The involvement of former extremists in preventing and countering violent extremism has attracted many advocates. Interventions in school settings by or with former extremists have been commonplace for a long time, and in some countries even for decades, which is reason enough to focus on the current research state. We did this through a synoptic examination of the empirical literature on the subject. Hence, we took an in-depth look at four experimental studies with robust samples. These studies investigated projects from Ireland, the Basque Country, Denmark, and Germany. The findings demonstrated two main points: (1) the empirical evidence showed a contrast to the anecdotal evidence, which mostly provided a positive assessment of former extremists in school settings, and (2) thus far, students' perspectives on these initiatives have not been considered in a sufficiently differentiated way.