Violence in Public Schools

Folake Sofowora EDRS 641 Intro to Ed Research Topic: Violence in Public Schools Introduction The recent violence on school grounds (including elementary, middle school and high school violence) has created a climate of fear in American public schools, and the literature presented in this review relates to that fear and to the difficulty schools face in determining what students might be capable of mass killings on campus. Television coverage of school shootings leave the impression that there is more violence on school campuses than there really is, but the threat is real, students are being killed, and the background into how and why these murders take place is a main point of this paper. Moreover, the acts of violence at schools create perceptions that may or may not be valid, and that issue is part of this literature review as well. Perceptions of School Violence Why do Americans have the perception that schools are places where violence takes place on a regular basis – when that is not truly the case? A scholarly article in the peer-reviewed journal The Clearing House points to the fact that when there are highly publicized acts of brutal violence at schools, because of the bold, up-close-and-personal video reports on television sets across the nations, the rare acts of violence stick in the minds of Americans. The article explains that there are upwards of 55 million students attending public schools in the United States today, including from kindergarten through 12th grade (Algozzine, et al, 2011), and obviously not all schools are places where killings take place. And moreover, “…reports of school crime and violence” from administrators, students, and teachers “…differ in severity and in nature from what is perceived” by the greater society (Algozzine, 91). The salient point this paper presents is that Americans perceive that schools (per se) are not safe, Algozzine explains (91). The authors research existing

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