Mayer Furlong 2010- How Safe Are Our S

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DOI: 10.3102/0013189X09357617

2010 39: 16EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER Matthew J. Mayer and Michael J. FurlongHow Safe Are Our Schools?

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EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 16

Educational Researcher, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 1626DOI: 10.3102/0013189X09357617

2010 AERA. http://er.aera.net

Schools are basically safe places for children. School violence anddisruption, although in decline through the mid- to late 1990s,remains a concern. National surveys that inform research, policy, and

practice have been designed for different purposes and can present

conflicting findings. Common standards of risk and harm that could

advance policy and practice are lacking. Progress in the field of schoolsafety has been hindered by the lack of a coherent conceptual struc-

ture to guide measurement and research. This article identifies some

of the conceptual and methodological challenges that must be

addressed and calls for a 10-year national strategic plan to improveschool safety.

Keywords: at-risk students; school psychology; student behavior/attitude; violence

E ach day parents watch their children go off to school, trust-ing the system of education to keep them safe. Because theexperiences of their children and periodic media coveragemay increase their concern, parents and others naturally ask:How safe are our schools? The response of researchers has been

that schools are generally safe (Dinkes, Cataldi, & Lin-Kelly,2007), but this alone has not fully quelled these concerns becauseof a lack of consensus about what constitutes safety. Do the rela-tively rare yet tragic high-profile school shootings represent agreater concern than the long-term psychological effects of day-to-day bullying, intimidation, and incivility experienced by stu-dents at school? What is the connection between school safetystatistical reports based primarily on survey indicators and thereal-life experiences of students in schools?

General Awareness of School Violence and Disorder

Aspects of school violence have been a concern throughout mod-ern American history (see Cornell & Mayer, this issue ofEducational Researcher, pp. 715) but came to the forefront withthe issuance of the 1978 report Violent SchoolsSafe Schools: TheSafe School Study Report to Congress (U.S. National Institute ofEducation, 1978). A report in 1984, Disorder in Our PublicSchools (U.S. Department of Education, 1984), pointed to ongo-ing issues with school disorder nationally, concomitant withincreases in juvenile crime (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999). Althoughnot widely recognized, school violence incidents peaked around

1993 and were described as an epidemic in the early 1990s(Elliott, Hamburg, & Williams, 1998). The National Center forEducation Statistics began issuing annual data reports on schoolsafety in 1998. News coverage of school shootings involving mul-tiple victims during the 1990s further focused public attentionon school safety. Despite this attention to violent school events,there was limited consensus about what constitutes school vio-lence and disorder and how to gauge accurately and reliably theoverall safety status of American schools.

Those behaviors that typically fall under the termschool vio-lence constitute a small percentage of the constellation of behav-ioral events at school. Conceptually, it is possible to consider the

relations depicted in Figure 1, understanding that its compart-ments are not empirically derived but that they informally andbroadly summarize behavioral events in schools. There are noextant data that map precisely to all of these categoriesthislimitation leads us to a key consideration. Having neither a quan-titative referent base of a broader array of student behaviors asso-ciated with school violence nor definitive means of quantifyingunacceptable, marginal, and acceptable behaviors at school,highly variable interpretations of the seriousness of school vio-lence incidents are possible.

For example, how is meaning attached to the observation that909,500 secondary students (3.4%) experienced theft at schoolin 2006 or that 43% of middle schools reported weekly incidentsof school bullying during the 20052006 school year (Dinkes,Kemp, & Baum, 2009)? Considering the 767,000 violent crimesat school reported in 2006 spread across 26.4 million studentsages 12 to 18, each attending school for about 165 days (assum-ing absences), does the resultant rate of 1.76 victimization experi-ences per 10,000 studentschool days represent a major problem?These data suggest that a child has about a 1 in 5,700 (5,681)chance of being a violent crime victim on a given day during theschool year, or about 1 violent incident at a large comprehensivehigh school every other day. Presenting the same data in different

ways may lead parents and guardians to feel more or less comfort-able regarding their childrens safety based on varying probabilityestimates. These rates vary based on race/ethnicity, urbanicity,gender, and other key variables. However, it remains unclear howseriously the statistics should be taken relative to adult views of

what constitutes a reasonable degree of safety and how unsafebehaviors are considered relative to the much more common pro-academic and prosocial student behaviors that occur daily inschools.

School safety stakeholders often read and interpret statisticsreporting prevalence and incidence data.Prevalence is generally

How Safe Are Our Schools?Matthew J. Mayer and Michael J. Furlong

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 17

given as the number (or rate) of incidents of a condition of inter-est (event or disease) present in a population at a given point intime. Incidence is generally given as the rate of new events emerg-ing within a specified time frame, as in the instances of new dis-ease outbreak annually, and represents the risk of experiencingthe condition. As discussed by Borum, Cornell, Modzeleski,and Jimerson in this special issue ofEducational Researcher (pp. 2737), the public could perceive schools as unsafe based onmedia reports of the incidence of school-based homicides (e.g.,21 during a particular year), although the actual prevalence ofschool-based homicides is extremely low (the typical school

would experience such an occurrence once every 6,000 years).The school safety waters are further muddied when the con-

cept of harma relative constructis considered. Do horrific

school shootings, albeit rare, yet devastating for all involved, con-stitute a public health risk? Statistically, based on an average of 21student deaths per year, nationally, from 1996 to 2006, theanswer would likely be no and lead to the conclusion that schoolsare among the safest places for Americas youth (Modzeleski et al.,2008). However, this provides little consolation to the bereavedfamilies, friends, teachers, and others affected, not to mentionparents who fear that similar harm may befall their children whilein school. Conversely, should widespread and long-term day-to-day bullying, intimidation, and incivility in schools be consid-ered a serious public health risk factor? In this instance, theanswer would probably be yes, based on recent data wherein 32%of secondary students reported being bullied at or around school(Dinkes et al., 2009) and several lines of research that point topronounced long-term psychosocial harm to large numbers ofaffected youth (Arseneault et al., 2006; Bierman, 2004; Boxer,Edwards-Leeper, Goldstein, Musher-Eizenman, & Dubow,2003; Ladd, 2003; Nansel et al., 2001). Thus far, the schoolsafety field lacks consensus on how to approach these matters,and this situation is impeding movement toward forming anational safe school agenda.

Despite limited consensus on essential school safety indica-tors, researchers have developed a picture of trends in school vio-lence and disorder at the national level taken from multiple data

sources, including but not limited to (a) School CrimeSupplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey(NCVS), (b) School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS),(c) Center for Disease Controls (CDC) Youth Risk BehavioralSurveillance Survey (YRBSS), and (d) Monitoring the FutureStudy. Data from these sources originate from local communityofficials (e.g., law enforcement), administrators, teachers, parents,students, and others and represent official and unofficial account-ing of discrete or grouped incidents, personal experiences, law-and rule-breaking behavior, and so forth. Based on these and othersources such as school records and administrator records, school-generated data can be used to monitor violations of school rules(e.g., fighting, bullying, theft); survey data can be used to assessvictimization events (e.g., being physically attacked, threatened

with a weapon); other data may address self-reports of studentfear, anxiety, or avoidant behaviors (e.g., avoiding parts of theschool building, missing school due to fears for personal safety).

Examination of SCS trend data derived from personal inter-views suggests major declines in school crime overall since around1993, with some leveling off from 2001 to 2006 (see Figure 2).In contrast, the CDCs YRBSS data derived from anonymousschool-based surveys show continuing or increasing problemsduring roughly the same period for high school students reportsof having been threatened or injured with a weapon and missingschool due to safety concerns (see Figure 3). In fact, contrary toother data suggesting sharp declines from 1993 onward in indica-tors of school safety problems, the CDCs Morbidity and MortalityWeekly Report ( MMWR ) indicated, During 19932007, a sig-nificant linear increase occurred in the percentage of students

who did not go to school because of safety concerns (4.4%5.5%) (Eaton et al., 2008). When examining these findings intoto, how is it possible to conclude whether schools are becomingmore or less safe over time or how safety indicators compare withsome broadly accepted tolerance level? This question is addressedbelow in the section on major data trends. The situation pre-sented in this section sets the stage for discussion of definitionaland measurement issues, research-to-practice linkage, and makingpractical meaning for those in the trenchesparents, students,

Appropriate, Positive, EngagedBehaviors

School Disorder

Theft

Bullying, Intimidation, Incivility

Overall School Behaviors

Marginally AcceptableBehaviors

School Violence, Disruption, andProblem Behaviors

Outsider AdultShootings at School

School-Associated Shootings(e.g., Columbine)

Serious Violent Crime

Personal Attack

FIGURE 1. Conceptual representation of school disorder compared with overall student behaviors. Adapted from School violendisruption by M. J. Mayer, 2008,SAGE Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology, pp. 880-888, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.



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school personnel, education leaders, and local governmentgrappling with school safety challenges.Definitional and Measurement Issues

Federal, state, and local agencies collect, analyze, and report schoolviolence data using highly variable methods, with data reflectinginfractions of criminal law and/or school rules as well as victimiza-tion episodes (Leone, Mayer, Malmgren, & Meisel, 2000). Forinstance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation administers theUniform Crime Reporting Program, which provides general arrestdata and the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which,as of September 2007, reported detailed incident data from 37%of law enforcement agencies, representing approximately 26% ofreported crime nationally (Justice Research and Statistics

Association, 2009). There are no standardized methods of collect-ing and reporting school-based crime incidents nationally, andmost data come from anonymous self-report surveys that do not

allow tracking specific respondents over time. For example, nonational database provides a record of the same students schoolsafetyrelated experiences annually throughout secondary school.

Reporting driven by the No Child Left Behind law has beenof limited value because of the variable approaches used acrossstates and, in particular, the unrealistic standards adopted bymany states linked to the persistently dangerous schools componentof the Unsafe Schools Choice Option in the law (Mayer & Leone,2007). For example, in the entire nation, only 52 schools in sixstates were classified as persistently dangerous in 20032004(Snell, 2005). Testimony at a 2003 House Congressional Hearingindicated that the major cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami,Detroit, Cleveland, San Diego, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.,had no persistently dangerous schools (United States, 2004).

Above and beyond the impact of No Child Left Behind, prob-lems exist nationally with several major violence data collectionand reporting approaches.

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

At School 144 155 150 135 121 102 101 92 72 73 64 73 55 56 63Away From School 138 139 129 119 117 117 95 78 74 61 55 60 48 46 49

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

R a

t e p e r

1 , 0

0 0 s

t u d e n

t s

Year

FIGURE 2. Rate of total crime against students ages 12 to 18, per 1,000 students, at and away from school, 19922006. Total crincludes theft, violent crime, and serious violent crime.

1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007

Threatened or Injured With aWeapon at School (past year)

7.3 8.4 7.4 7.7 8.9 9.2 7.9 7.8

Missed School for SafetyConcerns (past 30 days) 4.4 4.5 4 5.2 6.6 5.4 6 5.5

0

2

4

6

8

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P e r c e n t a g e o

f R e s p o n

d e n

t s

9 5 %

C . I .

Year

FIGURE 3. Results of Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Survey, 19932007.



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We believe that the low number of schools identified as persis-tently dangerous is also a byproduct of ambiguity and a lack ofconsensus over which safety indicators and databases are mostsalient and what is actually being measured. Crime incident datacan lead to biased estimates of the extent of violent acts and num-ber of perpetrators in a community because they reflect arrests, notadjudications and convictions, and do not include behaviors thatescape law enforcement due to lack of detection, victims failure toreport crimes, or system inability to pursue cases. Victimization

self-reports via the NCVS are also vulnerable to problems, includ-ing sampling frame and instrumentation, and respondent errors,such as poor recall, comprehension difficulties, and telescopingeffects (inaccurately recalling sooner or later than events occurred;Biemer, Groves, Lyberg, Mathiowetz, & Sudman, 1991). Majornational surveys have demonstrated risk of bias driven by extremeresponse sets (responses that tend to be anchored at one part of ascale; Furlong, Sharkey, Bates, & Smith, 2004) and inferentiallimitations due to uses for which the surveys were never validated(Furlong & Sharkey, 2006). For example, citing work by Bachmanand colleagues, Furlong and Sharkey reported on the Monitoringthe Future Study, where validity of questions about substance use

was not empirically established. Large-scale surveys tapping intosimilar domains can vary significantly with respect to analysisgoals linked to instrumentation design and can produce data thatare incongruent across differently defined and targeted popula-tions, types of violence or disorder, and time frames (Leone et al.,2000; Reiss & Roth, 1993; Sharkey, Furlong, & Yetter, 2006).More localized surveys have demonstrated problems in terms ofconsistently following standardized administration protocols,directions to respondents differing across administrations, andlocal survey providers often being untrained and unprepared forsurvey administration (Cross & Newman-Gonchar, 2004).

Beyond survey administration issues, there are problems withhow results and other school safety data are organized, inter-

preted, and disseminated among schools and allied agencies.There is no uniform school safety data collection and recordingframework, and practices vary, for example in the recording ofduplicated versus unduplicated (e.g., counting multiple suspen-sions of a particular student as one suspension) counts and pro-tocols for reporting based on individuals versus incidents.Systems-change initiatives (e.g., positive behavioral supports)that often use outcome measures such as office disciplinary refer-rals have been criticized for not necessarily capturing the mostrelevant data reflecting violence and disruption in a school(Morrison, Peterson, OFarrell, & Redding, 2004). Likewise, dif-fering approaches to recording suspension data across school dis-tricts can result in reliability and validity problems, hinderingmeaningful interpretation (Morrison, Redding, Fisher, &Peterson, 2006). A noteworthy investigation in New York Stateuncovered serious underreporting of school violence in manyschools, where about one third of a sample of audited schoolsfailed to report approximately 80% of violent incidents (Officeof the New York State Comptroller, 2006). The State ofCalifornia, in fact, started formal school crime reporting twice,and both efforts were discontinued because it was evident thatnot all crimes were being reported and that reporting was influ-enced by administrator idiosyncratic interpretation of the report-ing requirements (California Legislative Analyst Office, 2002).

Beyond considering definitional and measurement issues, ques-tions emerge regarding linkage to theory.

Linkage to Theoretical Models

School safety and order encompass a wide range of student andadult behaviors and systemic processes, going beyond a narrowerfocus on school violence. Cross-cutting threads in school safetyinvolve well-run schools with positive student engagement andoutcomes and overall psychological and physical safety for all

stakeholders. A reasonable expectation for researchers and otherstakeholders in the social and behavioral sciences would be thatmajor national surveys of important social issues (e.g., violence,drug use, health habits) would be linked to established theoreticalfoundations and well-conceived conceptual frameworks. But thisis not necessarily the case. Johnston, OMalley, Schulenberg, andBachman (2001) provided insightful discussion of how theoryapplied to drug abuse meshed more or less well with goals of theMonitoring the Future Survey. Several key points they raised withrespect to drug use might be applied to violence and other social-psychological concerns.

First, the history of social and behavioral inquiry, includingresearch on substance abuse, includes dozens of theoreticalmodels and their derivatives, addressing (a) types of involvement;(b) stages of development; (c) sets of social, emotional, and behav-ioral factors purportedly linked to outcomes; (d) foundationaltheories of human behavior; and (e) units of measurement andanalysis. Second, no theories are embraced by most of the field,and theory development remains in process. Third, citing com-ments of Merton (1957), Johnston et al. (2001) pointed to muchof the research embracing middle-range theories that map tominor testable hypotheses; this research did not entail a coher-ent explanatory approach driving variable selection but, rather, amore general orientation to relevant variables. Fourth, citingCattells (1966) description of an inductive-hypothetico-deduc-

tive spiral, Johnston et al. argued that in the absence of coherenttheory, a somewhat more eclectic approach is necessary, wherethrough iteration, particular theoretical positions drive specificempirical tests, which in turn influence refinement of theory.

Taken as a group, these considerations suggest that the schoolviolence field is developing in a manner similar to other areas ofsocial-behavioral research, such as substance abuse, in that atpresent it lacks a unifying framework and is more often studiedin a piecemeal fashion within discipline domainseducation,psychology, sociology, criminology, and public healththatcommunicate incompletely with one another. This theoreticalfragmentation may contribute to the so-called research-to-prac-tice gap.

The desire to better understand the status of school safety islinked to future research, policy, funding, and programmaticimplementation to address need. Developing theoretical coher-ence is critical for purposes of developing a system of meaningthat informs research, practice, and planning for the future. Forschool violence and safety data collection and analysis, the inter-est often is focused on learning more about (a) victimizationexperiences; (b) characteristics of the individuals and schools;(c) systemic factors, such as how the schools system of rules isunderstood and implemented; (d) risk and protective factorsacross ecological levels; and (e) related contextual variables, such

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as neighborhood mobility or crime and violence in the localschool community.

Researchers are both constrained and liberated at times by theirchoice of theoretical approaches. More parsimonious approachessuch as radical behaviorism may be useful for understanding dis-crete behaviors and related interventions but offer relatively littlebreadth and depth to inform the understanding of and responsesto school safety needs. Highly eclectic approaches, while providingconvenient lenses through which to view and consider diverse

phenomena, lack theoretical coherence and can inhibit systematicresearch and development of effective prevention approaches.Researchers need to work with models that (a) propose theory thatpromotes understanding of complex social-emotional-behavioralissues, (b) provide a foundation for evidence-based interventions,and (c) support scientific investigation that is responsive to emerg-ing knowledge and withstands the challenges of experimental sci-ence. These trade-offs map to researchers understanding of schoolviolence data, especially when they seek fundamental meaning as

well as integrity of analysis.

Thinking About the Nature of Trend Data

There are limited and incongruent national-level measurementsof school violence and disorder that span considerably differenttime periods, making long-term trend analysis challenging. TheSchool Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National CrimeVictimization Survey (NCVS), which collects victimization andrelated data from student respondents, was administered in 1995,1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007, with plans to continue bien-nial surveys. The larger NCVS survey, reported annually since1972 (redesigned in 1992), which currently reaches a nationalprobability sample of about 76,000 households, taps into moregeneral crime victimization experiences of the overall adult U.S.population, as well as the experiences of secondary students. TheNational Center for Education Statistics School Survey on Crime

and Safety (SSOCS), which collects data from elementary andsecondary administrators, was originally administered in the19992000 school year, with biennial data collections, exceptingthe 20012002 school year. The CDCs Youth Risk BehavioralSurveillance Survey (YRBSS), which collects information bian-nually from students in Grades 9 to 12, addresses a wide range ofhealth- and safety-related behaviors, including behaviors relatedto school violence and victimization. The Monitoring the Futureannual survey of high school seniors, beginning in 1976, includesquestions on student victimization experiences at school (withdata on 8th- and 10th-grade students from 1991 onward). Otherrelated information is available from the Schools and StaffingSurvey, which includes teacher reports of school climate and spe-cific problems at school such as physical attack and threats onteachers (National Center for Education Statistics, 2009).

Recent reports from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice have documented significant declines in school violenceand disorder since the early 1990s (Dinkes et al., 2007). Weopened the door to this discussion earlier, suggesting that fromabout 1993 to 1999 there were striking declines in recordedschool crime (see Figure 2), whereas other indicators suggestedless pronounced changes or even increases (see Figure 3). Someof the trend differences across surveys can be understood as afunction of previously discussed definitional and measurement

issues, as well as respondent ages, response coding rules, and pat-terns of concordance of different surveys over time.

Stakeholders examining year-to-year changes in data need tobe mindful of point versus interval estimates (e.g., means andconfidence intervals). Statistics from national school safety sur-veys using probability samples include interval estimates that aredriven by standard error. Although it is tempting to read the dataas point estimates, this can be misleading. For instance, the 25%increase in serious violent crime from 201,800 in 1997 to

252,700 in 1998 seems noteworthy but is statistically nonsig-nificant at the .05 level as a result of high standard errors. Otherfactors must also be considered when evaluating trend data forchange. Major national surveys reviewed here use complex sam-pling designs (clustering, stratification, and unequal selectionprobability weighting) that can entail multiple methods for cal-culating the standard error of statistics, which are typically largerthan those of a simple random sample due to thedesign effect (theratio of the variance of a statistic under a particular sample designto the variance of that statistic under simple random sampling fora sample of equal size; Kish, 1964; Kish & Frankel, 1974). This,in turn, affects interpretation of change.

Do seeming contradictions in trends based on different indi-cator variables constitute a problem, or are they a benefit, helpinginvestigators better understand disparate aspects of school safety?Rand and Rennison (2002) discussed apparent contradictionsbetween a NCVS-reported 15% drop in crime from 1999 to2000 and a Uniform Crime Reporting Program report showingyear 2000 figures at a stable level compared with previous yeardata. They noted that year-to-year changes in violent crimesacross the two surveys moved in the same direction about 60% ofthe time. Rand and Rennison identified multiple aspects of thesurveys that accounted for differing statistics on crime, including

who was being measured, counting rules for multiple victims ver-sus incidents, victimization measurement of persons versus

households, and protocols for recording a series of victimizations.For example, if a student was victimized several times in one dayby the same bully perpetrator, should this be recorded as a singlevictimization or several? Protocols can vary. In addition, social-environmental factors may contribute to differential reportingbehaviors regarding crime and victimization, such as crime vic-tims perception of system responses to their reports.

Meaning and utilitynot just beautyrests in the eye of thebeholder, particularly when public policy issues are involved.

Above and beyond the topical content focus of a data collectionsystem are the end users who dictate relevance and utility. Justicesystem officials developing policy, legislators addressing crime,law enforcement officials developing interventions, and crimi-nologists studying these issues all would be interested in officiallyreported crime data to support their efforts. Epidemiologistsstudying patterns of violence, policy makers developing a nationalstrategic agenda, lawmakers approving funding, and local humanservices agencies providing support programs are each uniquelydependent on victimization data collected through surveys.Specific survey data efforts such as the CDCs YRBSS may bettersupport the work of epidemiologists than the needs of federal,state, and local policy makers trying to respond to violence anddisruption in the schools. The YRBSS can help track the emer-gence and development of targeted risk behaviors of interest,

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much like a disease outbreak, and includes a number of schoolsafetyrelated questions. However, it lacks the more comprehen-sive data collection tools that would be useful for designingschool safety programming that spans ecological levels, address-ing not only individual and interpersonal phenomena but sys-temic processes as well.

Data collection that is well linked to a theoretical framework will tend to support the work of researchers aligned with thatframework but may not necessarily provide valuable data for other

stakeholders. This relates to a broader theme in multiple areas ofeducational, social, and behavioral research, where the linkageamong theory, research-driven data collection, and practice candiffer dramatically between researchers and practitioners. Forexample, researchers may design an intervention for students withlearning disabilities that does not address the practical needs iden-tified by teachers (MacMillan & Speece, 1999). Likewise, a schoolviolence prevention researcher studying a new intervention inanger management would tend to focus on experimental condi-tions that may not align well with students ability to learn and usenew anger management techniques and may not mesh well intothe daily processes and procedures of schools (Mayer & Van Acker,2008). Research-based data collectionhaving critical impact onresearch analysis and subsequent practicecan be designed forhighly divergent researcher or practitioner needs. This leaves theconcerned stakeholder with awareness that data collection andanalysis systems are anything but unified and that they serve vari-ous purposes, often providing an incomplete view of what is hap-pening in schools. These informational windows can overlap whileretaining somewhat unique foci, with specific indicators providingdifferent insights into day-to-day life at school.

Current Indicators: What Is Going on in Schools?

We return to the core question: How safe are our schools? We willfocus on indicators from the NCVS and SCS, the CDC YRBSS,

and the Monitoring the Future Study. NCVS data from 2006show that student-reported violent crime in secondary schoolsincluding simple assault and serious violent crimes of rape, sexualassault, robbery, and aggravated assaultwas 29 per 1,000 stu-dents (Dinkes et al., 2009). In addition, these data varied bygender, race, age, and urbanicity. For the same year, the violentvictimization rate was 32 and 25 per 1,000, for males and females,respectively (with no statistically significant differences for gen-der). Violent victimization rates per 1,000 students ages 12 to 18at school were 27, 32, 26, and 44, for students reported as White,Black, Hispanic, and Other, respectively, where Other denotedstudents reported as Asians, Pacific Islanders, American Indians(including Alaska Natives), and those of more than one race.However, the differences of White, Black, and Hispanic eachcompared with Other were nonsignificant, and there were nosignificant differences among the first three categories of race.

Younger students ages 12 to 14 experienced higher levels of vic-timization, compared with older students, ages 15 to 18, at 35versus 23 incidents per 1,000 ( p < .05). Violent victimization ratesin schools for 2005, across urban, suburban, and rural settings

were 34, 19, and 21 per 1,000, respectively, and urban schools were significantly higher than schools in other settings ( p < .05).

Data from the 2007 NCVS SCS on bullying/peer victimizationshow that almost 80% of students who reported being bullied at

school indicated that it took place inside school, as opposed tooutside the building on school grounds, on the bus, or elsewhere.In 2007, 32% of secondary students reported being bullied at oraround school during the prior 6 months, with 11% of studentsreporting that they had been pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,and 8.8% reporting having been injured. As was the case withviolent victimization, a larger percentage of younger studentsreported being bullied, with percentages ranging from 42.9% of6th-grade students to 23.5% of 12th-grade students. Rates of bul-

lying in 2005 were similar in suburban and rural schools (28.9%and 29.0%, respectively), with slightly lower values in urbanschools (26.0%) and no statistically significant differences betweenany pair of settings. Urbanicity data were not publicly released forthe 2007 NCVS survey due to methodological redesign.Percentages of White, Black, and Other students bullied weresimilar (34.6%, 30.9%, and 34.6%, respectively, nonsignificant),

with lower values for Hispanic and Asian students (27.6% and18.1%, respectively). Reported percentages for White students

were significantly different compared with Hispanic ( p < .001)and Asian ( p < .0001) students, and percentages for Black students

were significantly different from those for Asian students ( p

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