Probable Causation

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Episode 10: Emily Weisburst

Jennifer Doleac

Emily Weisburst

Emily Weisburst is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Date: August 20, 2019

A transcript of this episode is available here.

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Episode Details:

In this episode, we discuss Professor Weisburst's work on the effects of stationing police in schools:

"Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long‐term Education Outcomes" by Emily K. Weisburst

OTHER RESEARCH WE DISCUSS IN THIS EPISODE:

Transcript of this episode:

Jennifer [00:00:06] Hello and welcome to Probable Causation, a show about law, economics and crime. I'm your host, Jennifer Doleac of Texas A&M University, where I'm an Economics Professor and the Director of the Justice Tech Lab.

 

Jennifer [00:00:17] My guest this week is Emily Weisburst. Emily is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. Emily, welcome to the show.

 

Emily [00:00:27] Thank you. It's great to be here.

 

Jennifer [00:00:29] Today, we're going to talk about your work on the effects of school resource officers — that is sworn police officers who are stationed in schools — on students' disciplinary and educational outcomes. So to start out, could you tell us about your research expertise and what led you to become interested in this topic?

 

Emily [00:00:48] Yeah, so I am an Assistant Professor, and I'm an applied microeconomist. My research interests are largely in crime and education. I'm very interested in policies that interact with income and racial inequality. And so that sort of guides my interest in education and criminal justice. And I developed my interests in criminal justice policy just thinking about the criminal justice system as an arm of the state and how large it is in the United States. Some of my other work is more focused on specific issues related to policing — such as how police discretion affects interactions between civilians and the police — and also working on some new projects related to public trust in policing. But this project really sort of merges my interests in education and criminal justice and thinking about the effects of officers in schools. And when I first started reading about the criminal justice system as a graduate student and thinking about issues related to crime and offending, I was really struck by how young individuals can become involved with the system. The individuals who are involved in the criminal justice system often become involved at very young ages. And so thinking about interactions that young students have with police in school districts is an important way to study how those relationships really begin. And I also think there's a discussion sort of in the cultural and social zeitgeist of, as well as the academic zeitgeist, of the school-to-prison pipeline. And this is something that really is a catch-all term for heavy handed disciplinary cultures in schools. So this can be anything from very high suspension rates to police in schools to metal detectors to a whole host of punitive sanctions policies that exist in public schools. And there's this claim by advocates that says that those structures increase involvement of students with the criminal justice system and make outcomes worse for students. And I've always been interested in this, but there hasn't been much quantitative work on it. And so that kind of was the genesis for this project.

 

Emily [00:03:05] So what I do is, and we'll get into this more later on, but I focus on the state of Texas, where I have some really nice detailed administrative data that I got as a graduate student through the Texas Educational Resource Center, which is an administrative database that links student level records in the education system in Texas from kindergarten through college. And I'm able to also look at disciplinary outcomes for students in that database. And I thought that this was a really nice resource to look at this problem because it's a large sample population of Texas. And so I'm able to look at students over time in that system. And I'm also able to drill down into some of the heterogeneous impacts of police in schools with this data, because I can separately look at different demographic characteristics of students. So that's kind of my background and the genesis for this project.

 

Jennifer [00:04:00] Great. And yeah, before we get too far down into the weeds of what you do in this paper, why don't you set the stage for us a bit? So what are SROs and how common is it for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools to have police officers on campus?

 

Emily [00:04:15] OK, so SROs are sworn police officers that work directly in schools, and they're also- part of the definition is that they have specialized training to work with students in schools. So more broadly in public schools in the U.S., many schools have kind of SRO-lite or some other form of security. So they may have security that aren't sworn police officers, just a general security personnel. And they also may have sworn officers who don't receive this training, who are not technically termed SROs. So that's kind of the universe of different types of officers in schools. And I always like to ask just because I think that the statistics on this are really striking, so I'll ask you Jen, did you go to public school as a kid?

 

Jennifer [00:05:02] I did.

 

Emily [00:05:03] OK, and did you have police officers in your school growing up?

 

Jennifer [00:05:08] Not that I remember.

 

Emily [00:05:09] Not that you remember, OK. I did. I had them in high school. And it's just- it was really amazing to me when I started looking at this, just how common SROs and security in general are in schools. So just to give some statistics, and I pulled these this morning for the most recent statistics: so 57 percent of all schools have security staff and 42 percent have a designated SRO. And the school rates of security are higher in secondary school, so these are middle schools and high schools. So, 72 percent of those schools have security staff, 52 percent with a designated SRO. And the security presence is actually much stronger in larger schools as we might expect. So this is where it gets very striking. So 96 percent of secondary school — so again middle schools and high schools — with over 1,000 students have school security staff and 84 percent of those have an SRO. So this is the vast majority of public schools when we when we're talking about large schools. And what this means is that because there are more students in large schools, that means that the majority of public school students are actually exposed to SROs or to school security. So in 2014, over 70 percent of all public school students attended schools with security staff. So this is really affecting, you know, huge swaths of public school students. And most of these students, as I mentioned, are in these secondary schools, but there are also a growing number of security staff in elementary schools as well, sometimes on a rotating basis. And so it's interesting to think about kind of how we got to this point in terms of security presence in public schools. It's not necessarily obvious that we want to have designated security personnel in all of our public schools in the U.S.

 

Emily [00:07:01] And so the first wave of policing in schools came in the 1980s and the 1990s during the get "Tough on Crime" movement. And given the attitudes of that time — and at that time, policies related to zero tolerance in schools, which are kind of approaches to student misconduct, which offer very harsh punishments for prespecified offenses, so these are kinds of the popular sort of anecdotes that you hear about these kinds of policies or things like a student getting expelled for having a pocket knife as sort of the extreme example of when this can be kind of egregious. But the zero-tolerance policies began in the 1980s and 1990s in very large school districts. But for the most part, in this early wave of school policing, police are confined to very large urban districts, which have higher levels of poverty, are more diverse school districts, and that's kind of where school police are. But then in 1999, there was a tragedy at Columbine High School and that school shooting caused a wave of political pressure to increase school safety in schools in a number of different ways. And one of the consequences of that was this large scale expansion of police officers in schools. And this is moving beyond, you know, some designated districts to really becoming the norm in public schools in the U.S.

 

Emily [00:08:28] And so just to give some background, my study setting is in Texas, so I want to just give a little background on that state as well, so Texas has a very large student population, about 5.2 million students, or about 10 percent of public school students in the U.S. And SROs have really taken off in Texas, similar to the rest of the U.S. So, there's different models of having SROs in schools. One is that you sort of contract with a municipal police department that sends an officer to your school district or more than one officer. And another model, which is increasingly common is the school district police department model. So in Austin, where I lived for seven years, there is the Austin School District Police Department, which has officers who only serve in Austin independent school district schools. The same is true for Los Angeles, where I live now, where LAUSD Police Department is not a subunit of the Los Angeles Police Department. It is its own department. And importantly, these these school district police departments are also not directly controlled by the school district themselves, they're a third party entity. So in Texas, just sort of from anecdotal research on some of the large school district police departments that exist in the state, a typical kind of ratio for these departments is to have two officers in a high school, one officer in a middle school, and a rotating presence in elementary schools. But some of these departments are actually quite large. So some actually have things like K-9 teams, gang suppression units, crisis response teams, traffic safety and incident reporting hotlines, so they can be very large apparatuses. So another thing to note about Texas, and this is kind of interesting because administrative data on student level discipline is not widely available across states. And so I had the access to this cool data set. I find the statistic to be quite shocking, but I really have no way of referencing this to other states. But in my sample, 49 percent or nearly 50 percent of students are either suspended or expelled between the 7th and the 12th grades, according to the administrative data that I have, which is quite a large rate, right?

 

Jennifer [00:11:05] Wow, yeah.

 

Emily [00:11:05] So so discipline is really common and we worry about this is an outcome that we don't know a lot about. We worry about the long term effects that these actions may have on students. This is a really commonplace event that we care about. So I'm interested in student discipline more generally. In this paper, I'm looking specifically on how it relates to police police presence.

 

Jennifer [00:11:30] Great, yeah, so I mean, you've already alluded to this a little bit, but just to clarify the potential trade-off here that will draw an economist to study something like this, really briefly summarize kind of what are the goals of hiring more SROs in schools? And then what are the potential downsides of bringing more police officers onto school campuses?

 

Emily [00:11:49] For sure. So this is really an empirical question, and your question alludes to that. There's this debate and trade-off related to SROs. So the main goal, I think, is that it's really important that students are safe in school and that they feel safe. And that's important in terms of their ability to learn and also to be protected in the school environment. So that's the main goal of SROs. So the idea is to protect students from outside threats. I mean, that's really the motivation for a lot of this funding and for calls for increased hiring of police officers in schools. And that draws back to this growing number of school shootings that we're seeing in public schools in the U.S. and how the idea is that SROs in these very catastrophic but also very rare events that SROs are going to be there to protect students. So that's the main- that's the I think the primary goal. But there are also some other positive goals of having these police officers in schools. So one is to educate students about safety and the law, and another one is too that that officers can serve as counselors, mediating conflicts between students, and they can also serve as positive role models for students and and get students comfortable with interacting with police officers, which is important, you know, as they become adults and move into society.

 

Emily [00:13:18] So those are the main goals. There's this interesting debate, you know, as I alluded to earlier, about some of the potential unintended consequences of SROs. And this is this is basically because, you know, we're putting all of these officers in schools where they're there to sort of be these guards primarily in in these tragic events. But what do they actually do on a daily basis? And there's this countervailing claim that that officers are really involved in what's called kind of everyday discipline. So this could be things like officers making arrests of students, but it could also actually be officers getting involved with more commonplace and lower level events that occur in schools. So these are things like kids acting out in class, student fighting, disruptions of the classroom and other sort of basic school rule enforcement. And so advocates talk a lot about this tension that we have all these officers in in school districts and what are they actually doing on the ground? There's this fear that they're creating this heavy handed disciplinary environment, which escalates incidents and creates harsher sanctions for things that used to be dealt with by teachers and administrators. And in particular, there's a concern that SRO disciplinary involvement adversely affects low-income students and black and Hispanic youth.

 

Emily [00:15:00] So in my sample for middle school students, black students are over 2 times as likely to have any disciplinary action in a given year, and Hispanic students are over 1.5 times as likely. So there's this large disparity and it's kind of interesting to think about, well, how does that relate to police presence? And then, you know, drawing back to what I said earlier, there's this notion of the school-to-prison pipeline. So this is the idea that through these interactions with police officers, through either low level or more serious events, individuals are getting involved in the criminal justice system, that their offending patterns may become more serious over time. And this could ultimately lead to incarceration. In the public debate, there has been some interesting incidents that have gone viral. So, for example, in 2015, there was this video, I don't know if you remember this, where a white officer in South Carolina high school flipped the desk of a black student while she was sitting in it in the classroom. There's a lot of concern from advocates related to physical force that's used on kids by officers. And in 2014, sort of related to all of these concerns, the Obama administration issued some guidance for school administrators and also for police in schools, which provided a number of suggestions and guidelines for how to curb exclusionary discipline overall, as well as disparities in discipline rates. This guidance has since been rescinded in the Trump administration. But this is a concern and we really don't know a lot about what officers are doing and how they're affecting kids.

 

Jennifer [00:16:49] So your paper is titled "Patrolling Public Schools: The Impact of Funding for School Police on Student Discipline and Long Term Education Outcomes." It was just published in the spring 2019 issue of JPAM, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. So you've mentioned a couple of times there isn't much research on this, at least much research on the causal effects. But there's been some, surely some in other disciplines. So before your paper, what had we known about the effect of SROs?

 

Emily [00:17:16] Right. So there is one quantitative paper which I'll talk about in a minute by Emily Owens. But there's also been a large body of ethnographic work on this topic, which has been incredibly useful through this project for me. And also just in understanding, I mean, some really great work by authors in sociology and other fields. So these are studies where a researcher kind of embeds themselves in a school and documents the practices and observes police officers on the ground. So, for example, there's a book by Kathleen Nolan from 2011 that documents her time in a New York public high school and talks about some of the relationships between students and school police. Some other work by Aaron Kupchik from 2010, another book, which also documents some ethnographic research in schools on police. So there's some interesting findings from this literature. They're very focused case studies, but also incredibly informative on this topic. And so one of the things that comes out of it, I think that's kind of interesting is the fact that these authors document that teachers are increasingly outsourcing disciplinary roles to officers. And so this is kind of a specialization of tasks that's occurring in schools as officers come in. So where in the past, several decades ago, a teacher would deal with a student and providing discipline or resolving a conflict in the classroom, instead what happens now is that the teacher will call the school resource officer to come into the classroom and sort of deal with a student that's acting out. And I think that this is kind of interesting. It sort of is transferring that function and some of the liability that's associated with that also from teachers. But it also shows that officers may be a lot more involved in disciplinary practices than we might see from like arrest statistics, let's say. Because if they're involved in sort of the daily workings of the school, they're really like fixtures in that environment.

 

Emily [00:19:33] So that's kind of the ethnographic work. In terms of quantitative studies, there's the best example which we'll talk about sort of more throughout the hour is work by Emily Owens, which is also published in JPAM from 2017. And she also looks at similar policy variation to my paper. She looks at variation in grants from the federal government for police hiring in schools, which is the same policy variation that I use. And she looks nationally using some different survey instruments that measure offenses reported in schools, as well as arrests that occur on campus and off of campus of youth. And so so there's one of the things that she has to contend with in this setting, which is unfortunate, is that the surveys aren't administered to all schools and they're also administered in waves. So there's some limitations on what she can do using panel data techniques with some of the the outcomes. But she sort of does the best that she can with that data and she finds some effects on safety. So some reduction in serious incidents reported by principals when police presence increases. And she also finds some effects on arrests, which actually dovetail nicely with this paper and was reassuring to me in terms of my results. So she finds some increases in arrests of middle school students on on school grounds. And she also finds some small increases in arrests of older students off of school grounds for mainly for drug crime. And so her results provide this kind of national context. She's looking at more serious sanctions, so arrests, and she also is looking at some measures of offending, which is out of the scope of of my paper. So it's sort of a nice companion study, particularly because the policy variation is basically the same.

 

Emily [00:21:50] So in addition to that paper, we also know more about youth crime and education from some other work, as well from the economics of crime literature. And again, this is- that literature is typically looking at more serious sanctions. So the main paper that comes to mind for me, although there are several, is work by Anna Aizer and Joe Doyle from 2015 that shows that- they use a judge instrument design and look at how juvenile arrests and juvenile detention affect high school graduation rates and also feature offending. And they find that juvenile arrests decrease the likelihood that individuals graduate from high school. And so there's many channels we might think about for why this link exists. One could be stigmatization and sort of decreased attachment to school because of changes in perception of the student thinking that he's sort of a bad kid or or she and is not cut out for school after a juvenile detention experience. The experience of sanctions themselves could change the goals or the offending pattern of the student just through that experience itself. And also there is potential loss of human capital that's associated with these sanctions. So I'm going to be looking at much more minor sanctions, these disciplinary actions. But even there, there's a potential loss of human capital, channeled through suspensions and taking students out of school.

 

Jennifer [00:23:38] And just to clarify, for the non-economists out there, human capital is basically the idea that you're reducing the amount of education people are receiving and basically, like all of the things that make you a productive citizen and employee going forward, right.

 

Emily [00:23:50] Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. We also know that youth may experience some of the same collateral consequences that have been documented for adults related to sanctions. So here this is, again, related to more serious sanctions. But having a criminal record could change your eligibility for federal grants and college loans or affect the ability to gain employment. These kinds of things may also interact with the effects that I- that I find on longer term outcomes. So that's kind of- most of the research on the economics of crime has been on more serious sanctions. But some of the same logic applies there to the to the work in my paper.

 

Jennifer [00:24:40] So why have there been so little work on the causal effects of SROs in particular? Any time we talk and think about a literature like this that's really thin, I think it's interesting to reflect on why it's so thin. So talk a little bit about the empirical challenge that you had to overcome to do the study.

 

Emily [00:24:56] OK, so there's two main things. The first one will not be surprising, but it's data, right? So this is, I think, the biggest hurdle. But the first thing is this project required access to administrative resources at the state or the local level to look at the student level outcomes. And why do we need- we could look at aggregated student outcomes at the school or the school district level. But the real advantage here in looking at student level data is the ability to look at some of the demographic heterogeneity that we really care about from a policy perspective. So that's a main limitation, is that student level data is kind of hard to come by, especially student level disciplinary data. So that's one piece of the puzzle. The other piece is the policing piece. So in Owens's paper, she looks at these national surveys and looks at police hiring as reported in in survey data. The problem is that that's not uniformly or widely reported across all school districts and school district police departments. One of the challenges, even having administrative data on school districts and knowing the personnel that are in schools are that police officers aren't actually employed by school districts themselves. They're employed by third parties. And so I would have loved in my Texas data to know how many officers are employed in a school district at any given time. But that information just didn't exist. This isn't tracked and it's not required to be tracked by the federal government. So it's just this is a- this is a case where the data doesn't exist.

 

Emily [00:26:47] So that's a real challenge as well. And from a causal research design perspective, there are some other challenges. So one is the classic challenge related to endogeneity of the treatment. School districts that have more police officers are going to be different than school districts who have fewer police officers. So we know that the police police presence is more established in large and urban districts than in small rural districts. And that and those characteristics are also associated with different patterns of disciplinary sanctions as well as offending behavior. So that's a big challenge, we can't just do a cross-sectional comparison here. And then additionally, you know, we could do kind of a difference-in-difference type of model. Try and do something like that and look at changes in police presence within school districts. But the problem there is that investments in police presence in school districts are also not random. Expansions in police presence are going to be decisions of school districts and administrators as well as citizens in an area that's going to involve probably changing approaches to school discipline and a host of unobservables that may affect the estimates. So what we need is an approach that deals with this endogeneity of the placement and also the timing of the placement of police officers in schools.

 

Jennifer [00:28:28] Right. And just to kind of restate a little bit of that, so probably the main concern here is that, you know, as- if crime is rising in a certain school district, you might see that then they hire a police officer and then it might look like the hiring the police officer caused more crime, because if crime just is on an upward trajectory more broadly in addition to kind of, you know, maybe hiring the officer is done at the same time as there are sort of broader changes in disciplinary actions because the school is concerned about crime. And so, as you've mentioned, you use the timing of federal grants. In this case in particular, you're looking at COPS in Schools grants from the Department of Justice as a natural experiment. So tell us about this grant program and how it allows you to measure the causal effect of SROs.

 

Emily [00:29:13] OK, so getting into the details of the paper, what I do is I use data on these federal police hiring grants and what's really nice, I think, is that I have information on both the accepted grants and also the rejected grants. So just stepping back for a second, I'll tell you a little bit about the grants. So these grants are three year federal grants of up to 125,000 dollars per officer, which is quite generous even compared with other community oriented policing services, so COPS grant programs. And the COPS grant office funds many more grants for general hiring of police officers. So this is a sub grant within their portfolio. The grant funding really escalated again after Columbine, reflecting the political interest in hiring of officers. And so the way that you apply for a grant is that you submit a narrative based application and it lists sort of the planned approach for the grant, safety issues in your school, community partnerships, and you state a monetary request.

 

Emily [00:30:27] So in Texas, there was about 60 million dollars distributed through this program in my sample period, which was about 7 percent of the total U.S. distribution, so it's a lot of money. And there's actually a lot of variation in appropriations of these grants over time. So so the funding is really spikes in like the year 2001 and thereabouts and then declines — so again, this is this Columbine effect. But what that means is that there's actually a lot of variation in the likelihood of winning a grant across different years. So what I do is I use variation in the timing of accepted versus- accepted grants versus grants that districts apply for and are not accepted over time. So kind of the thought experiment comparison is like let's say take the school district of Houston and I'm going to look at student disciplinary outcomes in years when the Houston ISD was covered by a federal COPS grant for school police, so when they got money, versus a year when they applied and did not get funding versus a year when they did not apply at all. So this is really looking at within district variation. And these application controls are really nice because they capture any changes in trends that may be correlated with a school district's decision to seek this funding. So that's, again, getting back at that endogeneity that we think is going to be associated with a school district's interest in expanding their police presence. So that's the design. And so that's- kind of the identification assumption is that conditional on a decision to apply for a grant, the timing of grant acceptance within districts is pseudo random. So it's a modification of a difference-in-difference design. And the reason I can do this, this model or do this design is that about 80 percent of the school districts in Texas, so this is student weighted district data, but 80 percent of them on a student weighted basis apply for grants where 70 percent are accepted, 70 percent are rejected, and 56 percent are rejected and accepted. And so on a grant level, again student weighted, the acceptance rate is about 60 percent. So I see a lot of grants that are actually not funded.

 

Emily [00:33:12] And so to be upfront about some of the limitations of this study, the first one, you know, when I was talking about the data limitations in this literature in general, I don't actually observe police presence in schools in every year in every school district. I just don't have that information. So what I would ideally want to do is use this kind of grant variation as an instrument for changes in police presence. But because I don't have that data, I can't do that. So. So what I'm doing in this paper is equivalent to kind of the reduced form analysis of of an intervention, sort of in the parlance of an instrumental variables paper. So this means I'm looking at the direct impact of a policy on an on a second stage outcome without looking at the mediating effect of the first stage. So that's the the first limitation. And then the second one is that I'm focusing on these discipline and academic outcomes in this paper, which does not consider the full suite of potential outcomes that police may have an effect on. So in particular, I do not have information on criminal offending in schools at the school district level for each year. And and so that limits my ability to say a lot about how the offending patterns may change or deterrence may be affected by by police officers in the schools.

 

Jennifer [00:34:45] Let's go back very briefly to the acceptance and application rates. So those numbers did not add up to a hundred. So I just want to make sure I understand them correctly. So you said there are 70 percent of school districts apply?

 

Emily [00:34:58] So 80 percent ever apply. So this is over the sample, which is why they don't add up, and they overlap. 56 percent are rejected and accepted over the sample period.

 

Jennifer [00:35:10] So that's like a district applies in one year, it gets rejected. And they apply a different year, gets accepted.

 

Emily [00:35:15] Exactly. So I have a lot of variation in this within the panel, which is really nice. And that's- this is sort of, you know, I have school district fixed effects in all of the models. And I'm really looking at this within-district variation across these application versus acceptance years.

 

Jennifer [00:35:33] Got it. OK, and so you've already talked a little bit about the the cool data that you have. I'm particularly interested in diving in a little bit more to the disciplinary outcomes. So can you give us some examples of what kind of disciplinary action would show up in these data and what the associated punishment would be? You mentioned suspensions, but does it need to be a suspension to show up in this? So just give us a sense of kind of what's in this data set.

 

Emily [00:35:57] So I include disciplinary actions that are either in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions or something that's more serious. So that includes expulsions as well as referrals to juvenile detention or disciplinary alternative education programs, etc. So in-school suspension is kind of the lowest level that I that I observe. And I also have information, some information on what the reason for that sanction was. And I'll talk about that a little bit more later. But I can look at whether it's it's a serious offense — things like sexual conduct violation, substance abuse, violence, etc. — or just a code for breaking a school rule that's kind of below that, which I call code of conduct violations. That's the disciplinary data. And I consider disciplinary outcomes as whether- my main disciplinary outcome is whether any disciplinary action occurred for a student in a given year. The other data that I use- so are- before I go on to that, in the Texas ERC data and the administrative data that I have, I also have information on school attendance, demographics, high school graduation and college going. So I have very detailed data on each student and I can actually link them over time. And as long as they are enrolled in any school- public school in Texas for K-12 or any college in the state, I can see those outcomes. So I can't see movers who leave. But for the most part, we think at least for K-12, that that that most kids are going to be staying within Texas.

 

Jennifer [00:37:44] People do tend to stay in Texas when they live here.

 

Emily [00:37:49] So I do have a large state and can see a lot of these linked outcomes. I supplement this with grant data from the Department of Justice that was obtained through a FOIA request. And again, this includes all grants that are either accepted or rejected through the COPS office, and I use that to identify the main grant category of focus in the paper, which are COPS in Schools grants. And this grant program has been the focus of the lion's share of funding for police officers in school districts. There are some other school specific grants, which I include as controls in the model.

 

Jennifer [00:38:35] OK, so what are your main findings of the effect of SROs on disciplinary outcomes?

 

Emily [00:38:41] OK, so the main findings are that I find that school police, or grants for school police, increase middle school discipline. So the effect size is about 6 percent per year off of a baseline rate of about 28 percent of students having disciplinary actions within a given year. And what's kind of striking about this result, I think, is that the effects are really driven by code of conduct violations. So these are your low level offenses. So we're not finding- I'm not finding a large increase on serious offenses. And so that includes basically anything other than code of contact- code of conduct violations, so that's substance abuse, assault, any form of violence or weapons, and any sexual conduct violations as well. And in terms of the sanction type, the increase is driven by out-of-school suspensions. So what's kind of interesting here is we might not think that things like code of conduct violations should result in an exclusionary disciplinary category, like an out-of-school suspension where students are taken out of schools. However, that's kind of the kind of sanction that is being increased through this policy variation. So I think it's kind of interesting to think about officers in schools. We typically hear the most sensational stories about them involve arresting youth, but they're actually associated with increases in lower level disciplinary actions.

 

Jennifer [00:40:32] OK, and then you go on to look at longer term effects on high school graduation and college going. So before we get into those results, tell us a little bit about why we would expect us SROs to affect those educational outcomes. Is it just that, you know, now I have a suspension on my record so I can't get into college or do you have other channels in mind?

 

Emily [00:40:51] So I think that this is very interesting. And unfortunately, I can't get into a ton of the mechanisms here. The longer term outcome is the way that I measure this is their cumulative outcome. So I can no longer look at year by year variation at the student level. But what I think about is how each individual is exposed to grants in different proportions based on their timing of enrolling in a particular school district and their sort of trajectory. And so I look at the cumulative exposure of grants on students over time and sort of the cumulative version of the main model. And I think that disciplinary actions could have lasting effects on students in in a couple of different ways. The main one, I think that matters here, which is not substantiated by actual analysis in the paper, but just sort of what I think makes the most sense is a channel of stigmatization. So this is a kind of tracking of kids as kids who have disciplinary issues versus kids who don't, as well as some loss of time in the classroom and that these things combine to decrease student attachment to school.

 

Emily [00:42:08] So student attachment to school in Texas, you know, high school graduation rates could be higher to begin with. So we can think about this as affecting those marginal students who maybe would have graduated, but are sort of put on this path from a young age of being kind of a bad kid. And so that's that's the channel that I think matters here. I think it's interesting that this starts with kids that are so young. So I don't find effects on high school students. And that could be for a number of different reasons. It's very consistent to the findings in Owens's paper. And so it may be just that the treatment of this COPS grant funding is really increasing police officers in middle schools and not high schools where there are already police officers or something like that. But it also could have something to do with differences in middle school students developmentally from from high school students. And there there may be more of a stigmatizing effect of getting these harsh disciplinary actions, you know, so young. So that's kind of some of my hypotheses. I think that that's left to future work. Unfortunately, with the data that I have, I'm not able to get into the mechanism of stigmatization directly.

 

Jennifer [00:43:32] Yeah, I agree. That's really interesting. OK, so what are the effects on high school graduation and college going?

 

Emily [00:43:39] OK, so I mentioned that I look cumulatively I'm looking at cohorts of seventh graders in the state and I find some small but significant negative effects on high school graduation and college going. So exposure to a three year policing grant for students is associated with a 2.5 percent decline in high school graduation — it's about 1.7 percentage points — and a 4 percent decline in college enrollment. And so in terms of the college enrollment, the effects really load on two year college enrollment versus four year college enrollment. I think that this makes sense in terms of who the marginal student- who we think the marginal students may be that are affected by these disciplinary actions.

 

Jennifer [00:44:25] And as you mentioned, a big reason that people worry about SROs is this concern about the school-to-prison pipeline and the idea that they might disproportionately affect students of color or those from disadvantaged backgrounds. You do a bunch of analyses by different demographic groups in the paper. So how do all of your results vary with students' race, economic status, gender, that sort of thing?

 

Emily [00:44:48] So this is really interesting. And just to provide some context for the heterogeneity analysis, we know, as I mentioned before, that low income and minority students are disciplined at far greater rates than higher income white students. And also that boys are disciplined at much higher rates than girls are. And so there's sort of two different hypotheses that we may have about how SROs affect- or SRO expansions affect these disparities. One is that these groups that are already being disciplined may be particularly vulnerable to SRO- expansions of SRO presence. Or that, you know, maybe SROs kind of democratize discipline and expand discipline to groups that are being less disciplined in the first place. So it's not really clear what the effect of these expansionary policies are. But what I find is is more consistent with the first hypothesis, which is that I see increases in disciplinary outcomes for all racial groups, but the effects are strongest and largest for black students. So that's both in terms of point estimates and also estimated magnitudes. It's kind of striking because- so I find a 7 percent increase in disciplinary action. So it's kind of striking that they have the biggest change effect, just because their base is also the largest. So, as I mentioned before, these middle school students, the black students, are over 2 times more likely to have a disciplinary action than than white students. And then I don't see statistically significant differences in effects of discipline across income or gender groups.

 

Emily [00:46:36] And then for the long term effects here, I find a somewhat different story that's not necessarily inconsistent, but is certainly different where I don't see statistical difference in effects across race for high school graduation of the expansion of police presence. Nor do I see any different effects across income or gender groups for for high school graduation. And the same same for college effects, except for I do find a much stronger decrease in college going among low income students. So there's kind of a mixed picture there, but it looks like on the whole that these more marginal students or students who have more interactions with the disciplinary systems in schools to begin with are also most harmed by these police officer expansions.

 

Jennifer [00:47:29] So let's talk a little bit more about the trade-offs here. It's possible that kind of despite all of the costs that you're documenting, there are still some benefits from having SROs in the building, right. So, as you mentioned, Emily Owens's paper found at least suggestive evidence that school safety increased as the result of SROs being hired. So school administrators report fewer criminal incidents on grounds even as the number of crimes reported to police increased, which is consistent with people substituting or outsourcing to the cops. So how do you think about your results in combination with hers? How do these papers mesh together?

 

Emily [00:48:03] Yeah, so the first thing that I think is reassuring in terms of the meshing of our papers is that we both find effects on middle school students. So I think that that's really important for consistency. In terms of the trade-offs, like, as you mentioned, I can't track criminal offending in the data that I have. And I think that the most policy relevant outcome, actually, which I would love to see research on in the future, are really related to school shootings and external threats, because I think that that's where, as policymakers, we care most about this particular intervention. And that's a hard problem because school shootings are very rare, which is a great thing. But I also think that because they have such large costs, that much more research is needed to understand how we can prevent these shootings and also protect students when they occur.

 

Emily [00:48:59] So just a little bit about the Owens safety effects- so any increase in safety is incredibly important. But I think that just in terms of comparing the estimates across our papers and trying to think about the trade-offs in a casual sense, I think it's important just to note that schools are incredibly safe places to begin with on average. So these estimates of offending- violent offending rates in schools vary a lot. In in Owens's paper, the baseline is less than one percent of students who are exposed to violent incidents. Estimates from the NCVRS, the National Crime Victim Reporting Survey, are higher, closer to three percent of students have- is the is the victimization rate in the school setting. And Owens's estimates are small but significant. So she finds a one to two percent reduction in criminal incidents in schools. So those effects are very important, and she weighs the trade-offs and talks about how there's this increase in school safety, but there's also this increase in arrests. But arrests are also very rare. And so I think where my paper fits in is it's thinking about a bigger unintended consequence of this policy. Some there may be certainly some increases to school safety, but when we only think about kind of the arrest trade-off of arresting young kids in middle school, we're missing a bigger piece of this picture, which is the general disciplinary outcomes and potential academic consequences related to those that are going to affect many more students. And so that's where I think my my paper fits into that that discussion.

 

Jennifer [00:50:50] So taking these papers together and kind of the broader literature here, what are the punch lines for policymakers? When legislators or folks interested in policy come and ask you what to do about SROs, what do you tell them?

 

Emily [00:51:02] So I think that this paper is not prescriptive, so it's not telling us what we should do, per se. It's really highlighting the fact that we need to take a second look at our disciplinary practices in schools. You know, I think that we've thrown a lot of money and a lot of resources at hiring officers in schools without knowing a lot about what they actually do once they get there. And that they can have consequences for students that last potentially a very long time. And I think the purpose of this paper is to call out those potential costs and then to use this finding to really start thinking about what we should do next. And there are a lot of policy options. So one could be just to simply de-police our schools, but there are other more intermediate options about retraining police or being more deliberate and specific about disciplinary practices and codes and protocols, as well as, you know, interventions like restorative justice that have have gained popularity. And I just although this isn't prescriptive, I want to just highlight that these issues aren't abstract in the sense that whenever there is news of a school shooting, while they are rare, they really ignite the minds of voters and policymakers. And after any school shooting, there's always calls for increased police presence in public schools. And we need to really be careful and thoughtful about the way that we make these investments. The most recent example, I think, is the renewed call for government to fund more officers and schools following the Parkland shooting. And so this debate is happening right now. And I think that we just want to be going into those kinds of investment decisions with eyes wide open. So that's where I think the policy implications are.

 

Jennifer [00:52:59] And presumably, you know, we want to experiment with other options and also evaluate whether they work. Of course. So so let's think about the research frontier. So what are the next questions that you and others interested in this topic will be thinking about in the years ahead?

 

Emily [00:53:15] So we need to know a lot more about what does work with school discipline. Obviously, we can't just not discipline students. That's not a good strategy. We need to think about what structures and protocols and practices actually encourage positive and safe behaviors in the classroom and in school districts as a whole. So we need to be concerned about external threats, absolutely. We also need to understand how we can deal with everyday discipline in a way that's fair, that maintains student attachment to school and encourages positive behavior. So this, you know, I mentioned some of the options that exist already. And I think that a lot of schools and school districts are starting to experiment with these alternative strategies. So I know in L.A. they have a restorative justice mandate and have reduced suspension rates dramatically. There are a lot of options to kind of think about what works and what doesn't, now that school districts are starting to experiment with these like alternative programs.

 

Jennifer [00:54:26] My guest today has been Emily Weisburst of UCLA's Luskin School. Emily, thanks so much for doing this.

 

Emily [00:54:32] Thank you.

 

Jennifer [00:54:39] You can find links to all the research we discussed today on our website, probablecausation.com. You can also subscribe to the show there or wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don't miss a single episode. Big thanks to Emergent Ventures for supporting the show. Our sound engineer is Caroline Hockenbury. Our music is by Werner, and our logo is designed by Carrie Throckmorton. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you in two weeks.