Education and Crime across America: Inequity’s Cost

Abstract

Much of current research on crime and education has focused on the effect of minimum dropout age on rates of crime. Combining the FBI’s uniform crime reporting database and district finance data, we study the longitudinal relationship between crime in every town/city (whose police department has reported crime statistics) and its school district spending in years 2003 to 2018. We combine over 213 datasets to control for population, density, wealth, education, employment, cost-of-living, race, law enforcement, and voting history. Additionally, we also look at teacher salary, teacher engagement, and student chronic absenteeism. Using linear mixed-effect modeling, we find an overall average of 2.35% percent decrease in property crime for every $1000 more a school district spends per pupil on education. Moreover, a $1000 increase in education spending decreased property crime nearly four times as much as a 10 percent increase in per capita income. We also looked at the range in district spending in towns/cities and counties whose students attend multiple districts. We find that for every $1000 difference in district spending within a city, property crime increases by an average of 3%; interestingly, violent crime decreases by 3%. When we lag variables of education quality, allowing these effects to playout, we also find that for every 10 percentage-point increase in chronic absenteeism among students, violent crime increases by 4%. Importantly, we find no such effect for property crime, suggesting a distinct mechanism of education on violent crime. Additionally, both law enforcement and unemployment explain little variance in crime. Our results demonstrate a robust relationship between education funding and reduced crime across America with regard to amount spent per student as well as equity in spending.