PREVENTING CHRONIC VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS

White House Conference

On

Character and Community

June 19, 2002

Presented By

Kenneth A. Dodge, Ph.D.\*

Center for Child and Family Policy

Duke University

Chronically violent and delinquent adolescents represent one of the most
costly and vexing problems in American society today. Economic analyses
suggest that each career criminal costs society over 1.3 million
dollars, in costs to victims and costs of incarceration and treatment.
No government or professional group knows what to do with these youth.
Public schools expel them. Juvenile courts incarcerate them. Mental
health agencies often put these youth in large groups where they simply
learn from each other to become more deviant. Almost all professionals
and government agencies have come to the same conclusion about
chronically violent adolescents: By the time that they get to us, it
seems too late. And, why couldn't someone have intervened earlier?

It should not come as a surprise that we have so few solutions for this
problem, given how little our nation has invested in research and
development on education and children. In most private industries,
companies spend 5 to 10 percent of their resources on research and
development. In the pharmaceutical and computer industries, the research
and development investment has been up to 20 percent of all dollars, and
the return on that investment has been striking. Of all federal
expenditures in areas such as health, transportation, and energy, 2 to 3
percent are spent on research and development. However, when it comes to
education and children, only .2 percent of all dollars that are
allocated are spent on research and development. It is as if when it
comes to education and children, we feel that we do not need to develop
a science and an evidence base. The methods that are used in education
and children\'s programs today have not changed much in the past 50
years, and the results have been disappointing. Fortunately, what I will
report to you today is an exception. It is a program of research that
HAS been supported by federal research dollars, and it has led to
positive results in preventing chronic violence among our highest risk
youth.

The solution has required a different approach toward violent youth than
the approaches we have taken in the past. It is an approach that we have
borrowed from education and public health. Consider some analogies.
About 100 years ago, we had a major problem in this country with
illiteracy. When our economy moved away from exclusive reliance on
agriculture, too many of our young adults were ill-prepared to
contribute to the new economy. As a society, we solved that problem
through universal public education. We had a theory about literacy,
namely, that one must be taught systematically over a long period of
time in order to become fluent at reading. And so we developed a system,
called public education, that is charged with delivering those services
to every child in America. We do not wait until age 18 to see which
children have failed to learn to read and then try to provide remedial
help.

Let's try another analogy. About 75 years ago, our society also had a
major problem with dental caries and tooth decay. We solved that problem
with a public health approach based on scientific theory and research
about the cause of this problem. And so we solved that problem by
creating a system of putting fluoride in the water and providing access
to toothpaste at an affordable price that enables children to prevent
tooth decay. We did not decide to wait until children lost teeth and
then replaced those teeth. We solved the problem through prevention.

Now let's look at the problem of chronically violent behavior among
adolescents. We all agree that this problem should not be tolerated and
that action by government must occur to protect others once violence has
occurred. But do we have a system to prevent these children from growing
up to become chronically violent? There is no fluoride in the water for
violence prevention, and there is no 12-year system of training and
education to prevent violence. In my few minutes, I will summarize the
scientific research that provides the basis for preventive intervention.
Then I will describe a program that my colleagues and I have developed
and evaluated, called Fast Track.

The scientific rationale for early prevention comes from longitudinal
studies like the Child Development Project. My colleagues and I began
studying a community sample of 585 preschool-aged boys and girls back in
1987 through annual interviews, tests, observations, and review of
archival records. Those children are now 19 years old. Some of them have
graduated from high school, and others are in prison. By following these
children across their childhoods, we have learned a great deal about how
chronic violence develops.

The first point that we have learned is that we can identify high-risk
children by the time they complete kindergarten. Screening of children
through teacher and parent reports of who is poor, behaves aggressively
at home, and has difficulty getting along with peers at school can
identify a group of children who have better than a 50 percent chance of
being arrested 12 years later.

Second, we have learned that this early identification is *not* destiny.
Chronic violence *develops*, and development depends on life experiences
during the school years. The children who become violent in adolescence
are those who have received harsh parenting, have been physically
maltreated, or have parents who have not been able to supervise them.
Next, the children who become violent are those who have had social and
academic problems at school. They have been socially rejected by their
peers, have failed academically, or are unfortunate enough to go to a
school where the classroom environment fails to support nonviolence.

Furthermore, we have learned how these life experiences lead to
violence. We have learned that harsh and rejecting environments lead
children to develop deviant ways of processing social information,
which, in turn, leads them to react violently when they are provoked.
For example, children who have been maltreated become hypervigilant
about other people and tend to attribute hostile intentions to others
even when others have not acted in a hostile manner. This hostile
attributional bias, in turn, leads a child to react aggressively when he
or she is provoked. In contrast, children from warm and nurturing home
and school environments tend to learn social-cognitive skills such as
how to read others\' intention accurately and how to solve problems
nonviolently.

Third, we have learned that it is possible to change those harsh life
experiences, so that even high-risk children need not grow up to become
violent. It is this premise that guided the creation of the Fast Track
Prevention Program, which began in 1990 through the support of the
National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse,
and the Department of Education, and which continues today.

Colleagues at four sites across the country began Fast Track by
screening 10,000 kindergarten boys and girls back in 1991. We identified
891 children who were at high risk for adolescent violence. These
children tended to come from mostly poor, single-parent-headed families
with multiple problems. We randomly assigned them to receive the Fast
Track intervention or not. Those children who were assigned to the
control group were allowed to receive whatever intervention might be
offered to them by the community, but we did not supplement those
efforts.

The Fast Track Prevention Program lasts 10 years and costs about
\$40,000 per child. We provide group training in behavior management for
their parents and supplement that training with biweekly home visits to
help with family management and with family-school relationships. We
provide training to the children in social-cognitive skills such as
understanding emotions and intentions and in solving social problems. We
provide phonics-based tutoring in reading skills. We support the
development of positive peer relationships through coaching. Finally, we
train the teachers to deliver a classroom curriculum in social and
emotional development.

Delivering the Fast Track Program has required a committed team of
education and family specialists, community volunteer tutors and
mentors, and school teachers. It also requires hard work from the
parents. One of the lessons that we learned is that no matter how
difficult are the circumstances of the families of these children, the
parents genuinely want their young children to grow up to graduate from
high school, get a satisfying job, and stay out of jail and off drugs.
We relied on those dreams to get parents to let us in the door. With
effort, we were able to get 99 percent of the 445 families to agree to
participate, and then, over 75 percent of the parents and 88 percent of
the children attended more than half of the sessions that we offered.

We have tested the efficacy of the Fast Track Program by comparing the
445 children who had been assigned to receive intervention, even if they
rarely attended, to the 446 children in the control group. Our findings
are modest but statistically robust and very striking.

First, we were successful in improving the competencies of our targeted
children and their parents. The parents in the intervention group
reduced their use of harsh discipline, and their children improved their
social-cognitive and academic skills, relative to the control group.

In turn, these improvements led to improvements in aggressive behavior
in the elementary school years. Compared with children in the control
group, children in the intervention group displayed less aggressive
behavior at home as reported by parents, less aggressive behavior in the
classroom as reported by teachers and peers, and less aggressive
behavior on the playground as directly observed by our observers who did
not know which children had received intervention.

By the end of third grade, 27 percent of the control group had become
free of conduct problems, in contrast with 37 percent of the
intervention group. By fourth grade, 48 percent of the control group had
been placed in costly special education classrooms, in contrast with 36
percent of the intervention group.

In middle school, the group differences continued. By eighth grade, 42
percent of the control group had been arrested, in contrast with 38
percent of the intervention group. Finally, psychiatric interviews in
ninth grade revealed that the Fast Track Program has reduced serious
Conduct Disorder by over one third, from 27 percent to 17 percent.

Although these effects may seem modest in magnitude, our initial
economic analysis suggests that the differences will prove to be
cost-beneficial. For example, if each career criminal costs society 1.3
million dollars, and if the Fast Track Program costs \$40,000 per child,
the program will prove to be a wise economic investment if just 3
percent of the children are saved from careers of violent crime.

We have begun to disseminate the Fast Track Program in several school
systems across the country through the Safe Schools/Healthy Students
Program of the Department of Education, and it is being implemented in
several schools in Great Britain, Australia, and Canada. It is by no
means the only way to prevent chronic violence, but it has been one of
the most rigorously evaluated programs ever. We appreciate the financial
support of research funds from the federal government that enabled this
program to get developed, implemented, and evaluated.

\*This research was conducted in collaboration with: John E. Bates,
Karen L. Bierman,, John D. Coie, E. Michael Foster, Mark T. Greenberg,
John E. Lochman, Robert J. McMahon, Gregory S. Pettit, Ellen E.
Pinderhughes.