Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

During the four years of high school, one in four Chicago Public School students experience a murder within a few blocks of their home. Using data from the 2010-11 through 2013-14 school years, we examine the ways in which high school student attendance, behavior, and perceptions change in the immediate aftermath of exposure to a community murder. We additionally consider the extent to which repeated exposure and persistence of impacts may contribute to longer-term outcomes including academic performance and attainment.

Years of developmental psychology research links traumatic experiences to long-term student externalizing problems. A related body of work relates negative life outcomes with exposure to high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods during childhood, although the causal interpretation of this work remains less clear in light of mixed results from randomized housing experiments. Recent work by Sharkey and co-authors (Schwartz, Laurito, Lacoe, Sharkey, & Ellen, 2016; Sharkey, 2010; Sharkey Schwartz, Ellen & Lacoe, 2014; Sharkey, Tirado-Strayer, Papachristos, & Raver, 2012) has examined more proximal outcomes of exposure to community violence, finding causally credible evidence that young students score lower on both low- and high-stakes assessments for 7-10 days after a violent crime occurs on the block where they live.

This study uses a similar approach to examine student behavior in and perception of schools in the immediate aftermath of a murder near their residence. Using daily high school student attendance and behavior data from the Chicago Public Schools, we conduct a within-student event study, comparing attendance and behavior in the two weeks preceding a murder near the student’s home to the same in the two weeks following. We additionally explore how student perceptions are changed by exposure to community murder, comparing student responses on the annual CPS My Voice, My School survey for students exposed to community murder in the two weeks before the survey to those exposed in the two weeks after the survey.

For high school students who live within a few blocks of a murder, attendance declines consequentially in the weeks immediately after the murder. The decline is largest at schools with pre-existing low levels of reported safety, and almost zero or potentially positive in schools perceived as the safest. We detect some indications that student misbehavior in school also increases in the weeks after a murder near their home, particularly for infractions related to disruption or defiance. Limiting the sample to the first time we observe students being exposed to murder, the impact of murder on student behavior is pronounced, corresponding to a 46% increase in all infractions and nearly a doubling of infractions for defiance and disruption. We fail to detect changes in student perceptions of themselves or their schools, but do find large statistically significant declines in student perceptions of their neighborhood and of their own safety on the way to school and outside around the school. As expected, results are strongest for students living within a few blocks of the murder.