Student Safety and the Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind

Abstract

reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is 3 years overdue, and the Obama administration, through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has explained the urgency of revising and reauthorizing the law. Attention has been focused most acutely on the provisions that directly relate to academic performance and accountability (Dillon, 2010a, 2010b). Remaining under the radar, however, is the critical Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO), Section 9532 of NCLB. USCO states that students who attend schools or who themselves have been the victims of violent crime at school are eligible to transfer to another public school (U.S. Department of Education, 2004). USCO was the first federal educational legislation to recognize school safety concerns as grounds for school choice. Since its inception, however, USCO has been heartily criticized; its provision related to the identification of persistently dangerous schools has yielded the most discussion. Much of the critique has been prompted by the fact that so few persistently dangerous schools have actually been identified. At the time of its review, the Office of the Inspector General (2007) reported that the designation had been applied less than 200 times and often to the same schools year after year. Since USCO went into effect in the 2003-2004 school year, researchers have identified weaknesses, raised questions, and made suggestions for improvement (Education Commission of the States, 2004 (pp. 49-52); Gastic, 2007; Gastic & Gasiewski, 2008; Gooden & Harrington, 2005; Gooden, Harrington, Findlay, & King, 2008; Khashu & Salsich, 2005; Office of Inspector General, 2007; Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Advisory Committee, 2006; Zradicka, 2004). Taken together, this body of work describes how the current system by which states determine their criteria for persistently dangerous schools has contributed to USCO s limited relevance, as states have generated an idiosyncratic patchwork of regulations to measure school safety and risk. While that provision of USCO has been vetted, the shortcomings of the individual transfer option have gone relatively unexamined. In this essay I fill that gap and investigate how the individual transfer option fails to adequately protect the students who are at the greatest risk of being hurt at school. I also present specific recommendations for how the individual transfer option ofUSCO can be revised before NCLB is reauthorized. The first obstacle is that the individual transfer option is currently restricted to students who are victims of violent crime at school. Violent crime is (fortunately) one of the rarest forms of violence at school; it includes simple and aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and sexual assault (Dinkes, Kemp, & Baum, 2009). In 2007, 2% of students aged 12-18 reported these kinds of victimization at school. Albeit important, violent crime is a narrow category and therefore limited in its usefulness as a representative indicator of school safety. Use of this criterion effectively impedes a much larger population of students who have been otherwise significantly injured or hurt at school from exercising an option to transfer schools.