Data and measures
The School Survey on Crime and Safety is run by the National Center for Education Statistics. It goes to the principal of a nationally representative sample of US public schools. Six of its rounds carry the eight community-involvement questions this study uses: 2005-06, 2007-08, 2015-16, 2017-18, 2019-20 and 2021-22.
Each round asks the principal whether the school works with each of eight kinds of outside organization: parents' groups, civic groups, local businesses, churches, social services, mental-health providers, juvenile justice agencies and the police. Those eight are the whole of what this study counts.
15,195 principals answered all eight questions. Of those, 2,028 said they work with all eight organizations or with none, and they are set aside, leaving 13,167. Putting them back changes the main estimate from +0.126 to +0.125.
Every figure on this site is weighted using the survey's own weights, so that it describes US schools rather than the sample. Unweighted percentages of this survey are simply wrong. Standard errors are clustered on the sampling stratum crossed with the survey round, which gives 365 clusters. Clustering on the stratum alone would give 64, which is wrong, because the stratum codes are reused from one round to the next.
What these numbers cannot show
Every number here is an association, and three limits follow from that. None of them is small.
Each survey measures everything at one moment, and no school is followed over time. A fresh sample of schools is drawn each round. So we can say that schools in areas their principals call high-crime work with more organizations. We cannot say the area caused it, and we cannot rule out that the connections came first.
The crime measure is the principal's description of the area, not a recorded crime statistic. That is deliberate, because what an organization does about its surroundings depends on how it reads them. But it means the measure carries whatever a principal's judgement carries.
Everything is self-reported by one person per school. Nobody checked the answers against the organizations named.
Reproducing the numbers
Every estimate reported here is rebuilt by two implementations that share no code and agree on
all 76 checked numbers, standard errors included. reproduce.R is native R with one
dependency, and prints each estimate next to the number the paper reports with a MATCH or DIFFERS
flag. A Python pipeline produces the same tables independently. The six SSOCS public-use files are
free from NCES.
The code archive is minted when the paper is submitted, and this page will link to it then. Until then, write to ron.levi@utoronto.ca for the scripts.
Supplementary information
The Supplementary Methods describe the ERGM terms, the curveball randomization test, the multilevel and pairwise checks, and the lasso screening of all 87 items. Supplementary Tables map to the pipeline as follows: S1 every measure as the questionnaire asked it (source table 12); S2 the environmental estimate on all six waves, weighted and unweighted (source 8); S3 variance against independence and the full subgroup invariance panel (source 16); S4 the capacity components by grade level (source 2); S5 the student-body measures (source 10); S6 the environmental estimate pooled and by wave (source 3); S7 each of the eight ties against the crime reading (source 4); S8 the two sides of the field and their balance (source 9); S9 the count with enforcement organizations removed (source 6); S10 the two readings of the environment (source 5); S11 the association within city, suburb, town and rural schools (source 7); S12 parents' groups and parent turnout (source 14); S13 the police margins and the reversed-arrow tests (source 15); S14 reported trouble and recorded incidents (source 13).
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