A Call for the Conceptual Integration of Opportunity Structures Within School Safety Research

Abstract

Few studies explicitly examine how opportunity structures impact school safety, school climate, or bullying. This article applies school-centered ecological theory as a heuristic conceptual framework that links opportunity structures and school safety. Historically, opportunity structures identified how institutional characteristics such as labor conditions, combined with factors such as geographic location, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and family background, influence the opportunities open to individuals and shape patterns of entering the labor market. In education, the concept has been used when describing systemic racism in educational inequality. Examples are drawn from several bodies of research that have strong implications for future study of these issues. These areas include research on communities and families, creating positive school cultures and climates, and different types of educator bias that restrict opportunities and result in less safe environments. The authors suggest new research that combines school safety, opportunity, and social justice-oriented school reform. IMPACT STATEMENTOpportunity gaps based on social injustice often overlap with school safety concerns. Yet most school safety studies and interventions focus on individuals or interpersonal relationships and not on structurally changing opportunity or safety gaps. This article calls for new research, intervention, and policy approaches that jointly address opportunity and school safety gaps. Examples include research on (a) school-community opportunity and safety gaps, (b) low resourced schools' opportunity and safety gaps, and (c) racially biased classroom interactions that decrease opportunity and increase safety gaps. A CALL FOR THE CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION OF OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES IN SCHOOL SAFETY RESEARCH Background: Opportunity Structures and School Safety Opportunity StructuresIn 1968, British sociologist Ken Roberts proposed opportunity structure theory to help explain successes and failures in the transition from school to work in the post-World War II British economy (Roberts, 1968). This theory identified how institutional structures, such as labor conditions, combined with factors such as geographic location, gender, race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and family background to influence the opportunities open to individuals and shape patterns of entering the labor market.Job opportunities were open for some groups and severely restricted for others. The theory has been expanded to many divergent areas beyond employment, such as legal opportunity structures for LGBT individuals in Costa Rica and Colombia, the social mobility of women in Central Asia, and political opportunities of migrants in Portugal (i.e., Oliveira & Carvalhais, 2017;Urbaeva, 2019;Wilson & Gianella-Malca, 2019).In education, the concept of opportunity structures includes patterns, options, supports, and access to resources that shape the opportunities of K-12 and college students to achieve good outcomes (Weis et al., 2015). The ro...

Preventing School Violence and Promoting School Safety: Contemporary Scholarship Advancing Science, Practice, and Policy

“…Several of the articles do an excellent job positioning our current state of knowledge relative to decades of prior research, where others explore and test key propositions. Some articles blaze new trails, facilitating important avenues of future research (e.g., Astor et al, 2021).…”

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“…The literature on school safety has typically centered on a restricted range of themes, with relatively little attention to larger social dynamics and related models. Astor et al (2021) take a school-centered ecological approach to integrate school safety and opportunity structure literatures in "A Call for the Conceptual Integration of Opportunity Structures within School Safety Research". They consider two dimensions of school safety and opportunity structures: first, pertaining to a set of interacting nested variables in every ecological layer that can impact opportunities and safety, and second, systemic macro level patterns of expectations, rules, and guidelines that influence paths to safety, achievement, and well-being.…”

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“…Schools vary significantly in the challenges they face and the resources they can muster. Many schools are embedded in contexts that provide few resources and have discriminatory and inadequate opportunity structures (Astor et al, 2021). There are several implications of this conceptualization, namely that external contexts are a target for change.…”