FULL BUILLY REPORT

http://www.dosomething.org/bullyreport

Study Measures Bullying's Academic Toll

By Nirvi Shah

Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.

Read more FREE content!

• Printer-Friendly
• Email Article
• Reprints
• Comments
• 
• Article tools sponsored by:

  

While bullying is known to leave physical and emotional scars, a new study finds that victims may suffer long-lasting academic effects, and high-achieving black and Latino students are especially vulnerable.
Building off of previous research that found high-achieving black and Latino students are more likely to be bullied, Ohio State University doctoral student Lisa M. Williams and Anthony A. Peguero, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Tech University, found that bullying, in turn, could lead to lower achievement for victims.
Their study is due to be presented Tuesday at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas.
The sociologists found that the grade point average of all students who were bullied in 10th grade dropped slightly by 12th grade. By their senior year, black students who had a 3.5 grade point average, on a scale of 0 to 4, as freshmen, lost almost one-third of a point if they had been bullied. The result was more pronounced for Latino victims of bullying: They lost half a point. That compares with a loss of less than one-tenth of a point for white students who had undergone such harassment, the researchers found.
One reason minority students seemed to suffer larger academic aftereffects, Ms. Williams said, could stem from some of the stereotypes about minority students, including that they are tough or street smart, compared to their peers from other racial and ethnic groups.
“Schools may think that because students are black and Latino, they’re better able to handle bullying,” she said, “and their schools won’t have the same type of [bullying prevention] programs.”

Related Blog

Visit this blog.

On the other hand, Ms. Williams said, there are often prevention strategies in place at many predominantly white schools. Instead, schools must employ bullying-prevention programs regardless of the racial and ethnic backgrounds of their students, she said.
This fall, the U.S. Department of Education will begin a study that looks at how local bullying policies are put into action in several individual school districts and states. At about the same time, the Education Department will share the results of an analysis of current state anti-bullying laws and model policies. The study will aim to identify promising strategies that school districts are implementing to combat bullying in schools. This information will be used by the department to better support bullying-prevention activities.
Ms. Williams’ and Mr. Peguero’s results were based on the academic performance of 9,590 students in 580 schools. While many factors contribute to students’ academic performance, the researchers controlled for some other variables often associated with students’ academic achievement. They eliminated family background, previous grades, and school characteristics when calculating the effect of bullying on students’ grades.

In a previous study published earlier this year, Ms. Williams and Mr. Peguero found that black and Latino students who have high test scores, countering stereotypes of low academic achievement among such students, are more likely to be harassed or teased at school. They also found that low-achieving Asian-American students—going against stereotype—were also particularly vulnerable to bullying. Another study by Mr. Peguero has found that black and Latino students bullied at school are more likely to drop out than their peers.
For the study released at this week’s conference in Las Vegas, Ms. Williams and Mr. Peguero came to their conclusions by comparing students’ academic baseline performance as 9th graders, before they had been bullied, with their academic achievement four years later as high school seniors. They found that about 40 percent of all students in their study answered yes to questions about being bullied, including whether they had been hit, bullied, or threatened with violence in the previous year.
Earlier this year, another study involving school bullies and stereotypes suggested that the most likely campus aggressors aren’t the most popular or most socially outcast students—those most typically thought of as potential bullies. Mapping of students’ social networks found instead that children somewhere in the middle of the social hierarchies in their schools were the most likely bullies on campus.

Vol. 31, Issue 02

BULLYING

by Erik Monreal


What is bulling?
Bullying is when someone keeps doing or saying things to have power over another person.

Some of the ways they bully other people are by: calling them names, saying or writing nasty things about them, leaving them out of activities, not talking to them, threatening them, making them feel uncomfortable or scared, taking or damaging their things, hitting or kicking them, or making them do things they don't want to do.

Have any of these things happened to you? Have you done any of these things to someone else? Really, bullying is wrong behaviour which makes the person being bullied feel afraid or uncomfortable.




Why are some young people bullied?
Some young people are bullied for no particular reason, but sometimes it's because they are different in some way - perhaps it's the colour of their skin, the way they talk, their size or their name.
Sometimes young people are bullied because they look like they won't stand up for themselves.


















Bullying is abusive treatment, the use of force or coercion to affect others,[2] particularly when habitual and involving an imbalance of power. It may involve verbal harassment, physical assault or coercion and may be directed persistently towards particular victims, perhaps on grounds of race, religion, gender, sexuality, or ability.[3][4] The "imbalance of power" may be social power and/or physical power. The victim of bullying is sometimes referred to as a "target."
Bullying consists of three basic types of abuse – emotional, verbal, and physical. It typically involves subtle methods of coercion such as intimidation. Bullying can be defined in many different ways. Although the UK currently has no legal definition of bullying,[5] some U.S. states have laws against it.[6]
Bullying ranges from simple one-on-one bullying to more complex bullying in which the bully may have one or more 'lieutenants' who may seem to be willing to assist the primary bully in his bullying activities. Bullying in school and the workplace is also referred to as peer abuse.[7] Robert W. Fuller has analyzed bullying in the context of rankism.
Bullying can occur in any context in which human beings interact with each other. This includes school, church, family, the workplace, home and neighborhoods. It is even a common push factor in migration. Bullying can exist between social groups, social classes and even between countries (see jingoism). In fact on an international scale, perceived or real imbalances of power between nations, in both economic systems and in treaty systems, are often cited as some of the primary causes of both World War I and World War