Three of the following practices are associated with reduced violence in schools

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Second-grade teacher Vicki Kreidel considered resigning this spring because interactions with parents each week left her feeling increasingly demoralized and inadequate. For 21 years, the southern Nevada teacher had enjoyed productive conversations with parents when she alerted them to academic or behavioral issues with their children, but in the wake of the pandemic, many of her students and their parents seemed to disregard civility norms. Children were yelling at one another and name-calling; parents accused her of biases against their children and anonymously reported her to the principal. Kreidel sometimes suffered from panic attacks after work, and the stress intensified her symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis.

“These families have experienced trauma from long periods of isolation, the deaths of loved ones, and economic insecurity as a result of COVID, and I have empathy for them,” said Kreidel, who is also president of the National Education Association of Southern Nevada. “But I started to question whether the job was worth it.”

Kreidel’s struggle reflects an alarming trend among teachers and other school personnel throughout the nation: Violence against educators is common. Psychologists are working to understand both the causes of the problem and the solutions that will increase safety in schools. But they agree that there is an urgent need for more research and resources to protect and retain the country’s education workforce, especially as school shootings pose another constant stressor for educators.

Two of Kreidel’s second-grade colleagues at Lomie G. Heard Elementary School recently quit, and teachers throughout the district have been resigning at twice the pre-pandemic rate, Kreidel said. In Los Angeles County, school superintendents are reporting unprecedented threatening behaviors in classrooms, at school board meetings, and sometimes at the homes of school leaders, said Debra Duardo, who oversees the county’s 80 school districts. More than 30% of the superintendents in the county’s districts resigned during the last two school years—6 times the typical turnover rate. Nationwide, the current gap between public education job openings and hirings is the largest since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking this data in 2000.

The stories from Kreidel and Duardo were mirrored in a recent APA national survey of nearly 15,000 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, staff, psychologists, social workers, and administrators: 54% of all respondents were threatened on the job between July 2020 and June 2021. Administrators and teachers were the most likely to experience verbal abuse from parents. About 1 in 5 school psychologists, social workers, and staff—such as janitors, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers—had been physically attacked, sexually assaulted, or threatened with a weapon by students (Violence Against Educators and School Personnel: Crisis During COVID, APA, 2022).

“One of the most alarming findings was the discovery that nearly half of teachers and one third of administrators desired or planned to quit or transfer,” said Susan Dvorak McMahon, PhD, who is leading APA’s Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel, a group of seven psychologists who conducted the survey. McMahon, a professor of clinical and community psychology at DePaul University, and other task force members are afraid that the learning loss experienced during COVID will expand if there is an exodus of teachers.

“And for those who stay, it will be difficult to promote emotional and academic growth in students if school workers are feeling victimized and burned out,” said Dorothy Espelage, PhD, who is on the task force and is a professor in the school of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Data from the new survey will allow psychologists to study not only how factors such as access to resources, school climate, and local laws influence rates of violence against educators, but also which interventions are more likely to be effective in different settings. This work will also help policymakers as they look to pass legislation at the federal and state levels that supports improving school climate and educator recruitment and retention efforts. “There may be one school that is very demoralized and another one three blocks down the road that is not, so the programs must be adapted to fit the context of each school,” said Ron Astor, PhD, a new member of the task force and a professor in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We also saw the need to explore the context in which this was happening rather than blaming the kids for the problem.”

Promoting safety and civility

Astor believes that psychologists are essential to the effort to reduce violence in schools because they can help students, teachers, parents, and administrators listen to one another and home in on safety interventions tailored to the needs and resources in their schools. He found that many evidence-based school safety programs fizzled after researchers implemented them, prompting him to explore a new grassroots approach in Southern California. He recruited graduate-level social work and psychology interns to share school-specific data from the California Healthy Kids Survey at parent-teacher association meetings, staff meetings, and student gatherings (Research on Social Work Practice, Vol. 31, No. 5, 2021).

“The state has been collecting data for decades about school safety and student wellness, but this information rarely comes back to the classroom,” Astor said. The team visited 145 schools between 2009 and 2013, and the researchers avoided using the term “data” because the word seemed to distance people from the results. Instead, they explained that the survey reflected students’ feelings. Sometimes parents and teachers were surprised by how many students were worried about being beaten up or being the subject of mean rumors. Through these discussions, a group of motivated people within a school would usually work together to tackle a problem, and the strategies each group used varied.

The youth in one district, for example, were concerned about the high rates of bullying in their local schools, and they suspected the issue stemmed from a lack of awareness in the community about the prevalence and effects of bullying. The students met with members of the local chamber of commerce, who agreed to fund a “Because Nice Matters” campaign. Bus murals and banners in stores advertised the importance of kindness, and the students helped to launch social-emotional learning (SEL) programs in the schools. Their efforts not only decreased bullying but also improved relationships between students and the school staff.

All manifestations of school victimization—such as being in a fight, being threatened or injured with a weapon, or being the subject of rumors or sexual jokes—in the 145 schools dropped during the 3-year study, and the rates remained low at least 3 years after the study. Although the research did not focus specifically on reducing violence against educators, Astor is optimistic that a similar method could improve safety for this workforce. Schools could use the APA survey to launch discussions that allow teachers, janitors, administrators, and others to share their experiences and explore possibilities to increase safety at their school.

APA’s survey also included 7,000 qualitative responses, and more than 50% of the respondents wanted more training in SEL skills, trauma-informed practices, and de-escalation strategies. “When more than half are saying they need more training, it is clear that we are not doing a good enough job equipping educators with skills that will help them be more effective,” McMahon said. Psychologists can help by conducting school- or district-wide trainings on how to apply these skills to real-world situations and by consulting with educators about individual and classroom­-level challenges, she said.

Another theme in these responses was the important role of school principals after an incident of verbal or physical aggression. Some teachers felt that lack of support from school leaders after the teachers reported a problem significantly intensified their distress. School psychologists can leverage their position within a school system to address issues like this, said Byron McClure, PhD, a school psychologist in Washington, D.C., who spoke at the congressional briefing when the report was released in March.

“For a long time, school psychologists have been relegated to the role of assessing students who are having problems, but I made it a priority to listen to teachers, students, and principals to find out how I could support them,” said McClure, who was recently part of a team working to redesign DC Public Schools. “They are eager to share the barriers they face and their ideas to overcome the barriers.” While working at Anacostia High School, McClure helped students and staff organize a rally to advocate for more resources to prevent violence. The event led to a meeting with the chancellor of DC Public Schools, who agreed to provide funding for mental health first aid training at the high school.

Measuring teacher safety

Although there is increasing awareness about the importance of safe working conditions for educators, psychology researchers agree that teacher and staff victimization is rarely included in measures to assess school interventions. “For the most part, people doing school safety research test programs that focus on students, and we don’t know if those programs are benefiting teachers,” said Andrew Martinez, PhD, a member of the task force and a principal research associate at the Center for Court Innovation in New York, a nonprofit focused on improving the justice system.

His team recently completed a 3-year restorative justice study across 19 high schools in New York City. The qualitative findings suggested the Restorative Justice in Schools Project created stronger relationships between teachers and students while also helping to reduce fights but did not decrease the number of suspensions (Ayoub, L. H., et al., Restorative Justice in NYC High Schools: Perceived Impact and Mixed Findings from a Randomized Controlled Trial, Center for Court Innovation, 2022). The schools in the study aimed to prevent violence by building relationships rather than resorting to punishments for misbehavior. The students participated in “restorative circles,” in which groups of staff and students talked about challenges and supported one another. If students were involved in a violent incident, both parties invited supportive friends and adults to a conversation mediated by a restorative justice coordinator. “This is an example of an intervention that has been widely used to increase school safety, but it has not been rigorously tested under experimental methods, and teacher safety has not been measured,” Martinez said. “Maybe examining school suspension rates after only 2 years of implementing the program is not the best measure to determine the effectiveness of this intervention.”

Including parents in more school safety studies and interventions would be valuable, said Espelage. “Many psychologists get frustrated because parents may not be responsive to these programs, but we need to go to them rather than expecting parents to come to the school,” she said. “Make it easy for them to participate.” She encourages psychologists to offer SEL programs at churches, at community events, and through youth sports organizations. To make a training event at a school more inviting for parents, include dinner and provide childcare, she said.

Swift action needed

Even though research on teacher victimization has grown in the last decade, the field is still in its infancy, McMahon said. The task force distributed a second survey this spring and will repeat the process in a year to track rates of violence over time. The data will be analyzed in future years to study a variety of factors influencing rates of victimization, school climate, and recommendations. Members of the task force also recognized that teachers and school personnel need help now, and this urgency prompted them to create a policy brief and technical report highlighting a slice of the APA survey findings rather than wait to publish studies based on the data. “We made this decision because data loses its policy relevance over time, and the mental health of our schools and country is at risk,” Astor said.

They shared these findings at the congressional briefing in March and advocated for legislation that would increase education jobs, mental health services in schools, and training programs for educators. Tonya Shonkwiler, a special education teacher in Montana who spoke at the briefing, hopes these efforts will help teachers avoid the difficult decision she made to leave her dream job. For years she loved teaching students with special needs, but over time she encountered more violence from students as funding declined and resources disappeared. Her class sizes expanded, yet she had fewer and fewer teaching aides, and administrators lacked the training to help her deal with unsafe situations.

For Astor, the evidence is clear that educators are in crisis and that their safety must be a higher priority for legislators, researchers, parents, and community leaders. “It will be impossible to help kids thrive unless we consider the teachers and school personnel who are supporting the students,” he said. “Too many educators feel afraid, disrespected, and exhausted, and their mental health can no longer be an afterthought.”

Further reading

Addressing violence against teachers: A social-ecological analysis of teachers’ perspectives
McMahon, S. D., et al., Psychology in the Schools, 2020

Mapping and monitoring bullying and violence: Building a safe school climate
Astor R. A., & Benbenishty, R., Oxford University Press, 2017

Are cyberbullying intervention and prevention programs effective? A systematic and meta-analytical review
Gaffney, H., et al., Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2019

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