A Multilevel Analysis of the Association between 8th Grade Achievement and Neighborhood and School Safety in New York City

Background & Purpose: Disparities in academic achievement mirror inequalities in neighborhood and school environments for children living in high-poverty contexts versus their counterparts living in low-poverty contexts. These disparities often persist to inequitable later life employment, health, and mental health outcomes, and it is critical to understand how neighborhood and school risk and protective factors relate to school performance to identify potential buffers. Although neighborhood and school contexts are closely associated with each other and both are independently associated with educational outcomes, research often focuses on each context separately. Thus, we aimed to assess how youth’s perceptions of school and neighborhood safety relate to school-level academic performance by asking the following research questions: (1) to what extent are perceptions of neighborhood and school safety associated with school-wide English Language Arts (ELA) achievement? (2) to what extent does neighborhood poverty concentration moderate the relationship between perceptions of neighborhood safety and school-wide ELA achievement?

Methods: We analyzed publicly available administrative and school climate survey data from New York City (NYC) public schools serving 8th grade in 2021-2022 (N=453). Students’ perceptions of school and neighborhood safety were drawn from annual surveys, and neighborhood poverty concentration was measured as the percentage of students living in poverty within each of NYC’s 32 geographic school districts. We estimated a multilevel regression model with schools nested within districts, predicting the relationship between school-wide ELA proficiency and percent of students in schools perceiving neighborhoods and schools as safe. We then estimated a model including a cross-level interaction assessing whether the relationship between neighborhood safety and ELA proficiency varied by district-level poverty concentration.

Results: We found that 25% (ICC=.247) of variation in school-wide ELA proficiency could be accounted for on the district level, and on the school level higher proportions of students perceiving neighborhoods and schools as safe were significantly associated with higher levels of school-wide ELA proficiency. Our models demonstrated a significant moderating effect of district-level poverty on the relationship between perceived neighborhood safety and school-wide ELA proficiency. In districts with the lowest levels of poverty, schools located in neighborhoods perceived as safest were predicted to have significantly higher proportions of students proficient in ELA (78%) than schools in neighborhoods perceived as least safe (42%). However, for schools in districts with the highest poverty levels, about 40% of students were predicted to be proficient in ELA regardless of neighborhood safety.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings suggest that neighborhood safety may play a larger role for academic achievement in lower-poverty contexts, whereas in higher-poverty districts, cumulative risks of other systemic/contextual disadvantage stemming from poverty may overshadow the independent role of neighborhood safety. Our results highlight the importance of considering neighborhood context when evaluating academic outcomes and planning policy and interventions in schools, particularly in schools serving areas of concentrated poverty. Future research should examine drivers of the moderating effects of neighborhood poverty concentration on the relationship between neighborhood safety and school-wide academic achievement, including how resource allocation, teacher support systems, and student needs may vary across different neighborhood contexts.