparisons. "In short, there have been only a handful of programs that have been evaluated at a level approaching rigorous experimental design. None would meet the most rigorous methodologic standards of outcome evaluation."

That schools adopt these programs without valid effectiveness information may merely indicate that they use these programs as a last resort. But why do they continue with the programs without any evidence that they work? If solid evaluations are useful to school administrators, it may seem surprising that these programs are so poorly evaluated. We can only conclude that schools do not evaluate these programs because they do not have to; from the administration’s point of view, there is no significant loss in attendance or funding from a program that does not work well.

Moreover, even on educational-theory grounds, a conflict-resolution approach is not for everyone. Some commentators believe that violence-prevention programs, which do nothing but talk about violence, are inherently limited in that they are often adopted as a substitute for actually stopping students in the act of violence, and moreover, inadvertently teach students that violence is a normal state of affairs to be adapted to, instead of being an aberrant situation to be reversed. At any rate, researchers seem to be unanimous that violence-prevention or conflict-resolution programs only work if properly done, and since there is currently no universal consensus on what constitutes doing violence prevention properly, we have every reason to expect empirical results of such programs to be highly mixed.

2. Peer-group Programs

Paramount, Calif., was one of the first cities to include a course in gang prevention in the school curriculum. The city has a serious gang problem, with multigenerational Hispanic gangs, a gang of immigrant youths, a Crip clique, and several tagger groups. Since the early 1980s, over 9,000 students in the second, fifth, and seventh grades have taken a 15-hour course called "Alternatives to Gang Membership" (ATGM). ATGM, which has been widely replicated in Southern California, seeks to reduce gang membership and activity by teaching students the harmful consequences of a gang lifestyle, how to not participate in it, and how to choose positive alternatives. ATGM tries to reach students early; the second grade program is taught in ten weekly 40-minute lessons, the fifth grade program is taught in 15 weekly 55-minute lessons, and the seventh grade follow-up program consists of eight biweekly lessons which expand on previous topics, such as peer pressure and drug abuse. The program also focuses on self-esteem, higher education and career opportunities, and uses guest speakers. Every year, ATGM holds about 50 bilingual neighborhood gang-education and gang-prevention meetings with parents and residents, at schools, churches, parks, community centers and private residences—to educate them about gangs. Program staff also contact individual students and their families, and meet one-on-one with at-risk students referred to them by teachers.

ATGM evaluations have typically used "before" and "after" participant questionnaires. These evaluations, and staff opinions, have suggested that the program was effective. Fifth graders who had neither positive nor negative feelings toward gangs before the program tended to have a negative attitude after the program. Of fifth graders from the original 1982–83 group, 90% said two years later that the program had helped them avoid gangs. The same students gave the same responses two years later. In February 1993, working with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, city officials matched 3,612 names of ATGM participants with a listing of identified gang members; 96% were not gang members.

The trouble with such "success stories," of course, is the same as the trouble with conflict-resolution programs. We must take student questionnaires about attitudes with a large shaker of salt; it is, indeed, questionable whether they mean anything at all. The statistic that 96% of ATGM participants were not gang members also does not tell us much unless we can know how many would have become gang members if they had not been offered ATGM.

While even the ATGM figures do not clearly show that the program is a success, other studies are even more pessimistic. Patrick Tolan and Nancy Guerra, who have reviewed the literature on peer-group interventions, conclude that "there is little evidence that this type of approach is effective in reducing antisocial or violent behavior, and some programs have demonstrated negative effects." Empirical studies of peer-mediation programs are "almost nonexistent." There is a relation between gang involvement and antisocial behavior, but most studies of gang-prevention programs—which have tried to decrease gang recruitment or to channel gang members to better community activities—either have flaws in their methodology, or suggest that the programs are ineffective. In one study, 800 members of four gangs were given athletic and social events and academic tutoring. Because these activities made the gang members spend more time together, criminal behavior increased.

Other gang-prevention efforts are mostly harmless but are also amusingly simplistic. One report, Working Together to Erase Gangs in Our Schools, from the National Consortium on Alternatives for Youth at Risk, tells teachers how to identify gang members and gang activity at their school. Bloods call each other "Blood" and Crips call each other "Cuz"; Latino gangs call gang members "cholo" while black gangs say "let’s bail" for "let’s leave." Teachers are told to watch out for caps and jackets with sports logos such as that of the L.A. Raiders, colored shoelaces, sagging pants worn low around the hips, tattoos, and hand signals. All this while warning teachers to "eliminate any preconceived notions you may have about gangs." Another author suggests watching out for students with beepers, and for "informal social groups" with unusual names, like "Females Simply Chillin’" or "Kappa Phi Nasty." A naïve teacher reading this report and accurately observing the behavior of today’s high-school students would be forced to conclude that everyone must belong to a gang.

Similarly disappointing results have often been found for many drug-prevention programs, for instance the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. Several studies have found either that DARE had no effects on students’ drug or alcohol use, that the effects were short-lived, or, for some groups, that it even slightly increased their tendency to use drugs or alcohol.

IV. The Importance of Competition and Choice

In short, different methods work in different schools; no method clearly works in all cases. This is not surprising. There are too many variables, most of them difficult to quantify, and all of them changing over time.

Any policy that strives to impose a particular school-violence prevention method on many different schools is unlikely to be the best solution to school violence. Clearly, though, some policy must be best at any particular school. So what policies will encourage schools to adopt the most appropriate anti-violence methods for their needs?

The preceding discussion suggests not only that we don’t know what works, but also that "works" is a subjective, value-laden term. If a disciplinarian solution makes students less violent but scars them emotionally, some would consider it a failure; if video cameras make students less violent but without changing their attitudes about theft, some would consider that a failure. Flexibility and choice are therefore desirable for two reasons. First, they alleviate our ignorance. They allow school administrators to experiment with different methods to determine what works, and they allow parents to reward successful administrators by sending their child to a school with low violence rates. Second, they allow us to dispense with mandating a particular anti-violence program over the objections of certain parents. They allow schools with different educational philosophies to flourish and they allow parents who share the educational philosophy of a school to decide on their own what constitutes a good learning environment.

This section describes the difference between public and private schools and includes the results of personal interviews with the principals of ten Los Angeles-area Catholic schools. It concludes suggesting that compulsory education laws may themselves exacerbate school violence and that choice may also be beneficial if it is extended to the student and not only to the parent.

A. How Public and Private Schools Differ

1. Incentives

While decentralization is desirable because individual schools are more aware of their own communities, problems, and constraints, it is not enough. Al Shanker has pointed out that when New York City schools were decentralized in 1968 and decisionmaking authority brought closer to the neighborhood level, the result, in many cases, was corruption, and board members who were ignorant of many important aspects of their schools. As a result, Shanker says, New York schools have recently become partly recentralized.

A mechanism must be in place that rewards those who run schools for making good decisions and punishes them for making poor decisions.

The institutional setting of private schools provides some lessons. Private schools have a better record at keeping violence down than public schools. Private schools are usually smaller and less bureaucratic. They are often more academically challenging, so that to the extent violence is perpetrated by unmotivated students faced with undemanding course offerings, private schools offer advantages over public schools. (James Coleman also reports that private-school sophomores do, on average, two more hours of homework per week than their public-school counterparts, which may contribute to keeping them out of trouble, at least after hours and perhaps in school too, both by actually taking up part of their time and also perhaps by making them more studious.) They often offer stronger accountability to parents and students, since their survival depends on performance and meeting parental and student expectations. Moreover, the voluntary nature of attendance at these schools gives them greater latitude to set rules—often presented in the form of "contracts" with students—to abide by them. Some evidence suggests that by competing with public schools, private schools also force quality (including safety) up in public schools.

This does not mean that all schools should be private. Choice matters, even in public schools. Yvonne Chan, principal at the Vaughn Learning Center—one of the first schools in California to be awarded a charter, in 1993, under California’s charter-school legislation—described the revolutionary effects of choice, and the pride in having a school that the administrators, community, and students can feel to be "their own":

Because of the racial-ethnic problem [at the school before the charter]—my predecessor was pulled out of school because of death threats—the best they could do for me . . . was to give me three security guards . . . . Then [after getting the charter], we have to get those insurances. If you’re a vendor, like Prudential or [CIGNA], God, will you sell workmans’ comp and liability to a school like Vaughn in the ghetto with all the vandalism and graffiti and theft? . . . But guess what? Right now, we have no theft, no nothing. Everybody takes ownership of this school.

In its first year, disciplinary referrals dropped from 500 to 100 a year. Likewise, public schools that use private contractors to manage them may be better able to enhance accountability and reduce violence by making achievement of these goals a contract renewal condition. For example, public schools now managed by the Edison Project use contracts with each student and their parents to set goals and evaluate student performance.

2. Doing What the Government Can’t

Public schools, by contrast, labor under a host of legislative and judicial restrictions on discipline and punishment. Yet many of these restrictions exist for an excellent reason—to prevent abuse of government power and discriminatory provision of mandated government benefits. In a private context, where parents’ choice of school is entirely voluntary, and where parents can contract with the school for any policy imaginable (as long, of course, as it is legal), these constraints naturally (and correctly) do not apply.

This is good news for advocates of the disciplinarian model—private schools often keep violence down through strict and uniform regulations. Researchers like James Coleman find that private-school discipline, while less legalistic than in public schools, is both perceived as fairer by students and (possibly as a result) more effective. But making students better able to attend private schools would also be good news for advocates of the non-disciplinarian model, as non-disciplinarian private schools are also widespread, and parents would be able to choose whatever private school suited their vision of what their children’s education should look like.

There are many other things the government cannot do. The government cannot indoctrinate children with any particular brand of religion-based morality. But the connection between violence and moral values is not accidental. Many believe that moral values are the key to violence prevention. And while morality is possible without religion, many people do derive their morality from religion. Many parents also believe that morality aside, religious schools also provide structure to children who lack structure in their lives. Government-run schools, again, for excellent reasons, are forbidden from using religion to inculcate moral values—but many parents find morality more acceptable for their children, and many students find it more compelling as a personal guide, if it is religiously based. This is yet another reason why one might expect private schools, particularly religious schools, to do a better job at controlling violence.

Because of discrimination law, whether the government can run same-sex schools is a controversial question. On the other hand, many private schools, including Catholic schools, have been same-sex. That boys are generally more violent than girls is well-known and not surprising (though this is becoming less true, at least in public schools); thus, by removing boys, same-sex education may reduce violence substantially for girls. It is unclear whether same-sex education would reduce boy-on-boy violence, though it may reduce relationship-related violence, and some have suggested that it may reduce violence by giving boys from single-parent homes "healthy male role models," thereby helping to break "the cycle of welfare and intergenerational illegitimacy."

Also, for obvious reasons related to discrimination law, the government cannot run same-race schools. Some educators and parents, though, believe that all-black schools can provide significant benefits to black children, particularly by exposing black boys from fatherless families to positive black male role models they can identify with. More generally, to the extent that a black community may share certain cultural characteristics (much as other ethnic communities do), such schools may succeed by being more in tune with community values and prompting greater parental involvement and student interest.

Several cities, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, Ore., and Camden, N.H., have opened schools with Afrocentric curricula. In Detroit, Malcolm X Academy, a public school, strives to be all-black and all-male (though it cannot legally refuse to admit white students or girls) and has an Afrocentric curriculum. Students are taught Swahili and refer to male and female instructors as "Baba" and "Mama" (Swahili for "father" and "mother"). The school sports a red, black, and green "African" flag, and displays pictures of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and other prominent blacks. It features books on black history and literature, and emphasizes the contributions of blacks to math and science. (Teachers at Malcolm X also enforce a strict dress code, and also are free to spank unruly children.) Though 75% of its students are raised in single-parent households and more than 60% are poor enough to get free lunches, Malcolm X students have higher scores on standardized tests, higher GPAs, and better attendance rates than district norms—and, more interestingly for our present purposes, have low violence rates.

Since the school is government-run, it has been desegregated by court order, along with Detroit’s two other black-male academies. Still, it is mostly black because of its location, and still almost all-male because the community has rallied around the school and few girls have applied. The school has made enemies of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, but the principal denies that his school is segregationist. "Why shouldn’t our children learn about their origins, too?" asks principal Clifford Watson. Actually, Watson’s critics have a point; the school is indeed segregationist, but no more so than, say, a Jewish school, of which there are many. Government-run schools should be restricted from endorsing this brand of racialism, just as Judaeocentric curricula are inappropriate in public schools, regardless of Jews’ needs for positive role models. But if this type of school truly offers educational benefits for some, as Watson and the parents of his students believe, it should be allowed and encouraged—except, of course, under private ownership.

B. Doing the Numbers

As private school enrollment began rising after more than a decade of decline—in Florida, for instance, combined private-school enrollment in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties rose by 10% in 1994—private schools came to experience many of the same problems as public schools, including crowding, discipline, and drugs. But this increase in private-school enrollment has come about because of parents’ dissatisfaction with the crowding, discipline, and drug problems at public schools. "I think a lot of people right now are afraid to send their kids to public school," said Edward Gilgenast, headmaster of the Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg. And these problems are still significantly smaller at private schools. In the words of Sister Noreen Werner, schools superintendent for the Archdiocese of Miami, "we have the same problems they do; we just have them in less numbers." 70% of respondents to a national poll felt that private schools did a better job keeping out drugs and violence; only 6% thought public schools did a better job.

Relevant statistics, culled from different studies, on the performance of public and private schools, are shown in Table 2. On the availability of drugs, the prevalence of violence and property offenses, the extent to which students avoid places at school or fear attacks, private schools are consistently shown to be safer places to be than public schools. While victimization in general is lower in private schools than in public schools, physical attacks are lowest by the largest amount. On the more subjective questions, private-school teachers are also more positive about their students than are public-school teachers; private-school students are more positive about their classmates than are public-school students; and private-school administrators are more likely to give their schools high marks than are public-school administrators. The results are similar for assigned public schools and chosen public schools; the main difference is between public and private schools. The difference between assigned and chosen public schools is a difference of choice and responsibility. Parents are free to choose a different school, and therefore the administrators of the chosen public school bear the costs of whatever bad decisions they make. However, the question of ownership, which is what separates public from private schools, seems to be even more important. It makes sense that private-school administrators achieve better results not only because they bear the costs of their bad decisions, but because they are freer to make good decisions.

C. Religious Schools

It is often asserted that private schools do well because they can expel whomever they like; thus, they can weed out the most difficult-to-educate students—like those with emotional or physical handicaps—foisting them on the public school system. Religious schools, though—particularly Catholic schools—have a legendary reputation for educating the difficult-to-educate. On average, Catholic schools expel less than 1% of their students, and suspend less than 3% of them. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York City, responding to a long-standing challenge by the American Federation of Teachers’ Al Shanker, even offered to enroll 5% of the city’s most difficult-to-educate students in parochial schools for Fall 1996. (At any rate, public schools already do not accept everyone. Nationwide, more than 100,000 difficult-to-educate students—students with physical handicaps, learning disabilities, emotional troubles, or involvement with the juvenile-justice system—are already enrolled in private secular and religious schools at taxpayer expense.)

For students from comparable backgrounds, absenteeism, disciplinary problems, threats to teachers, and rates of violence among students are lower among students at Catholic and other religious schools. Many parents choose religious schools for reasons quite unrelated to religion; "Our school is free of drugs, free of violence and free of sex," says Sulaiman Alfraih, principal of the boys’ school at the Islamic Saudi Academy in Washington, D.C. "Regardless of their ideology, the parents love to see their kids in a very safe, clean environment." "Our schools have a sense of order," says Sister Catherine McNamee, president of the National Catholic Education Association. "Parents feel their children are safe, especially in urban areas, and they will develop a sense of moral values."

Many Catholic schools used to have uniforms, though many today merely have a general dress code (i.e., no baggy jeans or nose rings). Most have few guards or security gadgets, and overwhelmingly, they do not incorporate violence prevention as such into the curriculum. Naturally, they have (often voluntary) school prayer, and strict behavior codes. Legendary Catholic school discipline (i.e., being rapped on the knuckles by a menacing nun) is more lax today than it once was. The success of Catholic schools is mostly attributed to such factors as "high expectations, firm discipline, academic rigor, and a sense of community." One writer describes the typical Catholic-school approach to discipline, in the person of Brother Greg (a pseudonym):

Coming off a 20th reunion gathering, a class of ’76 graduate recalled, "Brother wanted you to learn. He knew his stuff. He had a sense of humor. He respected you. But if you played the badass or mouthed off or hassled other kids, no matter how big you were, he would take off his shirt, show his martial arts thing, and, if you pressed it, kick your butt but good." In four years, how many butts did you actually see him kick? "None—but that’s the point. We knew he could and would—and had! We also knew he cared, and that he didn’t play favorites. White or black. Jock or not. Going to college or back to [the local bar]."

One 15-year-old, who has attended both a Catholic school and a lower-tier New York public school, puts the matter quite clearly: "It’s like here [in the public schools], the teachers . . . don’ say anythin’ when you miss their class or mess up your homework; the nuns, they make you look stupid and feel bad kind of like my mom treats me." The Jesuits, renowned among Catholics (and in the outside world) for their quality educational system:

were not afraid to confront students who failed to uphold their responsibilities . . . . When you did something right, you got immediate positive reinforcement . . . . What Jesuit teachers feared more than any arrogant student was a fellow teacher (Jesuit or lay) who didn’t know how to control a class . . . . Fear was certainly not considered the best method for motivating students in these highly competitive schools, but neither was it disdained . . . . My graduate students today stare at me in disbelief when I relate to them how, as late as the 1960s, as a young priest-housemaster living in the student dormitory of a Jesuit university, I was doing midnight bedchecks, bailing students out of the local precinct when they got in trouble with the law, communicating with their parents, and checking to see if they were going to daily Mass.

When teachers were asked to rate aspects of their school climate, Catholic school teachers gave their schools generally higher marks than public-school teachers, but the difference was greatest in teacher assessment of student behavior (see Table 3).

D. Catholic-School Principals Speak

1. Public and Catholic Schools in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Unified School District has its own police department, which has been in existence since 1948. The LAUSD Police Department has about 280 sworn personnel—one chief, three assistant chiefs, four lieutenants, 25 sergeants, 18 detectives, six senior police officers, and about 223 police officers. The police department serves about 58,394 regular employees, 811,713 students (in school year 1995–96), and 899 schools and centers spanning an area covering 708 square miles. Table 4 shows LAUSD crime statistics for years 1990–91 through 1995–96, with offenses ranging from assault with a deadly weapon and homicide to property crimes and trespassing.

According to the California Safe Schools Assessment 1995–96 annual report to the legislature, Los Angeles County had an enrollment of 1,511,054 (including the 811,713 in LAUSD). The financial loss to the county due to crime-related incidents (mostly property crimes) was just under $12 million. California public schools also invest a large amount of resources into violence-prevention programs: $7.2 million statewide for the School Violence Reduction Grant Program; $10 million for eight or more sites (in a three-year demonstration grant) for the Targeted Truancy and Public Safety Grant Program; $50,000 for each school that applies for the School Community Violence Prevention Grant Program; $8,000 for each applying school for the Conflict Resolution and Youth Mediation Grant Program; $5,000 for each of 100 schools (plus a district matching fund) for Safe School Plan Implementation Grants; $3 million statewide for the Gang Risk Intervention Program; and $4.03 per pupil (a federal fund entitlement) for Title IV Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities.

Catholic school enrollment is 2.6 million nationwide. Minority students account for nearly one-fourth of the total, and a rising percentage (now 13.2%) of the students are not Catholic. On average, Catholic schools expel less than 1% of their students, and suspend less than 3% of them. Most Catholic principals (84%) say that "discipline is a strong emphasis."

Total enrollment in Los Angeles County parochial schools is 93,200. There are 207 elementary schools (K–8), four middle schools, and 45 high schools (9–12). According to Sister Mary Joanne, research analyst for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, there is no need for a formal violence tracking system in Los Angeles-area Catholic schools because the number of incidents is so small. The Catholic school principals we interviewed reported less than one incident per year that would require police involvement. "There have been no incidents on school property in the last two years, although there has been violence in the community which has affected the children," according to John Quarry, principal of San Mogul Elementary. And as Margaret Nadeau, principal of St. Malachy Elementary, said, "I have worked here for six years and we have only called the police one time when outside gangs were causing trouble on our street corner. In fact, the police do not even know where we are located." When the police are called at Los Angeles Catholic schools, it is usually because of a disturbance from outsiders who come on or near the school campus.

Sister Mary Joanne confirmed our findings from the interviews with local principals and said that the low rates of violence are generalizable to all Catholic schools in Los Angeles County.

2. Ten Los Angeles Catholic Schools

We interviewed ten Catholic school principals at K–8 schools in East and South-Central Los Angeles. The student populations at these schools were 100% minority. At Santa Teresita Elementary School, all 274 students are Hispanic; at Santa Isabel, all 304 students are Hispanic; and at St. Lawrence of Brindisi, 60% of students are black and 40% are Hispanic. These Catholic schools also have a high student-teacher ratio. The smallest student-teacher ratio was 28-to-1, and most schools had a ratio closer to 35-to-1. (A Wall Street Journal editorial once described an eighth-grade teacher at New York’s Our Lady Queen of Angels who "manages a class of 46, a number that would send most public school teachers on strike.")

The Catholic schools we contacted do not have student mediation and conflict resolution programs, metal detectors or security guards, locker searchers or small class sizes. They manage to maintain discipline without many of the popular public school methods for preventing violence. Our interviews identified three sorts of strategies Catholic schools use to promote order, maintain discipline, and avoid violence—assertive discipline, contact with parents, and a strong sense of moral values.

3. Assertive Discipline

Amity Schlaes wrote of New York’s Our Lady Queen of Angels that it "enjoys another, giant advantage not shared by its public counterparts: the freedom to demand civilized behavior from its students. A blue school handbook lays out a stern line: ‘Self-discipline is the Christian ideal which all students are encouraged to achieve.’ The ‘Rules of general behavior’ include ‘polite greeting to each other’ and ‘holding doors and stepping back to let adults pass first.’"

All of the schools we contacted have a clear and consistent discipline policy. Public schools have zero tolerance for bringing weapons to school; Catholic schools have zero tolerance for misbehaving. All types of misconduct carry serious consequences; because Catholic schools try to nip misbehavior in the bud, weapon-carrying is rarely a problem.

According to the principal of San Miguel Elementary School, "the number one component to prevent violence is a very strong, assertive discipline program. Although teachers have autonomy to find the best way to control their classrooms, they consistently enforce a set of rules that all students are made aware of." At St. Lawrence, students are given a handbook at the beginning of the year, and the teachers review the handbook with students at mid-year to remind them of appropriate behavior. At this school, the punishment associated with different types of misconduct becomes harsher as the year progresses.

At Holy Cross Middle School, Sister Daniel Therese Flynn explains that the policies in the student handbook are strictly enforced:

We do not deviate. We have complete consistency in applying our policies. If students throw punches, for example, they are both suspended. There is no determination of who is at fault. There is not one predator and one victim—we do not act as a court of law so as to divide students into groups. There is no arbitration; everyone gets the same penalties.

Ms. Collins of St. Gregory pointed out that when children learn to respond to discipline in the first grade and the child stays in the Catholic schools for eight years, a sense of self-control becomes ingrained in the child. "We teach children self-discipline," explains John Quarry of San Miguel Elementary, who has expelled only two children in 12 years.

At Santa Isabel the principal, Sister Joanne Marie, pointed out that all teachers present a unified front of consistency:

We have zero problems because we emphasize that misconduct is just not permitted. When two seventh-grade boys were caught smoking marijuana before school, we took it very seriously. We made a heavy-duty big deal. They know, the other students know, their parents know—we set an example—this behavior is not tolerated.

In Catholic schools, students know the exact consequences for their behavior. At St. Thomas the Apostle school, for example, there is a specific process leading up to student expulsion. If students receive three pink slips, they are put on probation. If they receive three more, they are asked to withdraw from the school. School principal Dan Horn explains that:

it rarely gets to this point. The kids know the policy and they have a sense of shame when they receive a pink slip because they know it is serious. The student’s parents are contacted even before the first pink slip is issued. Before a student is asked to withdraw, every effort has been made to work with the student and parent and we even recommend outside counseling. The last automatic probation was for an eighth-grade boy who continued to verbally and sexually harass a female student.

4. Contact with Parents

Catholic schools keep in close contact with parents through letters or phone calls. Catholic school teachers call between 28 and 35 parents on a regular basis. At Holy Cross Middle School, the teachers maintain constant contact with parents to report positive and negative student conduct. Santa Isabel has mandatory parent meetings; every Tuesday, students take home a progress report detailing the student’s behavior, which the parents must sign.

And at Santa Teresita Elementary, when two seventh grade boys grabbed a note from a seventh grade girl, they received a detention slip just for "the nonsense" and because they took someone else’s property. Sister Mary Virginia, the school principal, told the boys to have their parents call her at home that night. One boy did, but the other did not. Sister Mary Virginia called the second boy’s home at 9:30 that night; his parents had been told nothing about the incident or his detention. The principal made sure the parents were aware of the incident.

5. Moral Values

All of the school principals we talked to stressed the importance of explicit moral values in maintaining a safe and positive environment in their schools.

As St. Malachy’s principal, Margaret Nadeau, explained:

Catholic schools have the moral advantage; we live by the Ten Commandments and install a strong sense of right and wrong in our children. We talk about values and teach the children to respect their teachers and each other. Our teachers demand respect. Children cannot live without a framework. We spell out our expectations and the children appreciate this—they appreciate the safe environment.

Similarly, Holy Cross Middle School’s Sister Daniel Theresa says, "We make youngsters aware that they have a moral obligation to behave. Their parents are sacrificing their time and money to send them to this school." And at Santa Isabel, they emphasize "saying kind things rather than unkind." At St. Thomas the Apostle school, Dan Horn explains that the faculty has a strong philosophy of respect and dignity. "Beyond just academics, we care for the students. And both students and teachers share in that philosophy."

E. Compulsory Schooling

To be most effective, choice in education may need to go further than merely allowing parents to choose which school their child goes to. Compulsory schooling laws may themselves exacerbate school violence problems. Repealing or softening such laws, at least at the high-school level, may alleviate school violence and improve the quality of education, would not flood the streets with delinquents, and would not appreciably increase crime in society at large.

The costs of compulsory schooling are twofold. First, public schools find it difficult to expel troublesome students. When a troublesome student attends class, he can make education difficult for the willing students; when he shows up at school and doesn’t attend class, as is often the case, he blurs the line between intruders and students, making it harder to maintain order. An anonymous ninth- and tenth-grade teacher at a large high school in New Jersey puts the problem this way:

You normally can’t kick [a low-performing, disruptive kid] out of the class. School administrators want to keep that kid in the classroom because they say whatever he gleans might help him next year when he takes the class again. But that isn’t what happens. For short periods of time, you can remove him from the class—which takes time and energy—and place him in what’s called the "restriction room," a sort of detention hall held during regular school hours. But you still have to make assignments for him and follow up on those, both of which take time away from actively working students. And when he comes back to the class, he is usually just as disruptive, and likely to drag marginal students down to his level.

Second, compulsory schooling may not even benefit the potential dropout. Compulsory schooling laws are often called "compulsory education" laws, but they are more accurately called "compulsory enrollment" laws. For unwilling, disaffected students, who have not chosen their school and who feel like prisoners, enrollment does not equal education. Such students are hostile, do not respect authority, and do not feel their education is worthwhile, and the higher the age of compulsory education, the more such students there are.

It is no coincidence that many academically or artistically selective schools—such as Boston Latin School, the Bronx High School of Science, Aviation High School, and the Murry Bertraum High School for Business Careers—are both safe and academically meritorious. They are entirely chosen, and have a critical mass of willing students. Thus, Aviation High School, for instance, serves both airplane lovers and students who are "looking for a place where there wasn’t going to be a fight every day." According to Jackson Toby, schools can ensure such a critical mass:

by insisting that educational achievement is the primary mission of schools. Such a policy implies that the small minority of high school students who lack the slightest interest in learning anything except how to drive their teachers into another profession would have to mend their ways in order to remain enrolled. Taking high school education seriously means that it is not enough for a youngster to be on the high school rolls and show up occasionally. Dropout prevention is not an end in itself; a youngster who does not pay attention in class and do homework ought to drop out.

What would happen if schools really allowed and even encouraged potential dropouts to drop out? Since most children are ruled by their parents, most children, even unwilling ones, would still go to school. Parents like to use schools as a day-care service, and child-labor laws reduce their incentive to withdraw their children from school. The data from different states with different ages of compulsory attendance confirms that the vast majority of students would still attend school. Table 5 compares the percentages of students in 1970 that attended school until ages 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, in two groups of states—the five states that compelled attendance to age 15 or under at the time, and the four states that compelled attendance to age 18. (The table only shows attendance rates of white males. Because different races and genders have different overall attendance rates, and states differ in their racial composition, considering all students together might have produced a misleading impression. Therefore, separate comparisons must be conducted for the other three race-gender combinations. They are not shown, but the results are similar—attendance rates are similar, whether or not a state has a compulsory attendance law for high school.)

For all years, the percentages of students that stay enrolled in school are similar. Since enrollment is an overestimate of attendance, the differences in attendance should be even smaller. And since attendance is an overestimate of learning, the true differences should be even smaller than that (and while "learning" cannot be measured directly, we cannot rule out the possibility that the lower-compulsory-attendance states might come out ahead under such a comparison).

School violence would also decrease for three reasons. First, those who don’t want to be there, who disproportionately exhibit delinquent behavior, would leave. Second, since schools, freed from the requirement to take all comers regardless of behavior, would be able to maintain higher standards, incorrigible students who do not want to drop out would be expelled. Third, once schools enforce higher standards, individual students’ behavior would probably improve.

Making schools tougher academically, with substantial amounts of homework, might have the paradoxical effect of persuading a higher proportion of families to encourage their children to choose of their own volition to try to learn . . . . Keeping internal dropouts in school is an empty victory.

As the crude comparison in Table 6 indicates, higher ages of compulsory attendance seem to be associated with higher rates of secondary-school crime. The interesting variable in the table is the right-hand column, which calculates the difference between secondary-school crime and elementary-school crime. As the age of compulsory school attendance rises, so does this difference.

But would dropouts increase the crime rate in the outside world? Probably not. Intuitively, one can observe that juvenile arrest do not increase much during summer vacation, even though students, including violent ones, are not in school. One can also observe that many students who eventually drop out already spend a lot of time outside of school, since their nonattendance rates are high. Quantitative studies support this intuition, and suggest that while dropping out may be a symptom of larger problems, it is not itself the problem, and in fact, forcing dropouts to stay in school will likely be counterproductive, both for the school and the would-be dropout. While dropouts do indeed have high delinquency rates, dropping out is not the cause of delinquency. Dropouts generally adopt antisocial behaviors while still in school, often as a result of experiences in the school itself. Once they drop out, their delinquency does not increase (see Figure 2); according to one study, dropping out actually decreases the dropouts’ rate of delinquent behavior and the likelihood of official police contact.

Thus, only a small minority of students are likely to drop out, and these are possibly the students that ought to drop out in any event; these dropouts would not appreciably increase violence in society at large. As schools become more demanding, other would-be dropouts might conclude that education is valuable and worthwhile. Schools may well be safer for the other students as well, increasing the value of the education for well-behaved students, and possibly slowing down the flight of students from public schools.

Voluntary high schools may account for some of the successes of the Japanese educational system; Japanese high schools are voluntary, and can therefore be selective and demand hard work from willing students. 94% of Japanese junior high school graduates attend high school, and 90% of them complete it. As high school attendance becomes more selective and voluntary, higher academic and behavioral standards seep into junior high schools, where students know that their acceptance into the high school of their choice depends on how they do in junior high. Japanese junior high schools (which are compulsory) are more violent than Japanese high schools, even though most junior high students are too busy preparing for high school admission exams to break the rules.

Schools might benefit not only by allowing students to drop out, but also by encouraging adult dropouts to return to school—not in special adult classes, but together with children. In Chicago, DuSable High School, which allows adults in regular classrooms, has found that "returning students," "urban Rip Van Winkles," act as "unofficial teacher’s deputies" and provide a "calm and wisdom" that reinforces the power of teachers. Children are often ashamed to misbehave because their adult relatives, or other adults they know (who "don’t have time for no foolishness"), might see what they are doing. As 17-year-old senior Alex Lee remarked, "I don’t want to be cursing and acting silly around them. I got respect for old people. Some of them are 40, 45 years old." For those children who misbehave anyway, adults can also be extra disciplinary aids. Once, the principal of DuSable, Charles Mingo, thought he saw a girl beating a boy in the hall. It turned out to be a mother disciplining her son, who was about to skip gym class. "She popped him right there in the hall and marched him off to the gym." (On the other hand, while sending teenagers to school with middle-aged adults may seem intuitively appealing, sending teenagers to school with college-age students is perhaps another story.)

In the words of the anonymous New Jersey teacher:

[In the real world, dropouts] could ponder their choices without draining time and resources from other kids who want to learn. Teachers would have more time to teach, and principals would have the opportunity to meet responsible students instead of dealing with the same problem kids over and over. I’m sure some of the dropouts would do well in the work world, especially those who got into a trade that emphasized experience over book learning. I’m equally sure that others would come back to school with their attitudes adjusted . . . . Compulsory education laws obscure the fact that most students would choose to be in school anyway—and that choice is a major motivator in learning. Perhaps more important, in the end, such laws make willing students pay the freight on unwilling ones. And those charges are pretty steep.

V. Conclusion

The conclusion is threefold.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Since no solution clearly works in all cases, no solution should be mandated from on high. Moreover, different schools, in different communities, will differ in their reasonable interpretations of the same data; people disagree on "what works" partly because they disagree on what it means to "work." Schools should be free to experiment with different systems to find the solution that is best for their own needs.

Incentives matter. Decentralizing decisions will do no good if the decisionmakers are not punished for bad decisions and rewarded for good decisions. Schools should have an incentive to produce the information on whether their violence-prevention programs work or not, and make that information available to parents. Ultimately, parental choice is the only way to ensure that good decisions are being made, because there is no objective standard by which to distinguish "bad decisions" from "good decisions."

Private schools have their advantages. They are not only chosen, but their owners directly gain when they attract students and directly lose when they lose students. They are also not subject to many of the rules of government-run schools—they are free to pursue a number of possibly promising paths to reduce violence, including same-sex education, disciplinarian methods, and religiously based moral teaching.

From a policy perspective, the problem should not be seen as managing the individual decisions of individual schools. Rather, the challenge is to create an educational environment relying less on centralized, government-run, compulsory approaches, and more on localized, voluntary ones, including private-school options.

Source: Bastian and Taylor, School Crime, p. 1

Note: Because these numbers come from different studies, they may not all agree exactly. Sources: Jean Johnson and Steve Farkas, Getting By: What American Teenagers Really Think About Their Schools (New York: Public Agenda, 1997), p. 42. Lisa D. Bastian and Bruce M. Taylor, School Crime: A National Crime Victimization Survey Report, U.S. Department of Justice, September 1991, NCJ-131645, pp. 2, 4, and 11. Mary Jo Nolin, Elizabeth Davies, and Kathryn Chandler, Student Victimization at School, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES-95-204, October 1995, pp. 7–8. Peter Benson and Marilyn Miles McMillen, Private Schools in the United States, National Center for Education Statistics, February 1991, NCES-91-054, pp. 97–99.

Source: Peter Benson and Marilyn Miles McMillen, Private Schools in the United States: A Statistical Profile, With Comparisons to Public Schools, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, NCES 91-054, February 1991, p. 115, figure 5-5.

Note: n/a = not available. Assault reporting rules changed in 1995–96; see battery. Extortion reporting rules changed in 1995–96; see robbery. Source: Los Angeles Unified School District home page, http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/police/crimstat/

Note: The five states with compulsory attendance until age 15 or under are Arkansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, and Washington. The four states with compulsory attendance until age 18 are Hawaii, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah. Source: Jackson Toby, "The Schools," in Crime, ed. James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilla (1995), chp. 7, p. 24, citing United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), ch. D, parts 5, 13, 20, 21, 37, 39, 46, 49.

Note: Because there are so few states in the 18 age group, extreme values for one of them greatly influence the average. Hawaii, for example, had by far the highest rate of school crime on both the elementary and secondary levels. If Hawaii were excluded from the average and the remaining eight states with compulsory ages of school attendance of 17 or higher were averaged, the result would be 4.0 for elementary schools and 11.4 for secondary schools, with a difference of 7.4. Source: Jackson Toby, "The Schools," in Crime, ed. James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilla (1995), ch. 7, p. 25, citing United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Violent Schools — Safe Schools: The Safe School Study Report to the Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), p. B–6.