Victimization in Schools

255 Pages·1985·7.138 MB·English

by  Gary D. Gottfredson, Denise C. Gottfredson (auth.)

Victimization
in Schools
LAW, SOCIETY, AND POLICY
Series Editors: Joel Feinberg, Travis Hirschi,
Bruce Sales, and David Wexler
Universily of Arizona
Volume I DISABLED PERSONS AND THE LAW: State Legislative
Issues
Bruce Sales, D. Matthew Powell, Richard Van Duizend, and
Associates
Volume 2 VICTIMIZATION IN SCHOOLS
Gary D. GoHfredson and Denise C. GoHfredson
A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of
each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon adual shipment. For
further information please con tad the publisher.
Victimization
in Schools
Gary D. Gottfredson
and
Denise C. Gottfredson
Center for Social Organization of Schools
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland
Plenum Press • New York and London
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gottfredson, Gary D.
Victimization in schools.
(Law, society, and policy; v. 2)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. School violence-United States. 2. School vandalism-United States. 3. School disci·
pline-United States. 4. School environment-United States. I. Gottfredson, Denise C. II.
Title. III. Series. .
LB3013.3.G67 1985 371.5'8 85·17010
ISBN-13: 978-1-4684-4987-7 e-ISBN-13:978-1-4684-4985-3
DOl: 10.1 00978-1-4684-4985-3
©1985 Plenum Press, New York
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985
A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation
233 Spring Street, New York, N.Y. 10013
All rights reserv ed
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical. photocopying, microfilming,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher
Preface
The perception that our nation's public schools are disorderly and
unsafe is widespread, and the image of the public school is deteriorating.
Since 1974, the Gallup organization has gathered opinions about the
public schools. The percentage giving the schools an "A" rating
declined from 18% to 6% between 1974 and 1983 (Gallup, 1974, 1984).
In a recent survey of America's teenagers, only 9% gave the schools an
"A" rating (Bahner, 1980, p. 106). Lack of discipline tops the list of the
problems adults see facing schools, and class disturbances and theft are
reported by teenagers to be "very big" or "fairly big" problems in their
schools (Bahner, 1980, p. 107).
These public perceptions are fostered by and reflected in national
media attention ("City Schools in Crisis," 1977; "Help! Teacher Can't
Teach!" 1980; "High Schools under Fire," 1977). Public concern is also
reflected in Congressional hearings where testimony creates the image of
grave disorder within our schools (U.s. Senate, Committee on the
Judiciary, 1975, 1976b; U.s. House of Representatives, Subcommittee
on Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education, 1980). The public
has given the schools low marks, and the Senate Judiciary Committee
(1975) gave the schools an" A" in violence and vandalism.
In short, parents, students, and public officials are alarmed at what
they see as a rising tide of violence and disorder in the schools and are
concerned about how much learning can occur in a disruptive environ
ment, and about the safety of teachers and students.
These concerns have undoubtedly contributed to middle-class
flight from our urban schools. The wholesale departure of the children
of middle-class families from city public schools (often called "white
v
vi
PREFACE
flight"} will, if not stemmed, result in the big city schools being an
impoverished "dumping ground" for the poor-children of minority
families without resources to flee and without resources to improve
their schools. This specter implies that maintaining order in the public
schools, and maintaining the appearance of order, is a school
management problem of great importance.
The work reported in this book was undertaken during a period of
heightened awareness of the problems of the public schools, and in a
time when the spirit of many school administrators and public officials
has been defeatist. Schools, it is often said by those who run them,
inherit their problems from the community and from the families that
fail to control their children and do not instill in them a sense of value of
education. The Coleman report (Coleman, Campbell, Hobson,
McPartland, Mood, Weinfeld, & York, 1966) has engendered a 20-year
legacy of research concluding that schools make little difference, that
input (student characteristics) determines output (achievement). Thus,
the fatalism of school administrators has to some degree been clothed in
sociological respectability.
Yet if the public schools are to be improved, if we are to achieve
educational equity rather than leaving the have-nots of our cities to
founder in deteriorating schools, then we must understand what makes
some schools orderly and others havoc-ridden. More specifically, we
must determine what sources of school orderliness are amenable to
administrative control and to intervention. The search for those sources
is the subject of this book.
Any single investigation of a social problem can aspire only to
increase knowledge somewhat, to add a modicum of understanding, or
to bring a different perspective to the problem. Scientific breakthroughs
seldom occur in social science (Janowitz, 1979). By this standard, we
judge our work successful. This book adds to knowledge about the
nature and distribution of school disruption, increases understanding
about the social ecology of secondary schools, and claims that schools
(and those who run them) can make a difference.
The research reported here was conducted over a period of several
years at the Johns Hopkins University, Center for Social Organization
of Schools, and was supported in part by grants from the National
Institute of Education, U.5. Department of Education (formerly Health,
Education, and Welfare). We are grateful for the assistance of Lois Hybl,
Richard D. Joffe, Robert Kirchner, and Mary K. Roberts who helped
with word processing and research. Robert Crain, Michael R.
Gottfredson, and John Hollifield read and commented on parts of the
PREFACE vii
manuscript; and Robert Kirchner was especially helpful to us in
preparing Chapter 13. Henry J. Becker, Michael S. Cook, Robert Crain,
Richard Scott, Michael Wiatrowski, Shi-Chang Wu, and James M.
Richards, Jr., helped us with advice or comments in discussions about
our research. In addition, we are grateful for the feedback from
colleagues in other universities who used earlier drafts of parts of this
book in their graduate seminars in research methods and mental health.
This feedback prompted us to make the work more widely available.
The data used in this research, based on the responses of thousands
of students and teachers and the principals in over 600 schools, were
made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and
Social Research. These data were originally collected by the Research
Triangle Institute on behalf of the National Institute of Education for its
Congressionally mandated Safe School Study (David Boesel, project
director).
Most important, we are grateful to the students, teachers, and
principals who contributed information about their schools, their
experiences in those schools, and their perceptions of the social relations
that affect their day-to-day lives. Without their help, this work could
not have been done. We earnestly hope that their contributions will be
rewarded by having the data heeded by researchers, policymakers,
educators, and the public so that schools become more pleasant, orderly
places.
Much of the work to prepare this manuscript was accomplished in
an isolated house on the Chesapeake Bay built in 1895 by Albert
LaVallette. The warm, humid days of the Maryland summer made the
writing pads soggy but usable, and the ghost said to inhabit the house
never interfered with the writing.
None of those who helped us-those who collected the data, those
who made it available to us, our colleagues who gave advice, the ghost at
LaVallette's, nor the National Institute of Education that supported part
of this work-is responsible for the analyses or interpretations pre
sented here. Opinions expressed, and any errors, are ours alone.
Contents
CHAPTER 1. The Problem of School Disorder .................... 1
How Much Violence Is There? .............................. 1
Teacher Victimization .................................... 2
Student Victimization .................................... 4
The Imperative to Do Better ................................ 5
Previous Research and Advice .............................. 6
Early Forerunners ....................................... 7
The NIE Safe School Study Report ........................ 8
CHAPTER 2. Scope of the Research ............................ 14
An Organizational Perspective ............................. 14
What Organizational Characteristics Are Important? ........ 16
Speculations about Origins of School Disorder ............... 18
The Approach to the Research ............................. 19
CHAPTER 3. Overview of the Data, Plan, and Methods ........... 21
Data .................................................. 21
Plan .................................................. 23
School Disorder ........................................ 25
Methods-General Overview ............................ 26
Level of Analysis ....................................... 30
Special Problems Associated with Aggregated Data ......... 32
Use of Rates in Aggregate Data .......................... 34
Alternative Measurement and Causal Models .............. 36
ix
X CONTENTS
CHAPTER 4. The Measurment of School Disorder ............... 37
Technical Note on the Measurement of Victimization ......... 46
Analyses .............................................. 48
Student Interview Measures ............................. 49
Student- and Teacher-Questionnaire Measures ............. 51
Reliabilities ............................................ 52
Construct Validity ...................................... 53
CHAPTER 5. The Community Context .......................... 61
Research Traditions in Social Ecology ..................... 62
Critiques of the Ecological Traditions ..................... 64
Implications ........................................... 66
The Development of Community Measures ................ 66
CHAPTER 6. Demographic and Social Composition .............. 75
Comments and Cautions ................................ 78
Strength of Association ................................. 79
CHAPTER 7. School Size, Staffing, and Resources ................ 85
CHAPTER 8. School Climate and Administration ................. 88
Principal and Teacher Attitudes .......................... 89
School Governance and Sanctioning Practices .............. 94
School Social and Educational Climate ................... 105
Social Climate and School Disruption .................... 114
CHAPTER 9. School Security and Disruption ................... 118
CHAPTER 10. School Contributions to School Disorder .......... 122
Teacher Victimizations ................................. 125
Student Victimizations ......._ . ......................... 129
Influences Beyond the School's Control .................. 133
Limitations ............................................. 135
CHAPTER 11. Alternative Models of School Disorder . . . . . . . . . . .. 137
Measurement Models .................................... 145
Combining Structural and Measurement Models ............ 159
CONTENTS xi
Models of Teacher Victimization 160
Models of Student Victimization ........................ 162
The Need for Better Measures .......................... 166
Implications of the Models ............................. 167
CHAPTER 12. Advice for Policymakers ........................ 170
Promising Strategies ..................................... 171
School Size and Resources .............................. 171
The Organization of Instruction .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 172
School Climate and Disciplinary Practices ................ 173
Community Influences and Social Policy ................. 174
Some Negative Results ................................. 176
Schools Can Make a Big Difference ..................... 176
Learning to Do Better .................................... 176
A Policymaker's Guide ................................... 179
CHAPTER 13. Some Speculations and Extensions ............... 181
We Have Chronic Problems of Discipline in Some Schools-
Not an Acute National Crisis ............................. 182
Is Disorder Increasing? ................................. 184
Are Educators' Hands Tied? ............................ 185
Should We Establish Policies to Remove Troublemakers
from Schools? ........................................... 187
Ordinary Controls ..................................... 192
Holding Schools Accountable for Safe Environments ........ 193
School System Self-Monitoring ......................... 194
Monitoring Imposed by the Courts ...................... 196
Broadening the Scope of Educational Assessment ............ 197
Will Creating More Orderly Schools Cost Money? .......... 198
Appendix A: Student and Teacher Questionnaires ............. 201
Appendix B: Item Content of the Scales ...................... 227
References ................................................ 231
Author Index 243
Subject Index 247