A School Without Hate Strategies for Keeping Students Safe

An in-depth look at hate and violence in schools that provides proactive, evidence-based practices for responding to troubling student behaviors Educators are currently navigating an era of escalating hate, online radicalization, and school violence. As social media rhetoric bleeds into reality, youth are not always equipped with the media literacy skills to identify hate-based, manipulative, or false content in memes, videos, live streams, articles, or forums before they act on it. In A School Without Hate, youth radicalization experts Pasha Dashtgard and Cynthia Miller-Idriss respond to this ongoing crisis and provide guidance on how to create safer schools. Based on pioneering research and real-world examples from the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, this book includes classroom tools, scalable interventions, and schoolwide policies that educators can adapt to their own contexts and communities. PERIL has responded to several incidents of hate in schools, such as students disrupting female teachers' lessons with male supremacist talking points and students found creating and circulating explicit AI images of their classmates. A School Without Hate synthesizes findings from incidents like these, as well as extensive research and results from testing PERIL resources and interventions, to present a public health approach to preventing hate and violence in classrooms and across schools. This approach empowers administrators, classroom teachers, school staff, and students to reduce violence while still protecting freedom of speech. While pointing out that there is no single solution to stop hate, this book argues that we are not helpless in the fight to protect and strengthen our classrooms and our democracy.