dispense education under armed guard.”18
School violence broke into the national news as an issue bedeviling the entire country when the media publicized a report on school violence from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. The committee’s report, which was the first national study to name and examine school violence, surveyed 110 school districts around the country and found “sharp increases in specific categories of crime and violence.” The Dodd report, named for Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, the committee’s chair, found that the number of homicides in those schools had increased from fifteen in 1964 to twenty-six in 1968. (Those figures are staggeringly high considering that they come from a fraction of all school districts; in 1999, the year of Columbine, the national total of school-related homicides was thirty-six.) A Times article about the Dodd report also stated that more schools were hiring private guards because of “such incidents, coupled with student disruptions and evidence of racial polarization at some schools.” The causes of school violence, the report claimed, were the same as those causing violence in general society: poverty, physical deterioration of housing and surroundings, racial and ethnic concentration, and high unemployment and high population density, among other factors.19 A Post article stated that the Dodd report “said it was a myth that most of the violence was racially directed,” because most incidents “involved violence by whites against whites or Negroes against Negroes.”20
The fact that a Senate study framed school violence primarily as crimes against property and persons, distinct from racial clashes and political protests, indicates how fearful government was of the era’s volatility. Fear of popular uprisings, especially among youth, wasn’t paranoia; it was logical. The confluence of black activism, campus protests, antiwar demonstrations, and urban riots shook the government to its core. But some observers saw the connections, if through a jaundiced, conservative lens. The Washington Post columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote, a week before the Dodd report was released, that public high schools were becoming a “battleground” of racial turmoil. “No single high school disturbance has the magnitude of a Berkeley rebellion or a Watts riot to stir national imagination,” they said, but schools were becoming “the most violence-prone and divisive battleground of American society” as a “spontaneous reflection of national racial tensions and black militancy.” The duo listed a half-dozen incidents of “Negro students” assaulting white students, calling them examples of “a national blackboard jungle dominated by racial hatred.” The problem, Evans and Novak said, was not the influence of the Black Panthers or Students for a Democratic Society or any extremist groups. No, it was “the militancy now instilled in black youths,” which unless controlled would steel “middle-class white determination against racially integrated schools, North and South.”21
Their analysis was skewed by bias, but the columnists were right about high schools: they were hotbeds of all kinds of activity, not simply the racial clashes Evans and Novak singled out. A study released around the same time as the Dodd report by the National School Public Relations Association, titled “High School Student Unrest,” found that “59 percent of high schools and 56 percent of junior highs had experienced some form of protest by January of last year.”22 These public school protests did indeed mirror the college protests rocking campuses from Berkeley to Kent State to Columbia. In many cities and suburbs, high school students brought the spirit of protest inside the schoolhouse over the issues that were relevant to their lives and in ways that befitted their experience and circumstances. They walked out of classes as part of the nationally planned war moratorium of 1972. They protested dress codes as restrictions on their freedom of expression. Black students demanded black administrators and the inclusion of black history in their curricula. They staged walkouts when Reverend King was assassinated in 1968. In cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago, where poverty and segregation fostered racial unrest, school violence and disruptions were also manifested as crimes against property and people. Alienation from schools that didn’t speak to their experiences could spark a walkout or just plain vandalism. All of it, though, was a sign of the turbulent times.
In the early 1970s, racial segregation in the public schools was addressed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that built on the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Interestingly, desegregation and the busing plans that often accompanied it did not produce a new round of school violence among black and white students. The Boston example of pitched battles between white residents opposed to busing and proponents of integration was the exception, not the rule. In his 1978 study of busing, Gary Orfield noted that “while the fear of violence often plays a large role in local debates over desegregation plans, a recent Justice Department report indicates that desegregation seldom produces increases in school violence and even lowers the level when a local plan specifically addresses the problem. . . . The Detroit school system had fewer racial incidents than before . . . students usually adjusted rapidly to desegregated schools, particularly at the elementary level. Most of the violence was among adults outside the school and it diminished after the transition.”23
As the activism of the 1960s and early ’70s receded, different currents outside the schoolhouse came flowing through its doors: the economic downturn of the mid-1970s brought with it a bubble in violent and property crimes. Schools were now permanently fixed on the radar of government officials and bureaucrats as one locus of crime trends worthy of study. So, in 1978, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano released findings of a three-year study of school crime. And like so many government-financed studies of school violence to come, Califano’s report offered an odd mix of scary statistics and sobering perspective. Teenagers ran a greater risk of being robbed, assaulted, or otherwise becoming victims of violence at school than at any other time, the report stated. Yet Califano also offered that while the problem of school crime “remains extremely serious,” the study found vandalism and violence little changed from 1971 to 1976, with some improvement in urban areas. The HEW study also found, not surprisingly, that in communities where violence and crime were high, schools also had higher rates of violence and crime—and that held true in urban, rural and suburban areas.24 Despite the nuanced findings and clear connections between what occurred outside and inside the schoolhouse, the HEW report reflected an emerging consensus among policy makers: school violence was a growing social ill, distinct from crime in general, and that youth engaged in it were a breed apart. But the statistical jump in assaults and robberies was more a blip than a tsunami, and a relative increase could not reverse the fact that the overwhelming majority of students then, as now, were safe in school and faced a greater likelihood of harm at home or in their communities.
SUPERPREDATORS AND STUDENTS GONE WILD
The decade of the 1980s ushered in an entirely new era, as conservatism began its ascension to power in government and out. Ronald Reagan began his two-term presidency and initiated radical changes in social and economic policy. A crack-cocaine epidemic infected many cities around the country with an accompanying spike in violent crime through the early 1990s. Between 1984 and 1993, arrest rates for homicides more than doubled; aggravated assault arrests in 1992 were nearly double the 1980 rate.25 The Reagan Administration made crime and drugs among its chief domestic and foreign policy issues, and school violence was part of the agenda.
In 1984, Attorney General Edwin Meese created the National School Safety Center to reduce crime and violence and improve discipline and attendance at schools. It was the first of what would be many public and private centers created around the country to address, study, prevent, and fix the problem—the seed of an embryonic school-violence industry, so to speak. The center was born in controversy, however, when Justice Department insiders leaked information to journalists that cast Meese’s actions in a different light. In a classic example of pork barrel spending, the $3.9 million grant went to George Nicholson, a close friend of the attorney general, to establish the center at Pepperdine University, which had received private donations from both Meese and Reagan that year.26 Nothing came of the revelations and the NSSC exists today as a sort of clearinghouse.
Reagan also launched the War on Drugs, heralded with the
