schools are particularly well situated to provide prevention services: they provide regular access to students during the developmental years and may represent the only reliable access to large numbers of crime-prone youths. Children spend approximately 18% of their waking hours in school. Schools are staffed with individuals trained to help youths develop into healthy, happy, productive citizens and the community is generally supportive of schools' efforts to socialize youths. On these grounds alone, schools have crime prevention potential.

The preceding chapters paint a fairly optimistic view of the ability to realize this potential through school-based prevention. The nonexperimental studies summarized in Chapters 2 and 3 show that several of the likely causes of problem behavior are school-related, and that features of schools are related to the level of disorderly behavior they experience. The experimental studies summarized in Chapters 5 and 6 show that many of these factors can be manipulated, and that when they are manipulated, a reduction in problem behavior often results. These studies generally accord with the research on the causes of problem behavior by showing that attempts to alter the most likely causal factors (according to nonexperimental research) are more successful than attempts to alter other factors.

This chapter examines the generalizability of the research findings summarized in previous chapters.