A Call for the Conceptual Integration of Opportunity Structures Within School Safety Research

Abstract

Few studies explicitly examine how opportunity structures impact school safety, school climate, or bullying. This article applies school-centered ecological theory as a heuristic conceptual framework that links opportunity structures and school safety. Historically, opportunity structures identified how institutional characteristics such as labor conditions, combined with factors such as geographic location, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and family background, influence the opportunities open to individuals and shape patterns of entering the labor market. In education, the concept has been used when describing systemic racism in educational inequality. Examples are drawn from several bodies of research that have strong implications for future study of these issues. These areas include research on communities and families, creating positive school cultures and climates, and different types of educator bias that restrict opportunities and result in less safe environments. The authors suggest new research that combines school safety, opportunity, and social justice-oriented school reform.

Impact Statement

Opportunity gaps based on social injustice often overlap with school safety concerns. Yet most school safety studies and interventions focus on individuals or interpersonal relationships and not on structurally changing opportunity or safety gaps. This article calls for new research, intervention, and policy approaches that jointly address opportunity and school safety gaps. Examples include research on (a) school-community opportunity and safety gaps, (b) low resourced schools’ opportunity and safety gaps, and (c) racially biased classroom interactions that decrease opportunity and increase safety gaps.

Keywords:

• violence
• school and community
• bullying
• community–school collaboration
• social justice
• social support

ASSOCIATE EDITOR:

• Shane Jimerson

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ron Avi Astor

Ron Avi Astor, Ph.D., is the Crump Professor of Social Welfare in the School of Public Affairs and in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His work examines the role of the physical, social-organizational and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of bullying and school violence (e.g., sexual harassment, cyber bullying, discrimination hate acts, school fights, emotional abuse, weapon use, teacher/child violence). Astor is a fellow of APA, AERA, and SSWR, and an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Pedro Noguera

Pedro Noguera, Ph.D., is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. His most recent books are Race, Equity and Education: The Pursuit of Equality in Education 60 Years After Brown (Springer). Excellence Through Equity” (Corwin 2015), and “Schooling for Resilience: Improving the Life Trajectory of African American and Latino Boys” with E. Fergus and M. Martin (Harvard Education Press 2014). In 2013 he was appointed to the Kappa Delta Pi Honor Society and in 2014 he was appointed to the National Academy of Education.

Edward Fergus

Edward Fergus, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Policy, Organizational, and Leadership Studies at Temple University. His work explores the effects of educational policy and practice as it intersects the lives of populations living in vulnerable conditions. He extrapolates the relationship between discipline codes of conduct, gifted program practice, and academic referral processes and the educational outcomes of low-income and racial/ethnic minority student populations. This work also outlines policy and practice changes in order for schools to develop as protective environments for vulnerable populations. Dr. Fergus consults with state departments of education and the U.S. Department of Justice on disproportionality.

Vivian Gadsden

Vivian L. Gadsden, Ed.D., is the William T. Carter Professor of Child Development and Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and scholarly interests focus on learning, literacy, and the elimination of risk to children, parents, and families across the life-course and in marginalized communities. Her research projects examine early childhood development, parenting, and, families; father involvement; social determinants of health and education; children of incarcerated parents; and intergenerational learning. Gadsden is former president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), an AERA Fellow, former coeditor of Educational Researcher, and a member of the National Academy of Education.

Rami Benbenishty

Rami Benbenishty, Ph.D., is a Professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He got his Ph.D. in Social Work and Psychology from the University of Michigan. His main areas of interest are the safety, welfare, and wellbeing of children around the world. He is studying children and youth both in community normative settings, such as schools, and in out of home placements, such as foster homes and residential care. He investigates and tries to improve decision processes that lead to referral to protective services, removal of children from their biological families, and their reunification thereafter.