The Effect of High School Shootings on Schools and Student Performance

We analyze how fatal shootings in high schools affect schools and students using data from shooting databases, school report cards, and the Common Core of Data. We examine schools’ test scores, enrollment, and number of teachers, as well as graduation, attendance, and suspension rates at schools that experienced a shooting, employing a difference-in-differences strategy that uses other high schools in the same district as the comparison group. Our findings suggest that homicidal shootings significantly decrease the enrollment of students in grade 9 (the high-school entrance grade), and test scores in math and English. Using student-level data from California, we confirm that shootings also lower test results for students that remain enrolled. We find no statistically significant effect on suicidal shootings on all outcome variable of interest.