By Desmond Ang, EducationNext, June 4, 2020
How will the death of George Floyd affect Minneapolis schoolchildren? New research I conducted on the effects of police violence indicates that it will significantly hurt their educational and emotional well-being.
Examining detailed data on more than 700,000 public high school students and over 600 officer-involved killings in a large urban county, I found that police use of force has large, negative spillovers on educational achievement and mental health. Students living near an officer-involved killing experience significant decreases in grade-point average and increased incidence of emotional disturbance lasting several semesters. These effects are concentrated among underrepresented minorities. While white and Asian students are unaffected by exposure to police killings, black and Hispanic students are strongly and negatively impacted by these events, particularly when they involve unarmed minorities. Ultimately, students exposed to police violence are significantly less likely to graduate from high school or to enroll in college.
The difficulty of studying this issue is that police killings are not random and are more likely to occur in some neighborhoods than others. In my sample, blacks and Hispanics are two to four times more likely to be killed by police than whites, and similar disparities exist across the United States. Because race is so highly correlated with economic and social disadvantage in this country, comparing students in heavily policed neighborhoods to students in neighborhoods that are less so would likely conflate a number of correlated factors.
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