Rand Study Results
Dear Commons Community,
A Rand survey released yesterday shows 54 percent of teachers think students would be unsafe with educators carrying guns, 20 percent say carrying guns would make students safer and 26 percent believe it wouldn’t significantly impact safety.
There have been 36 school shootings in the U.S. during the 2022-23 school year, according to a The Washington Post.
Arming teachers is one solution to the gun violence that has been largely supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.
States are also split on the issue: 20, run by both Democrats and Republicans, allow educators to carry firearms on campus, with some having more strict requirements than others.
In Delaware, educators can carry a gun with no restrictions. In Oregon, teachers need a concealed carry permit to bring a gun on school grounds.
At least 17 states don’t allow educators to carry guns at all.
However, despite the concerns around mass shootings, teachers listed bullying as their top safety concern for students. As reported by The Hill.
“Even with the unfortunate regularity of gun violence in U.S. schools, which often drives the policy debate around school safety, only five percent of teachers overall selected gun violence as their largest safety concern,” said Heather Schwartz, a report author and senior policy researcher at RAND.
“Despite the prevalence of anti-bullying programs, everyday school violence is a concern for teachers. Bullying, not active shooters, was teachers’ most common top safety concern, followed by fights and drugs,” she added.
The survey was conducted in October and November among 974 educators. Its margin of error ranged from 1 percent to 7 percent.
Below are key findings and recommendations from the Rand survey!
Tony
Key Findings
- Similar to older and state-specific surveys, this survey found that teachers are divided about arming teachers at school. Fifty-four percent of the nationally representative sample of teachers reported believing that teachers carrying firearms will make schools less safe, 20 percent reported believing that it will make schools safer, and the final 26 percent reported feeling that it would make schools neither more nor less safe.
- White teachers were more likely than Black teachers to feel that teachers carrying firearms would make schools safer, and male teachers in rural schools were most likely to say that they would personally carry a firearm at school if allowed.
- All told, about 550,000 of the country’s 3 million K–12 teachers would choose to carry a firearm at school if allowed.
- Regardless of gender or race, roughly half of teachers felt that physical security measures at their school (which most commonly include locks, ID badges, cameras, and security staff) positively affected the school climate. Only 5 percent of teachers felt that their schools’ physical security measures had a negative effect on school climate.
- Despite the growth in gun violence, bullying — rather than active shooters — was teachers’ most common safety concern.
Recommendations
- Study early adopter schools or school districts that have more-expansive versions of teacher-carry programs to understand how they work in practice.
- Conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of programs allowing teacher-carry to rigorously assess their outcomes.
- Develop risk analysis approaches to inform school safety and security planning that balance frequent, lower-level forms of school violence, such as bullying, and lower-probability, extreme forms of school violence, such as shootings.
- Develop a deeper understanding of the sources of teachers’ safety concerns.
- Identify how fears of victimization and of specific safety concerns contribute to teacher and principal turnover, and to student enrollment, attendance, and academic performance.
- Better characterize the combined effects of school security measures and strategies on safety, school climate, and student attendance and academic performance.
- Take the pulse of parents, teachers, administrators, and students about school safety measures to disaggregate by type of community and to triangulate their views on school safety.
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