School Violence Has Become an Increasingly Important

School violence has become an increasingly important focus of study in recent years, precisely because of its apparently increasing prevalence in the United States today. Violence perpetrated by young children against other young children has never taken the epidemic levels it does today. Many scholars have made the central quest of their research to determine why this is the case and secondarily, how to prevent this phenomenon. And indeed, the statistics are upsetting. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2012), there have been 116 student deaths in 109 separate incidents of school violence during the past seven years. This translates to an average 16.5 student homicides per year. In order to deal with this terrible phenomenon, the CDC suggests that the first step is to define the problem. As such, the CDC (2012) defines school violence as "youth violence that occurs on school property, on the way to or from school or school-sponsored events, or during a school-sponsored event." There are also several factors that can place some students at greater risk of violence than others. Some students have a prior history of violence, for example, which increases the risk that they might become perpetrators of violence in their schools. Other factors include substance abuse, association with delinquent peers, poverty, and poor family functioning. Schechter takes this a step further by referring to a study of babies and the factors that play a role in their development of violent tendencies when they become adolescents. One of these include childhood exposure to abuse and violence in the home, as well as parental substance abuse. Furthermore, many authors have focused not only on studying the problem of school violence, but also the strategies that can be applied towards preventing this state of affairs. Among these are Astor, Benbenishty, and Estrada, who present their findings in the article "School Violence and Theoretically Atypical Schools: The Principal's Centrality in Orchestrating Safe Schools." The article presents a thorough analysis of the problem along with suggestions for strategies to prevent the phenomenon.

The introduction to the article provides a thorough overview of the authors' purpose with the article, which is to investigate additional dimensions besides the assumption that violence in schools tend to be a reflection of the communities and demographic within which they function. The authors' central claim is that school violence does not necessarily correlate with the violence level in the surrounding community. Indeed, the authors cite studies to suggest that there appears to be widely varying levels of violence even in schools within similar communities and with similar demographies. Indeed, their study focus on what they refer to as "theoretically atypical schools," which are those where violence levels are at the extreme opposite to what might have been predicted based upon community violence levels.

The introduction is followed by a section with the title "Understanding Multiple Aspects of School Violence." Here, the authors make a thorough investigation of the existing literature on the topic. They include a consideration of culture, school organization, and other factors as influencing school violence levels. While not so labeled, it is clear that this section represents the literature study of the document.

The rest of the article follows a more or less typical structure for a research paper, starting with the methods used for the investigation. The authors use a two-phased, mixed-methods approach to conduct their study for the paper. The first phase followed a quantitative method of gathering data from schools, while the second phase was an in-depth qualitative investigation.

The population sample investigated was taken from Israeli schools, which is relevant for the type of study, since this region is known for its general instability and violence in communities. The nationally representative stratified sample included 15,646 participants, of whom 5,795 were from primary schools, 6,550 from middle schools, and 3,301 from high schools. This amount of participants ensures a high level of validity and reliability in the results. Several instruments are used to conduct the study. To determine student victimization, for example, the authors adapted questionnaires from the California School Climate & Safety Survey. School characteristics were determined from The Ministry of Education school databases. Comparative neighborhood characteristics were extracted from census data. In short, the methods and instruments used seem well suited to a study of this kind. As said, the size of the population samples offer good representation and a high level of validity and reliability. After identifying theoretically atypical schools from the survey, the authors started the qualitative phase of their study.

In terms of graphic representations, the authors use several tables and figures to supplement the text of their study. These offer a good balance between the text and graphic material, as well as presenting an enhancement of the written material. Some of these are particularly moving, such as the student-created poster featuring a heart and text to suggest how people form various cultures can live and function together in harmony.

The discussion section of the article presents several interesting findings, one of which is that there are more atypical schools than anticipated. Generally, it appears that the scholarly assumption is that community violence levels will be reflected in schools. According to the findings in this study, this is not the case. Indeed, the authors were furthermore surprised at the consistency of the finding that the principal's role is highly indicative of school level violence. In other words, where the principal offers inspired and inspiring leadership, school violence is atypically low.

Importantly, the authors note that the role of the principal, along with the quality of school organization are rarely studied in terms of preventing school violence. This suggests a highly important area of future study, not only in Israeli schools, which were the focus of this study, but also in a worldwide context.

The research article ends with an in-depth discussion of the limitations of the study and directions for future attention. One of the limitations is cited as the relative lack of differentiation among cultures, which affected the representative level of the population sample. It is also mentioned that more normative settings as focus of future study might offer greater variation among cultures. Furthermore, the authors suggest that a good focus for future study might be the change from negative to positive safety levels in schools could be investigated to identify additional factors that influence this state of affairs.