ically entered the mainstream of Main Street USA.
This research examines the phenomenon of violence in American schools. The research will set forth the background and context in which school violence has emerged as a public-policy issue and then discuss the impact that school violence has had on the discourse, formulation, and implementation of relevant public policy, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of development.
School Violence: Important Social Problem
In 1975, Senator Birch Bayh of the Senate Judiciary Committee authored a report that characterized US schools as brimming over with violence. However, a subsequent review of the Bayh report (Gottfredson & Dalger, 1979) found that the kind of violence cited in the report was far more likely to be found in with the largest student populations. In 1978, the US Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, which predated the Dept. of Education as the federal executive cabinet department charged with oversight of the state of American public schools, published for congress an account of the degree and kind of violence in public schools (HEW, 1978). Violent Schools, Safe Schools, which used data from previous years for its content, was the first report on school violence of national scope, but by no means has it been the last. Every year since 1978 similar reports have been issued, designed to bring lawmakers up to date on the status of the safety of property and person in the public-school setting.
But school violence persisted as a cause of public-policy concern. Evidence of violent incidents in schools mounted over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The big picture was articulated in a report on the status of school safety in the late 1990s: "Each year between July 1994 and June 1998, approximately 45 violent incidents that resulted in deaths occurred in . . . school-associated settings" (Barrios & Others, 1999, p. 1).
The presence of school violence has been a co...