Julia Burdick-Will is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

TITLE: “Violence and the Chicago Public Schools.”

ABSTRACT:

Recent research on neighborhoods and educational attainment suggests that exposure to frequent and unpredictable violence may be an important mechanism through which neighborhood residence influences adolescent academic achievement. Parents in unsafe neighborhoods are more likely to use restrictive and authoritarian parenting techniques that are associated with lower achievement and students experiencing fear and stress may be less able to concentrate in the classroom and more likely to act out.  At the same time, living in a violent neighborhood may reduce interpersonal and institutional trust in a way undermines students’ relationships with their peers and teachers, thereby reducing their emotional engagement in the schooling process. This presentation uses geographically detailed crime data along with administrative and survey data from the Consortium for Chicago School Research to estimate the average impact of short-term (semester to semester) changes in neighborhood violence on high school student academic outcomes as well as heterogeneity in that effect across different types of students, schools, neighborhoods.