Students can’t be expected to learn in schools plagued by violence
By Rafael Perez | April 3, 2026
A U.S. News & World Report comparison of public schools ranks California’s Pre-K-12 schools 38th in the nation. In California, 51.2% of our students fail to meet English standards and 62.7% fail to meet appropriate math standards. Our city schools are clearly broken if a majority of students cannot meet modest proficiency standards.
Teachers’ unions blame large classroom sizes and inadequate funding. Others blame antiquated instruction methods that do not conform to evidence-based reading instruction or a neglect of the plurality of ways that students learn — in effect, there are plenty of explanations offered for the chronically low scores. One vastly overlooked factor that plays a significant role in poor performance is the daily violence that students face in many urban schools.
In the 1990s and early 2000s when I was making my way through the public school system in South Central Los Angeles, violence in and around schools was as much a part of life as anything else. Nearly all of the male students and a lesser number of female students had been multiple-time victims or perpetrators of violence, often both.
Not much has changed since I was in California’s grade school system. The School Experience Survey for the last LAUSD school year found that only 61% of students either “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” that they “feel safe in [their] school or in online sessions.”
From July 2024 to May 2025 there were 5,403 fights, 3,544 threats, 1,735 instances of controlled substances and 857 weapons possessions in LAUSD schools. These numbers undoubtedly represent only a fraction of actual cases. The vast majority of fights and threats happen away from the watchful eyes of staff and it seems that the significant underreporting of violence in K-12 has been happening for a very long time.
In 2002, while I was witnessing and at times partaking in the ubiquitous fighting, the No Child Left Behind Act required states to compile a list of “persistently dangerous schools.” While children and teens across California’s many dangerous school districts were constantly forced into gladiator fights, not a single school in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, San Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Ana or Sacramento made the list.
Mere physical assault is not the only constant in our schools. According to research in 2011 by the American Association of University Women, nearly half of grade-school students across the country reported having experienced some form of sexual harassment. The U.S. Department of Education found that during the 2017-2018 school year, nearly 15,000 K-12 students had reported some form of rape or sexual assault.
Sexual assaults are also significantly undercounted. At the middle school I attended in Los Angeles, multiple girls were sexually assaulted by boys every day. Sexual and physical assaults happened every day in school buses, bathrooms, halls, playgrounds and even classrooms with teachers present. I do not recall a single instance when anything was done about it.
Precisely measuring the effect of a given level of violence on learning is of course challenging but it should nevertheless be clear why the worst-performing schools tend to be the most violent.
The impact of all of this should be obvious — homework does not seem as immediately important when a child has a cafeteria fight to prepare for the next day. A child may find it difficult to concentrate on a lesson a few minutes after being battered or sexually assaulted.
In addition, research has found that students who experience violence also struggle with sleep disruption and higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which impacts learning. But these are precisely the circumstances within which our students are expected to learn.
Instead of protecting students, school boards across California have chosen to remove campus police from their schools. In 2020, Oakland Unified voted to eliminate their campus police while LAUSD implemented a near-ban of police on their campuses and slashed their funding.
Districts have been increasingly moving away from campus police and towards “restorative practices” focused on counseling, but persistent rates of violence have not demonstrated that they alone can make schools safe, particularly schools in economically disadvantaged areas where students are more likely to experience violence. California even passed a law making it harder to expel violent students.
As is often the case, effecting change requires the embrace of systems of accountability in the form of competition and comparison. If public schools cannot provide safe learning environments, parents and children must be allowed to have alternatives. Numerous studies have found that charter schools are typically safer and report fewer instances of violence than traditional public schools in addition to the well-established improvements in academic performance.
California’s school districts and lawmakers have waged a consistent war against charter schools including last year’s attempt to impose stricter funding restrictions (Assembly Bill 84) and LAUSD’s fight to keep charter schools out of city campuses. Funding gaps in California between charter and traditional public schools also impose barriers to school choice.
When schools are overtaken by disorder, students should not be expected to simply accept it as a way of life and lawmakers should not disrupt efforts to give parents alternatives. The learning opportunities that these children receive will directly shape their future prospects for a crime-free and productive life, making this a matter of immediate importance.
Implementing curriculum reforms like those found in Assembly Bill 1454 will have a limited impact as long as students are forced to learn within violent schools. The factors that contribute to the poor student performance are varied, but the presence of violence has long been overlooked.