Protecting Students from Gun Violence: Does "target hardening" do more harm than good?

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...While target hardening is an increasingly prevalent response to school shootings, it brings up a number of questions and concerns. First, what kind of impacts do security practices and technologies have on the learning environment? What messages do such practices send to students about their schools? To be sure, some students might feel safer and calmer in hardened environments, but it is equally plausible that intensive security procedures send the message that schools are unsafe, fearful places, thus adding an element of stress to the learning environment. Indeed, some evidence suggests that security technology such as surveillance cameras and metal detectors sends different messages, depending on the student population. For example, research indicates that African American students perceive school security practices as being implemented less fairly than their white peers do. The question, then, of how to get the messaging right when it comes to security practices, if it can be “right,” deserves serious consideration.

Another important question is: to what extent and in what ways do teachers and other school personnel reinterpret their roles and responsibilities in a target-hardened school? Some security practices—the use of armed officers and metal detectors, for example—set the stage for a different way of thinking about students. A hardened environment frames children and youth not as learners but as potential threats to be policed, controlled, and, in some sense, feared. This is particularly true when it comes to the ultimate target-hardening strategy: arming teachers themselves. How might armed teachers think differently about their roles and relationships with students?

Finally, we need to think more about the array of ethical questions that security practices present. To what extent, for example, should student expression be monitored? Should schools hire private companies to track students’ threatening statements and other activity on social media? And to what extent do we owe students a degree of privacy? These ethical questions expose possible conflict between security practices and the civic goals of schools. We want students to learn how to act autonomously and responsibly. Is this educational aim compatible, though, with an environment where we closely monitor and police every student statement and action? Or should we try instead to construct spaces for student freedom, space for students to practice acting with moral responsibility and according to their own reasons?

We do not have all the answers to any of these questions, but we do have a body of research indicating that some school security measures are correlated with undesirable, and sometimes harmful, outcomes for students, staff, and the school environment. It’s important to emphasize the correlational nature of this research and note that it does not demonstrate a causal relationship, but the results do raise red flags about the target-hardening approach. For instance, researchers have found that students and staff in schools that employ various security measures report experiencing higher levels of fear. Students say they feel less safe in schools with visible security measures, a finding that would indicate a potential challenge to the learning environment. Researchers have noted similar findings for schools that employ SROs: students report a greater sense of fear over their safety; a more disruptive or disordered school environment; and a greater likelihood of being arrested...