Federal Report: 220,300 Public School Teachers Physically Attacked by Students

A record 220,300 public school teachers reported that they were physically attacked by a student during the 2015-2016 school year, according to a report jointly published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The 220,300 public school teachers who said they were physically attacked by a student in 2015-2016 is up from the 197,400 who said they were attacked by a student in 2011-2012 (which is the last school year before 2015-2016 for which teachers were surveyed on the question).

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The 220,300 public school teachers who said they were physically attacked by a student in 2015-16 equaled approximately 5.8 percent of the 3,827,100 public school teachers the NCES estimates there were during that year.

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The data for 2015-16 comes from the NCES’s National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). The data for previous school years going back to 1993-94 comes from the NCES’s Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which the NTPS has now replaced.

The data was published in “Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018,” a report released online this month by NCES and BJS. (The data on the number of school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student in 2015-16 was also previously published in “Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2017.”)

The questionnaires used in the surveys asked teachers whether in the past 12 months a student had threatened to injure them or had physically attacked them.

“The percentage of public school teachers reporting that they had been physically attacked by a student from their school in 2015-16 (6 percent) was higher than in all previous survey years (around 4 percent in each survey year) except in 2011-12, when the percentage was not measurably different from that in 2015-16,” said the new report.

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The report indicated that female teachers were more likely than male teachers to be physically attacked (but not more likely to be threatened) by a student and that elementary school teachers were more likely to be both threatened and physically attacked by a student than secondary school teachers. {snip}

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Of the 220,300 teachers the report says were physically attacked by a student in 2015-16, only 35,100 were male teachers while 185,200 were female {snip},

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[Editor’s Note: The complete study, with tables and charts, is available here. It’s several pages long.]