ABSTRACT

While recent scholarship generally emphasizes how public school principals’ perceptions influence various school safety practices, far less is understood about how principals’ perceptions of school crime risk and academic climate informs schools’ decisions on specific school safety outcomes, including a school’s SRO/police presence and policies on whether to report student disciplinary incidents to law enforcement agencies. Using data drawn from the 2017–18 School Survey on Crime and Safety and 2,500 public schools in the United States, this study examines these questions. The results make clear that the influence of principals’ perceptions vary across different school safety outcomes. Equally important is that the variation appears to be nonrandom. While the uneven salience of principals’ perceptions does not necessarily dilute their importance to school policies, it does underscore the need for a more granular accounting and understanding of how various important school-level safety outcomes arise.

摘要

虽然最近的学术研究普遍强调公立学校校长的看法如何影响各种学校安全实践，但对于校长对学校犯罪风险和学术氛围的看法如何影响学校对特定学校安全结果的决定（包括学校的自律组织/警察存在）的影响却知之甚少以及是否向执法机构报告学生纪律事件的政策。本研究使用来自 2017-18 年犯罪与安全学校调查和美国 2,500 所公立学校的数据来检验这些问题。结果清楚地表明，校长观念的影响因不同的学校安全结果而异。同样重要的是，这种变化似乎是非随机的。