Community Safety and Policing Research Program, Global Justice Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

what the survey shows

What predicts a school's ties to outside organizations

A project of the Community Safety and Policing Research Program, Global Justice Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.

13,167 schools · 8 organizations · 6 surveys · 2005-06 to 2021-22 · survey-weighted

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What predicts how many organizations a school works with

what predicts it

How many more of the eight a school works with, comparing two schools one standard deviation apart on the measure. Survey-weighted; standard errors in brackets, clustered on the sampling stratum within wave; n = 13,167.

What the school already runssecurity staff, a formal process for consulting parents, and security equipment, combined into one measure+0.48***(0.021)
How the principal describes crime in the areawith what the school already runs also in the model+0.08**(0.027)

Comparing two schools one standard deviation apart on the combined measure of security staff, a formal process for consulting parents, and security equipment, with the principal's description of the area also in the model. The association holds in all six surveys and at every grade level; dropping any single survey leaves it between +0.463 and +0.487. The two interact at -0.036, so the environmental route is clear at and below average provision and cannot be distinguished from zero above it. Table 3.

what does not predict it

Do better-off schools work with more organizations? Measures of the student body, entered together with the two above.

Share expected to go to college-0.043(0.024)
Share testing in the bottom fifteen per cent+0.031(0.021)
Average daily attendance, per cent of students+0.020(0.018)

Entered together, no measure of the student body can be told apart from zero, and the two closest run in the opposite direction from what the social capital explanation predicts. Nothing here suggests that better-off schools work with more organizations.

which organizations, and how often

Share of schools working with each, survey-weighted, all six surveys. A school works with 4.00 of these eight on average.

The police
81%
Parents' groups
71%
Social services
65%
Mental-health providers
63%
Civic groups
40%
Juvenile justice
32%
Local businesses
26%
Churches
22%

Shown here, and the paper does not build on it. The police result holds in 2021-22 alone, and the pooled estimate does not survive dropping any of three of the six surveys. The paper's argument about enforcement rests on the counts instead: take the police out of the count and the association gets stronger. Filter these by survey, grade level and area →

and what changed over sixteen years

The mix changed while the total did not. Work with juvenile justice agencies fell from 40% of schools to 26%. Work with mental-health providers rose from 52% to 76%. The other six barely changed, and a school still worked with about four of the eight at the end.

0%25%50%75%100%Mental-health providers 76%Juvenile justice 26%2005-062007-082015-162017-182019-202021-22
Share of schools working with each of the eight, by survey, weighted. The two that changed are in color; the other six are grey. Source: tie_rates.json.

Introduction

Schools do not work alone. They deal with parents' groups, local businesses, churches and civic groups. They also deal with social services, mental-health providers, juvenile justice agencies and the police. This study asks one question about those eight kinds of organization: what decides how many of them a school works with?

The answers come from the School Survey on Crime and Safety, which the US government sends to school principals. It ran six times between 2005-06 and 2021-22. We use 13,167 of the answers.

Most research on this asks about one relationship at a time. Does this school work with the police? Does that one work with a charity? Asking one at a time misses something, because a school does not decide each relationship on its own. You have to look at the whole set together.

The first thing we found is that schools differ a lot in how many of those eight they work with, far more than they would if each relationship were settled separately. But knowing that a school works with four of them tells you very little about which four. There is no usual order for taking them on. There are no pairs that schools treat as alternatives. No group of schools favors the police and the courts while another group favors parents and churches. Schools, in other words, do not come in types here.

So a school mostly varies in one way: how many outside organizations it works with. The sociologist Nan Lin calls that reach extensity, and he counts it as a form of social capital, meaning the resources a person or an organization can get at through the people and organizations it knows.

Two things predict that number.

The first is three things the school runs itself: security staff, a formal process for consulting parents, and security equipment such as cameras, metal detectors and locked doors. Schools with more of these work with more outside organizations. The size of the difference is about +0.48 of an organization for every standard deviation, which is a measure of how spread out a set of numbers is. Two schools one standard deviation apart are clearly different from each other without being extreme. This holds in all six surveys and at every grade level.

The second is the area around the school, as the principal describes it. Principals are asked to describe the crime level where the school sits as low, moderate or high. Schools whose principals say high work with more outside organizations, by about +0.08 of an organization per standard deviation of that rating, even after the school's own staff and equipment are accounted for.

A school in a high-crime area works with more organizations, and they are not mostly police and courts. It works with more community groups and more government agencies, by about the same amount. Drop the police from the count altogether and the link between the principal's crime rating and the number of organizations gets stronger, not weaker. So this is not more policing under another name.

The mix of organizations changed over the sixteen years while the total held steady, which is set out at the top of this page and in full under Full results.