Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The cost of violent crime is high (McCollister, French, & Fang, 2010). Schools are likely important mediators of the long-term impacts of community violence on young people; schools provide direct services to traumatized and victimized students, and the work of schools is directly influenced by young people’s cognitive and behavioral responses to violence. These include a range of disruptive externalizing and internalizing behaviors (Bingenheimer, Brennan, & Earls, 2005; Osofsky 1999; Pynoos et al. 1987; Raver, Blair, & Willoughby, 2013; Shonkoff et al., 2012), changes in attendance (Hinze-Pifer & Sartain, 2018), short-term declines in cognitive abilities (McCoy, Raver, & Sharkey, 2015; Sharkey, Schwartz, Ellen, & Lacoe, 2014; Sharkey, Strayer, Papachristos, & Raver, 2012), and likely reductions in long-term learning (Schwartz, Laurito, Lacoe, Sharkey, & Ellen, 2016).

While the geospatial clustering of criminal violence is well-documented (e.g. Gaviria & Pagé, 2002; Hope & Norris, 2013), little is known about how the burden of community violence exposure is distributed across schools. With the advent of school choice, school-level violence exposure is no longer tightly coupled with neighborhood violence exposure; it is not immediately apparent whether this decoupling exacerbates or ameliorates inequalities in aggregate exposure at the school level. Similarly, little is known about how exposure to community violence accrues to individual youths across childhood in contexts with both high levels of violence and high residential mobility. Likewise, we have limited evidence on how aggregate exposure influences school-relevant behaviors over the full course of childhood and adolescence.

Using nearly a decade of data from Chicago – including student addresses observed three times annually, the location, date, and time of all crimes reported to police, and daily attendance and school behavior records – this paper pursues three goals. First, we document how individual exposure to community violence accrues during childhood and adolescence in the city. Regardless of definition, exposure rates are high, with nearly one in three high school students experiencing a murder within a few blocks of their home during the four years of high school, and most students experiencing a violent crime on their block each year.

Based on these individual measures of exposure, we next describe the distribution of exposure across all public schools in Chicago (traditional and charter), separately for elementary (K-8) and high schools. Recognizing the process by which students are assigned to schools is a potential policy lever, we estimate how the distribution would change if students were assigned to schools using various alternate approaches (e.g. zoned neighborhood schools).

Finally, using daily crime and daily individual behavior data, we estimate a series of longitudinal models estimating short-term impacts and long-run associations between exposure to violent crime and attendance, in-school misbehavior, suspension, and arrest for in-school behavior. Patterns are consequentially different for students living in relatively low violence settings – who come to school more after exposure and display limited evidence of long-term changes in behavior – compared to those living in the highest violence settings – who display evidence of longer-term behavioral challenges including increased risk of dropout.