This study should be no surprise. When students of color are exposed to police killings, their grades and graduation rates decline. It seems likely that being exposed to such traumatic events would depress the academic motivation of all students, whatever their race or ethnicity. Witnessing or hearing about a murder in one’s surroundings must be a traumatic experience.
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From the article: “While white and Asian students are unaffected by exposure to police killings, black and Hispanic students are strongly and negatively impacted by these events, particularly when they involve unarmed minorities.”
It’s not the trauma per se, it’s the message: people who look like you are expendable. Why bother to succeed when your life can be snuffed out due process free regardless? White and Asian kids aren’t getting that message, so they’re unaffected, even when they’re exposed to the same killings.
This study supports that we must consider the whole student, not just a student’s cognition in education. A police killing near a student’s home has a negative impact the student’s academic performance. Supporters of no excuses discipline ignore that fact that trauma harms a student’s sense of well-being. Humans are not built with separate compartments for the brain and emotions. If this were true, there would be no PTSD. Cognition, social and emotional issues are intertwined. Trauma and stress in students’ lives generally impede academic success. Minority students are more likely to experience more trauma from involvement law enforcement, and reducing the number of police killings would have a positive impact on black and Hispanic students’ academics.
To be clear, the number of “police killings” that are “murders” are very few. I think the WaPo’s database lists 19 nationwide for all of 2019 where the deceased was unarmed (which doesn’t mean that those 19 were all “murders”).
Meanwhile, there are between 15,000 and 20,000 gun homicides annually in the US.