Schools Are Desperate to Stop Violence. Will These New Guidelines Help?

Proponents argue that threat assessments decrease suspensions in a school and also reduce reliance on “zero-tolerance” policies for threats. These harsh policies that suspend or expel students for infractions regardless of the context are known to disproportionately punish Black and Hispanic students.

Still, the threat assessment process has been criticized for disproportionately targeting some groups of students as well, particularly students in special education. Critics allege that these assessments lead to those students getting labeled aggressive, causing them to be denied necessary support. These critics tend to favor increased investments into mental health services, rather than police presence, which they argue can reinforce the school-to-prison pipeline.

For Cornell, this is a confusion, arising partly because what constitutes threat assessment isn’t standardized.

Cornell says there’s “reasonable consensus” in the field about what makes up evidence-based practices. That includes a process that emphasizes facts in the assessment, a multidisciplinary assessment team, an effort to distinguish the level or seriousness of the threat and a commitment to try to resolve the threat and help the student, Cornell says.

But too often, schools slap the label “threat assessment” on whatever discipline regime they have, even if it’s “antithetical to threat assessment,” he adds. Cornell points toward zero-tolerance frameworks, arguing that they are the “antithesis” of threat assessment approaches, which seek to place threats in their context. “I think there’s a perception that I’ve run across in some critics who think that when schools are overreacting to student threats, it’s because they have a threat assessment program, and I think it’s more often that they don’t have a threat assessment program,” he says.

He hopes new guidelines will help.

Recently, Cornell co-authored a toolkit for the National Center for School Safety, based on interviews with about 200 experts. The guidelines instruct schools on how to recruit and train assessment teams, as well as how to maintain records, evaluate programs and avoid worsening disparities.

The authors hope it will shepherd schools to what they say is a more evidence-based approach, preventing schools from aggravating disparities when using threat assessments.

Stopping Tragedy Or Managing Anxiety?

While reducing suspensions is desirable, many schools and lawmakers adopt these policies in response to school shootings.

The rise in threat assessments comes when schools are desperate to respond to violence and student misbehavior, from pumping millions of dollars into the unproven weapons-detection industry to the nervous return of school suspensions as a disciplinary practice.

But there’s also no way to conclusively prove threat assessments stop school shootings.

According to Cornell, that’s because of how rare school shootings are statistically. Given that, proving that these assessments stop school shootings are not possible using rigorous criteria, he suggests. Instead, Cornell’s research has shown that assessment is correlated with less bullying and fewer fights, he says.

Is that enough? The focus on these techniques can suggest that they are only useful in preventing these extraordinarily rare school shootings, Cornell says. Anxiety over shootings provides the impetus, but threat assessment really helps to sort through students’ aggressions and choose an appropriate response in an era of fear, he adds.