What predicts a school's ties to outside organizations

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 draws on: 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. This study counts seven of them. Parents' groups are asked about and not counted, because a parents' group is part of the school itself.

15,195 principals answered all eight questions. Of those, 2,504 said they work with all seven counted organizations or with none, and they are set aside, leaving 12,691 school responses. Putting them back raises the main estimate from +0.104 to +0.129.

Every adjusted estimate compares schools of the same size, grade level, city or rural location and survey year, where a lack of funds limits the school's crime prevention to the same degree. The survey has no measure of a school's resources, such as family income. So, like Erica Bower (2024), we use the principal's answer on whether inadequate funds limit the school's efforts to reduce or prevent crime, which is no limit, a minor limit or a major limit. That answer rises with the crime reading: a major limit is reported by 25% of schools in areas called low-crime and by 40% in areas called high-crime. Adding it to the models leaves the police result unchanged.

The table gives, for each answer, how many schools gave it, how many outside organizations those schools work with on average, and how many of them work with the police, work with mental-health providers and have their own security staff. Schools that say a shortage of money holds back their crime prevention a little or a lot work with more organizations on average than schools that say it does not. Every figure is weighted to represent US schools.

Resource dependence, one of the two theories this study tests, expects this. It says an organization short of what it needs turns to other organizations, and it counts as resources more than money: services, staff time, expertise, information and standing. Each of the seven organizations supplies some of these. So a school that says it is short of money and works with more partners fits the theory, whichever partners it adds. The difference holds with the crime reading and the school's own staff and equipment taken into account, at +0.210 of an organization for "a little" and +0.132 for "a lot", and among schools whose principals call the area low-crime. The question asks about money for crime prevention, so a principal may answer "a lot" because the school is trying to do a lot as well as because it has little. The survey cannot separate the two.

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 material

The manuscript keeps five tables in its body and files the other fourteen as supplementary. This site draws no such line: all nineteen tables and all five figures are on the Tables & figures page, in the order the argument uses them, and every caption also gives the number the analysis pipeline assigned it.

The supplementary methods, which are not reproduced here, describe the exponential random graph model's terms, the curveball randomization test, the multilevel and pairwise checks, and the screening of all 87 survey items.

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