Strengthening Schools and Students Against Historically Fueled Violence,Bias,and Unkindness,With a Focus on School Psychologists Among the Pupil Services Professions

Abstract

Schools have not been sheltered from the history of extremist and race-based violence in the United States, regardless of efforts to prevent this history from being taught to students. Although the focus of this commentary has been on school psychologists, ensuring that positive school culture and climate norms are implemented without exception or exemption is a shared responsibility among school counselors, social workers, psychiatrists, nurses, and the rest of the school community. As students attend these kinds of school environments over multiple years, they have the opportunity to develop the skills and dispositions that would deter their expressions of violence.

Keywords

school counselors < urban education violence < social school effectiveness < urban education

That schools can somehow shut out the swirling winds of the wider culture, as well as national and world events, is unrealistic. We see the effects: unkindness, actual meanness, anxiety, exclusion, lack of empathy and compassion, and lack of interest in/curiosity about others. It goes further: we see slogans substituting for analysis; tweets taking the place of elaborated ideas; the push for simple and quick solutions edging out patient reflection and persistence. Leaders seem to prefer playing checkers when situations call for chess.

At first glance, it might seem as if there is a great divide between what happens in our schools and the kind of extreme violence that has been a part of American history since its founding (Fenwick & Osher, Forthcoming). Yet, the connections exist, and they cannot be left unaddressed. Promoting civic and social solidarity and preventing violent extremism require countering dehumanization, exclusion, and oppression, and addressing the role of racialized violence (Lantos & Molenberghs, 2021), actions that can begin early in life and continue as children and youth develop as adults. U.S. schools can help students understand the history and consequences of various forms of hateful violence and what they can do to prevent this violence.

Yet, in too many schools, Black and Latino students in particular feel subjugated to security-hardened schools, surveillance, and disparaging messages from the predominantly white-dominated culture, resulting in pervasive feelings of injustice. They are far from the only groups treated inequitably.

There is urgency and poignance in strengthening our schools and our students- ALL of our students—against the presence of violence, bias, and unkindness. The discussion that follows focuses on the role of school psychologists, but it is equally relevant to school counselors, school social workers, psychiatrists, and nurses.

While the presence of extreme violence in schools is, thankfully, relatively rare, the constant presence of school violence in other forms—whether physical, verbal, intimidation, or harassment—often has the effect of silencing people and their cultures, marginalizing rich funds of knowledge, and discounting linguistic traditions. The forced removal of indigenous North American students from their communities and their placement in boarding schools where they were separated from their families and punished for using their first language provides a painful example that remains emotionally salient to many indigenous people and is front of mind for many immigrant populations today. These processes can have indirect effects on the well-being of minoritized and displaced students by fostering learned helplessness and reduced aspiration, creating a self-fulfilling dynamic leading to their continued presence as a cultural and societal underclass. When school principals and district superintendents minimize or ignore claims about harassment or bullying, they contribute to the continuation of a victimization process that has a long history (Rogers et al., 2019; Slavich, 2020).

As a profession, school psychology places tremendous emphasis on social justice, and the presence of, and response to, violence in schools is indeed a social justice issue. The role and training of school psychologists position them to take a leadership role in reducing violence and increasing social justice in schools. A general discussion of actions that school psychologists can take will be threaded through three areas that are levers regarding the presence of violence, hatred, and racial and other inequity in schools: labels and biases within school discipline systems, the core values of schools, and the social and emotional skills needed to understand and uphold social justice.

Labels and Exclusionary Discipline

School psychology services are tied in part to a diagnostic/classification system. Brendtro et al. (2002) and Lazarus et al. (2021) discuss at length the impact and implications of being assigned a “label,” particularly when those labels have a deficit orientation. This is a special case of how language can be hurtful and can also oversimplify. It can be used to describe/excuse violent actions by reframing victims into those “deserving” threats and by supporting one- or two-dimensional pictures of the people receiving “services” that may ignore individual and cultural strengths. Some in the school psychology field remember when it was standard practice to isolate students with special education classifications, often so that they would rarely if ever be seen by “normal” students and other passers-by in the school. While these practices have (largely) changed legally, they have not always changed in the hearts of educators and policy makers; students of color are still more likely to receive restrictive “services” that focus on behavioral compliance. They are also less likely to be recognized as “gifted and talented,” particularly if they also have a special education label (Elias et al., 2024).

For school psychologists—as well as other school professionals—this requires cultural humility, cultural competence, cultural responsiveness, and promoting compassion for the unfamiliar, and using more complex language when understanding and describing students and their families (Pham et al., 2022). This means spending more time assessing and discussing strengths and avoiding creating or reinforcing simplifying stereotypes based on labels, e.g., that is an “autistic” child or an “ADHD” child or an “FARL” (Free and Reduced Lunch) student. Negative labeling and culturally insensitive services can be iatrogenic and lead down a path of dehumanization and a justification of maltreatment or neglect.

Even now, there is disproportionate use of harsh and exclusionary discipline in our schools, directed toward students of color (UC Berkeley School of Public Health, 2024). One example is corporal punishment, which is legal in 19 states and is more prevalent in states that were part of the Confederacy. Economically disadvantaged male students of color are more likely to experience this practice, which stands at variance to the UN's Declaration On The Rights Of Children and, numerous other child-focused organizations, such as the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), American Academy Of Pediatrics, The American and National Medical Associations, and NASP, due to its harmful psychological and civic consequences.
Corporal punishment signals to the child that a way to settle interpersonal conflicts is to use physical force and inflict pain. Such children may in turn resort to such behavior themselves. They may also fail to develop trusting, secure relationships with adults and fail to evolve the necessary skills to settle disputes or wield authority in less violent ways. Supervising adults who willfully humiliate children and punish by force and pain are often causing more harm than they prevent. (https://www.aacap.org/aacap/Policy_Statements/1988/Corporal_Punishment_in_Schools.aspx)

Exclusionary discipline and the school-to-prison pipeline, which start in the classroom, but include psychological and academic assessment processes, school policies, and adult practices (Osher et al., 2002; Skiba et al., 2011) provide another example. Students of color, students who are LGBTQ+, and students who have emotional or behavioral disabilities are often demonized and/or viewed through a set of deficit-focused statistics (Eberhardt, 2020; Goff et al., 2014; Muhammad, 2019), which lay a pathway for the disproportionate, exclusionary discipline that they experience. Disciplinary referrals, suspensions, transfers, and expulsions have a host of insidious academic, behavioral, and mental health consequences, including enhancing the likelihood of police contact (LiCalsi et al., 2021; Lozada et al., 2022). Exclusionary discipline is a racialized issue that sits at the intersection of psychology and policy (Okonofua et al., 2016; Skiba et al., 2011).

Improving Labeling and School Disciplinary Processes

School psychologists often find themselves meeting students in remediation contexts (Lazarus et al., 2021). This is unlikely to be a source of thriving for those students. It is not clear to them what their pathway is to a sense of positive purpose. Hence, inspiration must precede remediation. Having a sense of possibility, a vision of a positive trajectory, is the greatest motivation to address one's difficulties, as well as to appreciate and build on one's strengths (White et al., 2023). For school psychologists, that mean setting up contexts in which, for example, instead of running deficit-oriented groups like anger management or anxiety reduction, they offer opportunities such as forming a newspaper club or a service squad (Elias & Tobias, 1996; Kress & Elias, 2020).

It also means addressing school disciplinary processes that affect student motivation and equity (Darling-Hammond & Gregory, 2023). Toward that end, there is value in reviewing disciplinary approaches to ensure they do not reflect implicit and explicit biases and are experienced as clear, firm, fair, and consistent. There cannot be rules or practices for some groups in schools and not others. This creates a fuse that can erupt in violence when lit (Osher et al., 2004a, 2004b). School psychologists can and have played roles in preventing punitive and exclusionary discipline (e.g., Quinn et al., 1998) and they can do so in their consulting, assessing, and planning activities. Simply advocating for the ongoing tracking of who receives opportunities and sanctions among the student body—disaggregated by ethnicity, gender, grade level, FARL, and special education status at the very least—is a major structural step in reducing the effects of bias (whether intended or not). If disparities uncovered are then to be eliminated, this work must be done in a manner that is culturally responsive and centered on equity (Darling-Hammond & Gregory, 2023; Ingraham et al., 2016). School psychologists can advocate for and support the installation of well-implemented restorative practices, which contain the value position that all students belong in the school, not out, and all have positive contributions to make.

Identify Core Values Incompatible with Violent Extremism

This brings up the importance of schools having a set of core values that are articulated explicitly and are applied universally. Among these values are the dignity and worth of every student; other values that schools tend to endorse include integrity, compassion, excellence, responsibility, and kindness (Character.org; Elbot & Fulton, 2007). The core values of schools should be incompatible with biased, unfair, exclusionary, or selectively permissive discipline policies, as well as violent behavior toward students or adults. And process matters: it is necessary that statements of core values are not declarative, but rather are arrived at through consensual and inclusive dialogue in schools and then used explicitly to guide all facets of school life and to implement social justice.

Promoting Prosocial Core Values

School psychologists can play a leadership role in schools’ asserting and equitably “living” a set of core values. One tangible way to do this is to help schools undertake the self-study that is part of applying to be a National School of Character. First among the 11 Principles that guide the self-study is the establishment of meaningful and operational core values (Character.org). The process can begin as simply as students being asked to write down 5 ways that they would like to be treated and 5 ways they think it's important to treat other people. Then, have them pair-share, and come up with a combined 5 and 5 list. Then have them do the same thing in groups of 5, creating one list. Then have the groups of 5 create a final list of 10 “ways to be treated,” which constitute a set of core values for their classroom. There are other ways to do this, of course. Regardless, the path leading to establishing those values is itself an example of fostering productive exchanges and deploying healing-centered, culturally responsive learning environments that reduce the impetus toward violence in schools and classrooms (Ginwright, 2006, 2018; Noguera et al., 2013; Osher et al., 2020; Sheppard & Levy, 2019).

Build the Social-Emotional Skills Needed to Forestall Violence and Promote Civility

It is a sad reality that changes at scale at the organizational level of schools do not come quickly (Kendziora & Osher, 2016). Students in the 6^th grade today may find themselves graduating from middle school before any meaningful change has taken hold, even with the best of intentions. For those reasons, it becomes imperative that all students are given the opportunity to develop the cognitive, social, and emotional skills needed to understand and uphold social justice and avoid violent behaviors. Collectively, these skills are referred to as social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies (Durlak et al., 2025). They include taking others’ perspectives, understanding others’ emotions accurately, responding empathically, working together with diverse others in cooperative ways, problem-solving effectively and ethically, learning to listen deeply, and converse with others respectfully and with focus, and to have awareness of the culture and contextual norms in the range of situations one can experience (Elias et al., 2022; Fullmer et al., 2022).

Two social-emotional competencies merit particular focus. In every era, a new “threat” is identified, leading to relevant individuals being demonized, vilified, bullied, and otherwise excluded or subjugated. After 9/11, Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians were subjected to virulent negative stereotyping; COVID-related attribution biases targeting China led to attacks on Asian Americans that reprised the targeting of Japanese Americans during War II. Currently in the United States, transgender individuals and certain immigrant groups have become objects of aversion and restriction.

A key SEL competence is the ability to correctly label and differentiate various emotions. As Marc Brackett (2019) has noted, this is an area in which many youths and adults would benefit from greater guidance; errors in this domain by adults as well as youth fuel considerable interpersonal misunderstanding and sow the seeds of interpersonal as well as group violence. In practice, this means that many young people and adults say they experience “anger” or “resentment” when in fact they may be feeling frustration, confusion, disappointment, fear, humiliation, rejection, resentment, insult, or uncertainty—among other emotions. What happens for too many young people (and adults) is that their experience of any of these emotions is processed as “anger” and reacted to “in anger.” This learned and often socially reinforced behavior festers or grows as youth mature into adulthood. It does not take much imagination to see how much this will derail interpersonal relationships, working relationships, conversations, and—especially important for our current focus– attitudes toward others.

The second key skill is social awareness. This refers to understanding others with empathy, cultural and contextual sensitivity and humility, and nuance (Fullmer et al., 2022). Social awareness is meaningfully underdeveloped in young people today, where simplicity is favored over complexity. How does this play out to potentiate violence? Students who have a bias against “Muslims” or “Asian Americans” or “Jews” or new arrivals to the U. S. from “Central America” are likely have a highly superficial understanding of the reasons they hold this bias or whatever threat such individuals might pose. Further, they likely have few if any insights about the variation that is embodied by members of those groups. If these overgeneralizations continue below the level of conscious awareness, we arrive at scenarios where “anger” at “Asian Americans” or “Jews” can be prompts toward misdirected violence– including mass shootings.

This potentially toxic dynamic was recognized years ago by the expert panel that the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) convened for the White House and the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice. The warning signs that the panel identified included excessive feelings of rejection, and intolerance of differences and prejudicial attitudes (Dwyer et al., 1998). School psychologists, like the NASP experts who contributed to the expert panel and to related follow-up publications (e.g., Dwyer & Osher, 2000, 2005; Osher et al., 2004a), have a clear interest in ensuring students have a wide, accurate, and developmentally appropriate emotional vocabulary and a nuanced and working knowledge of diverse cultures and the implications of intersectionality. Of course, this is not something school psychologists can accomplish on their own. Teachers, administrators, and other support personnel need the skills both to understand their own emotions and to develop the emotional literacy of students. Once again, the leadership and consultative roles of school psychologists will be called upon.

Improving Emotion Recognition and Social Awareness

Fortunately, there are evidence-based approaches that are available to school psychologists either as tools or guides for promoting social-emotional competencies and related skills needed to address a more complicated approach to history (Salter, 2021; Shuster et al., 2018). Facing History and Ourselves provides a promising example, with demonstrated effects that systematic reviews (Amit & Kafy, 2022) suggest help prevent violent extremism: improvements in self and social awareness, empathy, agency, historical understanding, and civic responsibility (Domitrovich et al., 2022). The opportunity to understand and critically examine lived experiences of people who have been subjected to and challenged oppression can be integrated into academic curriculum in a manner that promotes civic literacy, engagement, and intergroup understanding (Fullmer et al., 2022). Indeed, activation and development of these skills can be embedded into academic subject areas; they need not be added to the extensive responsibilities teachers already have (Elias, 2026; Fullmer et al., 2022).

School Psychologists in a Leadership Role

Until school culture and climate changes, as well as circumstances outside of school that perpetuate a tendency toward violent problem solving, all children need advanced coping skills, to resist negative social pressures and respond as well as possible to the challenges brought by discrimination even while efforts are being made to reduce and ultimately eliminate those challenges systemically. As noted by Fenwick & Osher (Forthcoming), students also need more accurate and nuanced understandings of the history of violence, persecution, and victimization in the United States. There is no good reason to expect this kind of structural change in the foreseeable future. Therefore, to at least help keep students open to the possibility of complexifying their world views, school psychologists must be powerful advocates for institutionalizing the promotion of social-emotional competencies within curriculum and instruction and as part of staff hiring, orientation, and evaluation. Specific guidance exists to help teachers add social-emotional and character development “into,” and not “on top of,” the many tasks teachers already must carry out (Elias, 2024). Arts educators, in particular, have articulated a crosswalk of SEL skills and mandated artistic processes (SELARTS, 2020; SELarts.org) and are eager allies for school psychologists looking to integrate SEL into ongoing instructional processes. As Sarason (1982) and others have long maintained, “programs” are inherently temporary; the changes needed are structural and cultural.

School psychologists can also buffer the psychological harms created by the narrow focus on achievement. They can help teachers increase their sensitivity to how students interact with and can be affected by academic content. What often seems like historical facts and ideas to educators can be activating for many students. There are personal elements to slavery, the Holocaust, westward expansion at the expense of Indigenous Americans, COVID, poverty… the list is endless. School psychologists can provide instructional guidance regarding the need for educators to address the collective nature of the impact of trauma, the limitations of focusing on blame, and the importance of not replicating in the present-day school those aversive conditions being learned about. Allowing students to explore the powerful negative effects of hatred on mental health, on its distortions of perceptions of the world, of others, and on relationships helps reduce the unchallenged operation of harmful biases. Catalyzing conversations among educators navigating the rough seas students travel as they learn about the past is a role for which school psychologists are well suited. These conversations will address, at least, challenges and methods of interrogating and curating information; critically examining texts and historical documents; and understanding the dynamics, systemic underpinnings, and virulent impacts of intolerance, racism, and privilege-asserting violence (Amit & Kafy, 2022; Cummings, 2019; Fullmer et al., 2022; Stephens et al., 2021).

Addressing these issues certainly is not the sole responsibility of school psychologists (Lazarus et al. 2022; Osher et al., 2020), but the centrality of these issues to the professional identity of school psychologists suggests their need to be prepared for leadership roles, for building coalitions of collaboration within schools to be on the lookout for whether there truly is or is not equity, and for creatively and proactively addressing the inevitable situation where structures of equity are not necessarily or immediately accompanied by perceptions of equity. School counselors and social workers will be eager allies in the service of such coalitions. Social learning theory teaches us that ones’ generalized expectancies can be changed, but only by an accumulation of experiences differing from those expectations. It will not be through an orientation program or special workshop that perceptions may change—it will require ongoing efforts, conversation and dialogue, and a genuine climate of caring, support, and safety, with “no alibis, no exceptions, no excuses” (Elias & Leverett, 2011).

These changes are most likely to happen when schools address often-unaddressed needs: building historical and cultural literacy among all adults and students and countering the structural, cultural, and psychological processes, described earlier, that pit individuals and groups against each other (Stevenson et al., 2005). Helping students develop a sense of positive purpose (Elias, 2026; www.secdlab.org/MOSAIC) makes it less likely that a child will seek to build his or her identity solely based on being “better than” certain others and therefore invested in keeping those others “in their place.”

Conclusion

Schools have not been sheltered from the history of extremist and race-based violence in the United States, regardless of efforts to prevent this history from being taught to students. Correspondingly, schools have an interest in ensuring that all aspects of their setting reject violence as a strategy for resolving difficulties, and indeed emphasize kindness, support, and compassion, as well as a spirit of restoration over punishment. The lived reality of students’ time in schools is a powerful influence on the path students take in adulthood. Understanding our history and the corrosive effects of oppression, prejudice, and hate, and experiencing cultural appreciation, support, compassion, and fairness, make it less likely that students will take a future path of violence. School psychologists, along with other school mental health professionals, have an important role to play as conversation starters, awareness-raisers, process and outcome assessors, and advocates for unbiased discipline systems and positive school culture and climate for all. Further, as all schools have a strong interest in the social, emotional and character competencies of their students, school psychologists can ensure that these competencies are being developed systematically. Although the focus of this commentary has been on school psychologists, ensuring that positive school culture and climate norms are implemented without exception or exemption is a shared responsibility among school counselors, social workers, psychiatrists, nurses, and the rest of the school community. As students attend these kinds of school environments, for 180 days over multiple years, they have the opportunity to develop the skills and dispositions that would deter their expression of violence toward others, even if tempted to do so, and increase their outrage at historical, current, and potential usage of extremist violence, oppression, and victimization.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maurice J. Elias

Author Biography

Maurice J. Elias is a Professor of Psychology. His areas of research and practice are social-emotional and character development in students and schools.

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