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Deviance - Lecture 6
Université de Paris 8
School and Delinquency
Recap :
We have seen that
- persistent and serious delinquents have certain characteristics that mark them off from the mass of non-delinquents
- personality traits
- hyperactivity
- family traits
- poor discipline
- poor surveillance
- poor parenting
- large family size
- we have also seen that it is not true to say that all young people that share these characteristics become delinquent - according to Wadsworth, only 17% of those identified as likely to become delinquent in fact did so
We need to look at the process or processes by which those who are in danger of becoming delinquent actually do become so. We can look for a clue in one of the findings of Rutter et al's study of institution-reared children, where one of the factors which protected these young people from becoming delinquent was school success. What role does school play in becoming delinquent?
In what follows we will need to distinguish two questions, one of which is relatively simple to operationalize, the other more difficult
a) do some schools produce more delinquency than others, and if so, what are their characteristics?
b) do all schools play a role in the production of delinquency, through the operation of fundamental school processes?
The answer to the first question is that some schools do in fact add to the probability that a child will become delinquent. Wadsworth, looking at Primary Schools, found that factors such as type of school (rural/urban, large/small) had no effect on delinquency. Low academic success rate (11+ pass rate) was a significant predictor. He also found an association between no. of children per full-time teacher and delinquency - smaller the better - but this was not significant
Children rated as poor or lazy by teachers were significantly more likely to become delinquent - such children were more likely to come from a lower social class, had a higher birth order and a large family and had parents who were of minimum education and had little interest in their children's school career.
Are teachers stereotyping? They were not able to distinguish homes which would be broken later, so they may have been. However, they did tend to rate poorly those boys who came from homes which did not possess characteristics leading to delinquency, and who later became delinquent The question remains - how far are teachers' judgements to be seen as self-fulfilling prophecies?
Secondary schools - Wadsworth found once again that there seemed to be no effect of size of school or whether it was rural or urban. However, there was a school type effect
1.- middle class boys who went to secondary modern schools were more likely to become delinquent
2.- working class boys who went to grammar school were less likely to become delinquent
3.- children of parents who had wanted them to go to grammar school and who had not been able to were more likely to become delinquent than those who succeeded
4.- children who had wanted to go to secondary modern schools were more likely to become delinquent than those who went to a school that was not of their choice
5.- non-manual boys who went to schools with a large proportion of working class boys were more likely to become delinquent than those who did not
Sex mix made no difference. Parental interest, as judged by teachers, was a good predictor.
Study of school organizational styles in South Wales by Reynolds, schools were classified in terms of rates of attendance, academic attainment and delinquency.
The more successful schools tended to be smaller in size; to have a lower staff turnover, smaller classes and older buildings, but organizational features were the most important. The more successful schools were
- more likely to have prefect systems, and
- they enforced school uniform rules with less rigour, especially for fourth and fifth year pupils.
- They also enforced rules against three key behaviours, i.e. smoking, chewing gum, and outside school behaviour, in a less obsessive and relentless manner
- they opt for low rather than high control, over senior pupils in particular.
- they used lower levels of physical punishment;
the unsuccessful schools
- use higher rates of coercion and produce lower commitment to the school on the part of the pupils as a result.
In this sort of school, there is invariably vandalism, truanting and delinquency
Rutter, Maughan, Mortimore and Ouston (1979) - study of 12 London secondary schools. They found that, after controlling for scores on verbal reasoning test and for social class of parents, the delinquency rate at the most delinquent school was three times that of the least delinquent. Those schools which protected their students from delinquency, also had a high degree of academic success, a low level of truancy and relatively good behaviour of pupils within the school
To some extent, this was due to factors over which the school and the teachers have some control -
- punishment - schools with higher levels of corporal punishment seemed to produce more delinquency
- schools where teachers controlled lightly and without raising their voices seemed to produce better outcomes
- schools where teachers worked together and felt that their behaviour was noticed by their superiors seemed to produce better outcomes
- smaller classes were associated with less delinquency - but not with better academic results!
They found that there was a good association with academic balance - those schools that had a high proportion of able pupils at intake had lower delinquency rates.
There was a lower, but still significant association with school processes - but it seems that the main factor must be something to do with peer group processes. In those schools where a large number of children are likely to fail, it is likely that an anti-school sub-culture (or a sub-culture which is simply indifferent to school success) may develop more easily. These studies suggest that there is a tendency to greater delinquency when schools are characterized by
- antagonistic relations with their pupils,
- a large mass of underachieving pupils.
This in turn, may lead to the formation of anti-school peer groups
How does the formation of the anti-school peer-group come about?
Colin Lacey - Hightown Grammar (1970). When pupils arrive - uniformly enthusiastic and eager to please through work and behaviour. However, through a process of differentiation - separation and ranking of students, carried out by teachers, there comes about an increasing polarization within the student body, partly as a result of differentiation - process of subculture formation in which the school-dominated, normative culture is opposed by an alternative 'anti-group' culture. This rarely happens in the first year - often streaming takes place between first and second year, and this accelerates the process. First, reactions are individual, but then take on a group aspect
Those who are labelled as deviant in terms of the school culture - either because of their academic level or because of their behaviour - may come to subscribe to values which are an inversion of the school values - they gain prestige for cheeking the teacher, playing truant, not doing homework, smoking, drinking or stealing. Once committed to the group, the boy adopts a behaviour pattern that ensures that his work will get worse. True anti-group behaviour develops from 2nd year on and develops markedly in third and fourth years, when the school begins to try and get rid of them.
Other observers have found similar processes at work in other schools - Willis, Hargreaves - but what is interesting here is that the process is at work in a grammar school, where the pupils have been selected for their academic ability - that is, most of them would have been regarded as good pupils when they were at primary school. This, presumably explains their positive attitude towards school in the first year - many of their less able peers will already have distanced themselves from the school culture by this time.
Interestingly, Willis (Learning to Labour, 1977) found that the processes were at work in the secondary modern - non-selective - school which he investigated even when classes were not streamed. Moreover, he observed that it was not simply those of low ability who joined the anti-school culture -
'Some of its really central members were highly articulate, clear-sighted, assertive, and able across a wide range of activities. They had decided that, for them and at that stage, the life of 'the lads' offered more than the conventional road.'
This suggests that there may be several reasons for dissatisfaction with school. On the one hand, for a number of pupils, labelling as a failure will produce a low level of self-esteem, which, as we shall see, may precipitate them into the anti-school group. On the other, some of the brighter pupils may find the lessons and the teachers boring and irrelevant to their lives, and find more attractive outlets for their energies in the activities of the anti-group.
Willis's observations are also interesting in that they tend to conform to a great deal of what one finds in the literature - while statistic-lead studies tend to identify delinquents as being less intelligent and academically successful than average, many ethnographic studies suggest that at least some members of the delinquent sub-groups, and often central ones, are both intelligent and resourceful. As would be expected, these do not show up in the police statistics. This may be either because
- they do not themselves commit the more serious acts of delinquency which are liable to attract attention, or because
- they are less likely to get caught.
The mechanism whereby school failure leads to delinquency seems to be related, at least in part, to self-esteem. Kaplan (1980) found that nondelinquents in the seventh grade of an American High School, with low self-esteem, were more likely to become delinquent by 8th grade than those with high self-esteem. He also found that delinquent 8th graders were more likely than non-delinquents to experience enhanced self-esteem when they reached ninth grade.
Rosenberg, Schooler and Schoenbach (1989), in an analysis of data collected by Jerald Bachman, in 1966 & 1968, found that there was an interesting reciprocal relationship between school success, delinquency and self-image. Academic success lead to higher self-esteem, (the reverse was not true) and that delinquency had a positive - but just below significant - effect on self-esteem. This was partly because the effect of delinquency on self-esteem was not the same for all sub-groups - it had a significant effect on members of low SES groups, but hardly any effect at all on middle class children.
Academic success is not the only source of self-esteem in school. As Rutter et al found, those schools which put a greater degree of trust in their pupils, had better outcomes, both in terms of academic success, and in terms of preventing delinquency. Also, punishments which were of a nature to damage pupils' self-image - corporal punishment - seem to have negative effects.
It cannot be assumed that negative judgements which lead to a lowering of self-image are objective in any simple way. Teachers, as we have seen, are more likely to judge children in a negative way if they possess characteristics which are predictors of delinquency - coming from large families, having experienced a breakdown in family relationships and so on Cicourel and Kitsuse found that teachers' perceptions of a child's ability is a far more accurate predictor of the group into which a child will be placed than is the child's measured ability according to standardized tests. A number of studies have shown that teachers judge more favourably students who share their own values, and find it difficult to give failing grades to students that they like. (Ortiz, 1988) Moreover, teachers behave in different ways towards students depending on how they perceive them. Students of whom they approve are praised more for good work, criticized less for bad work and are allowed more autonomy in the execution of their school work. Moreover, they will be punished less for infractions of the rules.
This, as we have seen, suggests that students who are judged negatively are more likely to be on the receiving end of just those attitudes and behaviours on the part of teachers which appear to produce bad behaviour and delinquency
Conclusion
We have seen that some schools are more likely to produce delinquency than others. These schools are characterised by
- a larger intake of lower ability pupils, which allows anti-school culture to flourish
- more fuss about rules, and higher levels of punishment
- reluctance to allow pupils to take part in decision-making and discipline
- low expectations as to eduational and behavioural outcomes
- lack of coordination within the staff
We have seen also that the development of an anti-school culture is related to the increasing salience of school judgements of ability. Judgements of ability are based not only upon real ability, but upon the social distance between the teacher and the person being judged. These judgements in turn lead to differences in treatment which make it more likely that negatively judged pupils will be treated in ways which the research mentioned above suggests may contribute to delinquency.
We have seen that part of the process of the establishement of an anti-school or delinquent group is related to the damage to self-esteem that is caused by the negative judgements of the school. Delinquency, particularly in lower-class groups, appears to be a means of raising self-esteem that has been damaged by teachers' judgements
Where some pupils are judged to be less able, an anti-school group is likely to develop, whatever the overall level of the school's intake. School processes do have an effect on the behaviour of schoolchildren such that the institution singles out a certain kind of pupil for certain kinds of treatment.
These pupils possess some of the characteristics that we have already seen when analysing the effects of biology and of the family. The way the school treats them aggravates and reinforces those aspects of their behaviour that lead them to be labelled delinquent, and helps create within the chosen pupils an image of themselves the core of which is resistance to authority and to the rule-system valued by those in authority.
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