Councilmember Kristin Mink’s 2021 Anti-SRO Hearing Testimony to Board of Ed Included Reference to Questionable Study (and Appears to Conflate Correlation with Causation)
In March 2021, activist and now-current Montgomery County Councilmember Kristin Mink supplied written testimony to the MoCo Board of Education in which she urged an end to the Student Resource Officer (SRO) in-school program.
I’m here today to urge you to act in the best interests of our students and end the SRO program, and to keep police out of schools unless imminent physical danger requires a call for service.
In further written testimony, Mink stated:
Mink then footnoted this reference to such a study and provided a link to a 2019 chalkbeat.org article titled “New studies point to a big downside for schools bringing in more police” by Matt Barnum.
But even Barnum’s summary of the studies seems to point to a clear correlation vs causation misreading. One study noted in this article references “broken windows” policing in New York City back in 2004 (through 2012). It has nothing to do with SROs in schools. Nobody in Montgomery County leadership in 2021 was advocating for a return to this kind of aggressive policing of petty crime or mischief in or around public schools.
The other study, the one CM Mink was referencing (via the Chalkbeat.org article as intermediary) to back her claim that “the introduction of police in schools lowered the graduation rate” came out in 2018 and is called
Here’s the thing though… even the abstract part of this ‘study’ by Emily K Weisburst, publishing through the Journal of Policy Analysis and Measurement, concedes that: I also find that exposure to a three-year federal grant for school police is associated with a 2.5 percent decrease in high school graduation rates and a four percent decrease in college enrollment rates. The key word there is “associated”. Correlation. There is no direct evidence SROs caused any of this decline in graduation rates.
As Matt Barnum puts it in the Chalkbeat.org summary:
Students in middle or high schools that received a three-year grant were 1.7 percentage points less likely to graduate high school and 1.9 percentage points less likely to enroll in college, compared to similar students in the same district in other years.
It’s not clear what explains these results. Unlike in the New York City study, there was no indication that these declines were steeper for black students, or that the greater police presence meant students were disciplined more often in high school.
In hindsight, it seems like then-activist and current CM Kristin Mink wanted a quick score against SROs to shore up her “progressive” bonafides at the time (and in anticipation of running for Council). She grabbed a quick education policy headline to support her narrative and testimony against SROs, but a deeper dive into the studies referenced reveals it is a complicated issue. Declining high school graduation rates being placed on the mere presence and work of SROs in public schools is simply a smear of hardworking people.
Montgomery County children deserve reliable, safe public schools that deter kook sociopaths from even considering a demented scheme at a campus, and MoCo taxpayers deserve honest, pragmatic Councilmembers who don’t simply pander to a select few.
