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The Children of Hobbes: Education,Family Structure and the Problem ofSocial OrderCarl L. Bankston III a & C. Eddie Palmer aa University of Southwestern Louisiana , USAPublished online: 19 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Carl L. Bankston III & C. Eddie Palmer (1998) The Children of Hobbes:Education, Family Structure and the Problem of Social Order, Sociological Focus, 31:3, 265-281, DOI:10.1080/00380237.1998.10571106
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THE CHILDREN OF HOBBES: EDUCATION, FAMILY STRUCTURE
AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL ORDER*
CARL L. BANKSTON HI SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS C. EDDIE PALMER Vol. 31 No. 3 University of Southwestern Louisiana August 1998
This article suggests that the problem of social order remains a basic theoretical and practical issue for sociologists. It maintains that Dennis Wrong's discussion of this problem can help us conceptualize degrees of social order or disorder as emerging from patterns of social interactions. Given the increasing prevalence of single-parent families as an American social pattern, the article investigates the possibility that family structure may influence school outcomes by producing varying levels of social order in schools. Specifically, it looks at whether concentrations of students from single-parent families may lead to conflictual environments that can influence the school performance of all students, regardless of individual family backgrounds.
INTRODUCTION
ΜΓ arsons and Shils described the problem of social order as "one of the very first functional imperatives of social systems" (1951, p. 180). This problem is not only a philosophical issue, as Roidt (1995) has claimed; it is also a practical matter since the order or disorder of a social system can affect the lives of its members.
Dennis Wrong's The Problem of Order (1994) offers an intriguing investigation of the forces that hold social groups together. In probing the nature of social order, Wrong points out that this term has two closely related but distinct meanings. It can refer to regularity or rule in human social interactions, and it can refer to patterns of cooperation among actors. He argues that people develop regularities as norms, roles and institutions in the course of recurrent interactions. In this sense, social order tends to "take care of itself," since the lives of human beings largely consist of interactions with others. These interactions, though, may differ greatly in character, since they may be products of a variety of motivations.
Thinking about motivations, in Wrong's discussion, introduces the Hobbesian order problem, the problem of conflict versus cooperation. This is not an absolute choice, as suggested by Hobbes' (1968) unfortunate and misleading description of the natural human state as a "war of all against all." Humans in a state of total conflict could exist no longer than the time it would take parents to murder their children.1
Perfect cooperation, at the other extreme, seems to be a social state that exists only in
.Please direct all correspondence to Carl L. Bankston III, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, P.O. Box 40198, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504-0198, e-mail: [email protected].
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the imagination. In response to classic functionalism's "oversodalized" conception of cooperative order as the product of norms imposed on individuals from an external society, Wrong argues that human beings produce particular Mendings of conflict and cooperation from expectations developed in the course of their dealings with one another (this, also, is one of the themes of Wrong's well-known 1961 essay).
One of the virtues of Wrong's conceptualization of social order is that it offers a means of describing in what way social patterns are sui generis. They emerge from shared expectations created by interactions and, as collective regularities, become environments within which individuals live. A second virtue lies in its recognition that these regularities may vary greatly in the amount of conflict or cooperation they yield. Thus, the potential of any given social pattern for creating conflictual or cooperative environments is a matter of both theoretical and practical concern.
Among the most notable developments in modern American social patterns has been the increasing prevalence of single-parent families. Bumpass and Martin (1989) predicted that two-thirds of all first marriages would end in divorce, and custody of children is overwhelmingly granted to women. The proportion of unmarried mothers in the United States has been rising since the early 1950s, and by the mid-1990s nearly one-third of all births in the U.S. were to single mothers. According to Bumpass (1990), about half of all American children will spend some time in a single-parent family, and the majority of these children will remain in mother-only families until they become adults.
The large number of children from single-parent families means that children are also more likely than they were in the past to find themselves in social environments in which other children from single-parent families predominate. One might argue, then, that single-parent family structure is increasingly exercising a contextual influence, as well as an individual influence. This means that studying the effects of this increasingly common family structure on children is not simply a matter of looking at how individual children are influenced by their own families; it can also be seen as a matter of considering what level of conflict exists in the social order created by interactions among children from one-parent families. Since school is one of the primary locations of the society of modern children, we need to look at what kind of school social environment is created by the prevalence of children from single-parent families. Utilizing the second meaning of social order suggested by Wrong, order as cooperation and relative absence of conflict, we can think of this as investigating the relationship between family structure and disorder (presence of conflict and disruption) in the school environment.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Researchers have generally found that students from single-parent families tend to show weaker levels of school performance than students from other family types (Thompson, Alexander and Entwhistle 1988; Astone and McLanahan 1991; Sandefur, McLanahan and Wojtkiewicz 1992; Featherstone, Cundick and Jensen 1993; Hong Li and Wojtkiewicz 1993; Wojtkiewicz 1993). Children from single-parent families have also been found to be more likely than other children to have psychological problems, to commit anti-social acts, to become addicted to drugs and alcohol and to display aggression and other forms of behavior likely to create problems in the classroom
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(Dornbusch et al. 1985; McLanahan and Booth 1989; Featherstone, Cundick and Jensen 1993; Pearson, Ialongo and Hunter 1994; Vaden-Kiernan, Ialongo and Kellam 1995).
The negative relationship between single-parent families and scholastic performance has been attributed to the weak economic position of many single mothers, who make up the overwhelming majority of single parents (Herzog and Sudia 1973; Blechman 1982; McLanahan 1985; Acock and Kiecolt 1989; Takeuchi, Williams and Adair 1991). Nevertheless, some previous research suggests that family structure can have a direct effect, independent of socioeconomic status, on school performance and on behavior and attitudes relevant to school performance (Sandefur, McLanahan and Wojtkievicz 1992; Hong Li and Wojtkiewicz 1993; Wojtkiewicz 1993; Bankston and Caldas, forthcoming). Mulkey, Crain and Harrington (1992) found that depressed income could not explain the lower scholastic performance of children from mother-only families, but that taking into account the behavioral problems of children from these families completely explained the lower performance.
Precisely why children from one-parent families should display greater behavioral problems than other children is a question of family dynamics, and it lies beyond the scope of the present work. It is possible that since two-parent families are the normative standard in America, a process of labeling or self-labeling as "deviant," rather than any inherent defect in a one-parent family structure, may account for the problems of single-parent children. Regardless of the source of the problems, though, when we concentrate children with behavioral difficulties, we can expect a disruptive social environment.
If the behavioral explanation is correct, then it is fairly easy to see how a school made up predominantly of children from single-parent families can create an environment that will tend to lower the academic performance of all students in a school. Associating with schoolmates who have negative attitudes toward school and who engage in problematic behavior can affect the attitudes and behavior of adolescents. Research findings support the view that social environments emerge from sets of social ties and that these environments, in turn, shape the behavior and attitudes of people in social groups. According to Bott (1955), social contacts are important determinants of attitudes toward conjugal roles by married people. Ell (1984) found that the social networks that surround an individual exercise a strong influence on health behavior and personal well-being, and Schilit (1984) found that alcohol consumption is greatly affected by social contacts. Feld (1982) provided evidence of a general homophily of social sets, and Feld (1981) also argued that similarity among associates exists because of the influences of associates on one another, as well as because of the tendency of similar individuals to be drawn to the same activities and situations. Kilburn has found that knowledge of an individual's network ties can, in some instances, predict attitudes and behavior "even better than knowledge of a person's own characteristics'' (1993, p. 1).
Given the age-graded institutionalization of adolescents in contemporary society, the peer group network in school has become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, influences on adolescent behavior and attitudes (Coleman 1961), making peer group association at school a critical matter. In the influential report Equality of Educational Opportunity, Coleman and associates (1966) found that the academic achievement of American students was least affected by material resources such as
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curriculum and facilities, somewhat affected by teacher quality but affected most by backgrounds of fellow students. Others, since Coleman, have also found that the composition of the school population is generally more important than school policies, methods or resources as a determinant of achievement (Neisser 1986; Seiden 1990; Caldas 1993; Bankston and Caldas 1996; Bankston and Caldas 1997).
If family structures influence education by providing the backgrounds that create school social environments, this means that we need to consider family structure as a school-level characteristic. Thus, the present study will attempt to move beyond the level of the effects of individual family structure on individual students. It will examine whether the predominance of single-parent family structure may create an environment of social disorganization that can have negative effects on all students.
Using data from a survey of teachers in Lafayette, Louisiana, we will look first at teachers' perceptions of school discipline problems as a form of social disorganization, and how teachers believe that this type of social disorganization affects the performance of students. Next, we will consider the extent to which social disorganization, defined as the extent of violence and discipline problems in schools, may be attributed to teacher and school characteristics, to the reported socioeconomic characteristics of students and to the reported prevalence of students from single-parent families.
DATA AND METHODS
This study draws on two sources of data. First, in order to establish that there is evidence for considering prevailing family structure as a determinant of school outcomes, we utilize information from Louisiana's Graduation Exit Examination (GEE). All public high school students in Louisiana must take and pass all five subject components of the GEE as a prerequisite to being awarded a public high school diploma. The exam is criterion-referenced: The test items are tied to the official Louisiana curriculum as outlined by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The first three components of the GEE — Math, English Language Arts and Written Composition — are first taken when the students are tenth graders. The last two components — Science and Social Studies — are taken when the students are eleventh graders. The exam was first administered to all tenth graders in April of 1989. Demographic information was collected from only those tenth graders testing for the first time in April 1989 and April 1990. The collection of much of this information was discontinued after 1990. We therefore decided to use the most recent year and grade for which the student demographic data existed: all tenth graders tested in 1990 (N = 32,868).
We use the GEE data, first, to look at how students from two-couple families and single-parent families differ in average scores. We also include information on average test scores among low-income and non-low income students, since differences may be due to the fact that single-parent families generally have lower incomes. Next, we divide the schools into those with less than one-third of their students from single-parent families, those with one-third to two-thirds from one-parent families and those with over two-thirds of their students from single-parent families. We use these three
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categories because they enable us to look at outcomes among children in schools in which one-parent families are rare, in schools in which one-parent families are common and in schools in which one-parent families are in the overwhelming majority. By looking at the average scores of students from both types of family structure and at the average scores of students from low-income families and non-low income students within each category of schools, we should be able to determine whether family structure does have a demonstrable school-level association with academic outcomes. While we have no information on how long these schools have had these proportions of family structure, this should not present a problem. Public school populations are based on geographic areas and therefore tend to be fairly stable in their demographic characteristics.
Dividing schools into three categories and looking at average scores may give a clear and readily comprehensible picture of the difference made by family structure. However, we are not suggesting that there is a quantum difference between outcomes of students in schools with less than one-third or more than one-third or more than two-thirds of a family type. Instead, we are suggesting that the relationship between family structure and performance is more or less linear: The more children are surrounded by children from one-parent families, the lower the children's performance will be. Therefore, we employ regression analyses with the same GEE data. This has three purposes: First, by looking at standardized regression coefficients, this should enable us to compare family structure with other predictors of school performance. Second, by looking at a regression analysis conducted at the school level (regressing average school performance on percentages of students with various characteristics) and at a regression analysis at the individual level, we can make some judgments about whether academic outcomes are primarily associated with the family backgrounds of individual students or with the family structure composition of schools. Third, we can compare these regression results with those obtained from teacher reports to judge the extent to which teacher reports mirror objective situations. The regression analyses also have the added benefit of providing us with a test of the statistical significance of family structure.
In these regression analyses we break family structure down into three dichotomous variables: coming from a mother-only family, coming from a father-only family and coming from a two-parent family with one non-working parent. We include this final category because we will later look at parental involvement, and having non-working parents available for volunteerism may be relevant. The two-working-parent family is treated as a reference category. We use two measures of socioeconomic status: whether a student is classified as low-income by the federal free and reduced lunch program and a composite variable created from students' responses to questions regarding mother's occupation, father's occupation, mother's highest level of education and father's highest level of education. We used a final dichotomous variable to indicate race (white = 0, black = 1). For the school-level regression analysis, we computed percentages for each school of the dichotomous variables and the mathematical mean of parents' composite occupational and educational status in each school. Since all three of the test areas are highly correlated (all three had bivariate correlations in excess of .80), for the sake of economy we employ language scores alone as our dependent variable.
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If the family structures that prevail in schools are associated with scholastic results, we face the problem of explaining this association. For this purpose, we draw on a survey of teachers within a single parish (county) in Louisiana, which we administered during the summer of 1996 when we mailed questionnaires to the 1432 public school teachers in the parish. We received 561 responses by return mail, a response rate of 38 percent, which is a good response rate for a mail survey. Since this response rate was still low enough to raise some question of response bias, however, we compared the demographic characteristics of our respondents, given in the survey, to demographic characteristics of teachers in the parish in official reports of the Louisiana Department of Education (Bankston and Palmer 1997). The characteristics of our respondents closely matched those of the official reports, so there seems to be no systematic bias as a consequence of non-response. The survey gave teacher reports of job satisfaction, student backgrounds in their respective schools, perceived major problems for their schools and other issues.
We use this survey data, first, to examine teachers' estimations of how seriously schools are affected by social disorder. Next, we create a measure of school social disorder by using factor analysis to generate factor scores from two highly correlated (r = .546, factor loadings = .879)2 survey items regarding the frequency of discipline problems and the frequency of violence in each teacher's school. The former item asked, "How frequent are discipline problems in your school?" Possible answers were "we never have such problems," "we seldom have," "we occasionally have," "we frequently have" and "discipline is a constant problem." The latter item asked, T o what extent does discipline pose a problem in your school?" Possible answers were "no problem," "on occasions students may endanger others," "students frequently endanger others" and "students are never safe."
We then selected a number of theoretically meaningful possible determinants of teacher perceptions of school social disorder. We included indicators of the teachers' own backgrounds, experience and school situations, since these may affect their perceptions. We also included teachers' reports of the residential and socioeconomic backgrounds of students, the family situations prevailing among their students and levels of parental involvement in schools. In this way, we can use the reports of the adults most immediately involved in schools (the teachers) to examine whether social disorder in schools appears to be related primarily to the socioeconomic situations of their pupils or to school-level family circumstances. By including a measure of parental involvement we can consider to what extent the suspected effects of family structure on social order may be the consequence of a lack of parental participation in education. If disruption in the schools is a state that emerges from a concentration of single-parent families, it may be that this disruption results from gaps between home and school.
RESULTS
Table 1 presents the objective evidence for a link between school outcomes and the predominance of single-parent families in schools. The first row gives average percent correct answers on the language arts, mathematics and written composition sections of Louisiana's 1990 Graduation Exit Examination for all students: On average students answered correctly 76.6 percent of language arts questions, 68.5
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percent of mathematics questions and 80.6 percent of written composition questions. Students in two-parent families, shown in the second row, scored higher than these overall averages by about 2.5 percentage points. Students in single-parent families, however, scored lower than the overall averages by about 10 percentage points and lower than the averages of students from married-couple families by about 12.6 percentage points. Since it is possible that the gap between students from different family types may be a product of economic inequality, we also show average percent correct answers among students who do not come from low-income families and among students who do come from low-income families. Income is associated with test scores. However, the gap between the two income categories is smaller than the gap between the two family structure categories, and low-income students tend to score higher than students from single-parent families on each part of the test.
TABLE 1
AVERAGE PERCENT CORRECT ANSWERS IN LANGUAGE ARTS, MATHEMATICS AND WRITTEN COMPOSITION ON LOUISIANA'S GRADUATION EXIT EXAMINATION, BY INDIVIDUAL FAMILY
STRUCTURE, POVERTY STATUS AND FAMILY STRUCTURE PREVAILING IN SCHOOLS
All Students 2-parent families 1-parent families Not low income Low income
Lees than 1/3 single-parent families in school
All students 2-parent families 1-parent families Not low income Low income
1/3 to 2/3 single-parent families in school
All students 2-parent families 1-parent families Not low income Low income
Over 2/3 single-parent families in school
All students 2-parent families 1-parent families Not low income Low income
Language A r t ·
76.59 78.99 67.26 80.26 71.56
78.08 79.84 69.55 80.64 72.67
71.49 75.37 62.92 73.24 66.17
64.41 67.80 61.73 68.86 59.65
Mathemat ics
68.47 71.23 57.71 72.70 62.77
70.52 72.59 60.50 73.26 64.00
61.20 65.23 52.31 62.48 55.21
54.58 58.00 51.87 65.52 58.89
Compet i t ion
80.58 83.15 70.58 83.93 76.55
81.99 83.91 72.69 84.23 77.44
75.68 79.95 66.26 78.50 71.08
70.15 73.20 67.74 72.97 62.15
Source: Louisiana Department of Education, Office of Accountability.
In the second five rows of Table 1, we look only at students in schools with under 33 percent pupils from single-parent homes. We note that students from both types of family structures and from both economic categories do slightly better in schools with
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low percentages of single-parent families than in schools in general. Moreover, the gap associated with family structure is still greater than the gap associated with economic status.
The third five rows look at students with over 33 percent pupils from single-parent homes to 66 percent students from single-parent homes. Regardless of the students' own family backgrounds, they show lower scores in this greater concentration of one-parent families. Students from two-parent families in schools with one-third to two-thirds pupils from one-parent families scored an average of 6.3 percentage points lower than students from two-parent families in schools with under one-third pupils from one-parent families. Students from one-parent families in the second category of schools scored lower than those in the first category by an average of 7.1 percentage points. Similarly, both low-income students and students who did not have low family incomes did worse in schools with greater percentages of single-parent families.
The fourth five rows consider average percent correct answers among students in schools with over two-thirds pupils from one-parent families. Students from single-parent families scored only slightly lower (an average of. 15 percentage points) in schools in which over 66 percent of their peers were from similar backgrounds. However, students from households with both parents scored markedly lower: 7.2 percentage points lower than those in schools made up of one-third to two-thirds pupils from one-parent families and 12.2 percentage points lower than those in the first school category. Again, students tend to score lower in schools with higher concentrations of one-parent peers regardless of their own economic situations.
We have here divided schools into thirds based on family composition for the sake of clarity of presentation. However, if we look at schools at different points on the family structure composition continuum, the trends still hold. For example, students in schools with fewer than 10 percent children from single-parent families have average scores of 80.49 in language arts, 74.87 in math and 84.23 in written composition. In schools in which over 90 percent of the students were from one-parent families, on the other hand, the average over-all scores were 56.11 in language arts, 52.01 in math and 62.27 in written composition. Apparently, scores increase steadily as the proportion of one-parent families approaches 0 percent and decrease steadily as this proportion approaches 100 percent.
It is possible, as we have mentioned, that the lower scores of students from single-parent families may be due to the fact that two-parent families are the normative standard in American society. Thus, children with only one parent may feel deviant as a result of their minority status, a status they might have even when they are in schools where they are in the majority. However, this would not account for the fact that children from both one-parent families and two-parent families show weaker academic performance as the percentage from one-parent families increases.
In sum, it appears that we can identify an emergent effect of concentrations of family structure. Test scores are related to individual family situations: Those with two parents have consistently higher average scores. Still, increases in the percentage of children from single-parent families are associated with lower scores for adolescents from both types of families, as well as for both low-income and non-low-income adolescents.
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This emergent effect is even clearer in Table 2, where we present results from two regression analyses: one at the school level and one at the individual level. Since we are using data from two different sources in this study, and relying on reports from teachers, these regressions on the state tests can provide us with a basis for objective comparison with teachers' reports, as well as give information on the nature of the relationship between school outcomes and family situations. At the school level, we examine the relationships of average school scores on the language part of the test with percentages of students from various types of family structure, the mean educational and occupational level of parents in each school, percentages of low-income students in each school and percentages of African American students in each school. At the individual level, we examine the relationship between individual students' scores on the language part of the test, individual family structures, educational and occupational background and the race of each student.
TABLE 2
STANDARDIZED AND UNSTANDARDIZED COEFFICIENTS ON PARENTHESES) OP SELECTED SCHOOL-LEVEL PREDICTORS OF AVERAGE PERCENT CORRECT
ANSWERS ON THE LANGUAGE SECTION OF THE GRADUATION EXIT EXAMINATION AND OF SELECTED INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL PREDICTORS OF PERCENT CORRECT
ANSWERS ON THE LANGAUGE SECTION
School-Level Analysis Individual-Level Analysis
Percent single female-headed families
Percent single male-headed families
Percent 2-parent families, non-working parent
Percent low-income
Mean parental education A occupation
Percent black
Constant
Adjusted Ä2
N
- .558·· (-25.312)
-.012 (-3.912)
.009 (.659)
.031 (.812)
.174· · (1.297)
- .272·· (-5.651)
(70.493**)
.630
344
Single female-headed family
Single male-headed family
2-parent family, non-working parent
Low-income
Parental education & occupation
Black
-.093** (-3.883)
-.023** (-2.096)
-.013* (-.436)
-.073** (-2.234)
.157** (.890)
-.245** (-7.216)
(72.544**)
.143
32868
*p<.05;**p<.01.
Although we should exercise some caution in making comparisons across levels of analysis, the relative importance of the variables, as indicated by the standardized regression coefficients, provides us with an intriguing finding. The percentage of students from mother-only families (the most common type of single-parent family) is by far the single strongest predictor of a school's average score. At the individual level,
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however, while most of the predictors show associations to school performance that are very similar to those in the school-level analysis, family background has only a modest relationship to scores. Why should we find this dramatic difference between levels of analysis? We suggest that the most reasonable interpretation would be that the influence of family structure is not primarily a matter of an individual's own family background. Rather, it is a matter of the social context of the school; it is an emergent effect.
The critical question is why family structure might have this emergent effect on etudent performance. As we have suggested in our discussion of the theoretical background, one possible answer is that concentrating students from single-parent families produces a Hobbesian crisis, a state of social disorder. To investigate this possibility, we turn now to a richer source of data, the survey of teachers from one parish (county) in the state that supplied our objective measures of academic outcomes.
Table 3 gives teachers' responses to the open-ended question, "What do you see as the greatest problem facing our schools?" Since open-ended questions leave respondents the freedom to express their own varying views, instead of choosing among the preconceptions of surveyors, we normally expect substantial variation in answers. Still, we see extensive agreement among these teachers on this issue. A majority (52 percent) agreed that the greatest school problem is discipline or disruptive student behavior. Readers should note that this includes those who gave no answer, fully 57 percent of those who identified a greatest problem said that it was discipline.
TABLES
TEACHER REPORTS OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM FACED BY CONTEMPORARY SCHOOLS
Discipline/student behavior (%) 292 (52.0) Parental inaction or incompetence Overcrowding, inadequate staffing Inadequate curriculum Teacher pay Mainetreaming of special education/504 students Excessive standardization or uniformity in teaching Too much politics or bureaucracy Bad teaching Paperwork or burnout Others No answer
We have seen, first, that students in schools with high concentrations of single-parent families do worse than those in schools with low concentrations. Second, we have seen that teachers, in responses to an open-ended question, overwhelmingly identified a Hobbesian state of social disorder as the single greatest problem facing contemporary schools. We are left with the task of establishing a connection between these two points, of providing evidence that single-parent families affect school outcomes by producing a school environment of social disorder.
Table 4 shows zero-order correlations among the variables that we use to examine the link between the social environment of schools and social disorder. Since
55 34 21 15 14 12
9 5 5
48 51
(9.8) (6.1) (3.7) (2.7) (2.5) (2.1) (1.6) (0.9) (0.9) (8.6) (9.1)
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THE CHILDREN OF HOBBES 275
we are looking at the reports of teachers, we think it important to include some teacher characteristics that may affect these reports. Education (measured by the highest degree obtained), race (0 for blacks, 1 for whites) and sex (0 for males, 1 for females) show no significant zero-order correlation with reports of social disorder. Years taught (measured by years of experience) is not significantly related to social disorder, but it is, understandably, associated with teacher level of education. Grade taught (with three levels: elementary school, junior or middle and high school) is significantly related to reports of social disorder. Teachers in higher grades are also more likely to have higher educational credentials, and they are more likely to be male. Interestingly, neither class size nor school size (measured by reported numbers of students) are significantly related to social disorder, as we would expect if discipline problems and violence were products of crowding.
These first variables indicate characteristics of the teachers and of the schools. The final variables indicate characteristics of the students themselves. Here we begin to see strong relationships with our measure of social disorder. Reported urban residence of students (most students live in rural or suburban areas = 0; most students live in urban areas = 1) shows a fairly strong positive relationship with reports of social disorder. Also, more urban school populations tend to have smaller class and school sizes, again suggesting that behavioral problems in city schools are not consequences of crowding. Teachers who report having students in comparatively high income brackets (most students are low income = 0; middle income or mixed = 1; high income = 2) report fewer problems of discipline and violence. Teachers with more experience are more likely to be in comparatively affluent schools, a probable consequence of the greater power of choice in teaching positions given to those with seniority. The more economically privileged a school, moreover, the smaller the school and its classes tend to be.
Our indicators of parental composition and parental involvement show the strongest statistical links with reported discipline problems and violence. The higher the reported proportion of students coming from single-parent families (almost all students live in two-parent families = 0; most live in two-parent families = 1; most live in single-parent families = 2; almost all live in single-parent families = 3), according to these educational professionals, the greater the level of social disorder in the schools. Again, teachers with more experience are less likely to be in more troubled teaching circumstances, since they are less likely to report having high percentages of pupils from one-parent families. Those with higher percentage of pupils from single-parent households do tend to teach smaller classes in smaller schools, once again making an over-crowding explanation implausible. Teachers who say that they have more students from families with only one parent are also more likely to teach students from an urban environment.
Finally, we see that the variable of teacher reports of parental involvement (parents not at all active in school affairs = 0; parents occasionally active = 1; parents usually active = 2; parents very active = 3) have the strongest zero-order correlation of all with reports of social disorder. The higher the grade taught, the less likely are teachers to see high levels of parental involvement. Parental involvement has no significant relationship with class size, school size or urban residence of students. However, it is quite strongly associated with prevailing family structure, which
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4
TA
BL
E4
ZER
O-O
RD
ER C
OR
REL
ATI
ON
S A
MO
NG
VA
RIA
BLES
IN T
HE
AN
ALY
SIS
Scho
ol d
isor
der
Edu
c. o
f te
ache
r R
ace
of t
each
er
Sex
of t
each
er
Yea
rs t
augh
t G
rade
tau
ght
Cla
ss s
ize
Scho
ol e
i ze
Edu
c. o
f te
ache
r
-.017
Urb
an r
esid
ence
of
stud
ents
In
com
e le
vel o
f st
uden
ts
Fam
ily s
itua
tion
of
stud
ents
Rac
e of
te
ache
r
-.013
-.0
13
Sex
of
teac
her
-.021
-.0
99*
-.078
Yea
rs
taug
ht
-.054
.3
50**
-.0
42
.042
Gra
de
taug
ht
.135
**
.092
* .0
74
-.244
**
-.018
Cla
ss
size
.026
-.0
87*
.022
-.1
14*
.030
.0
46
Scho
ol
ei ze
.057
.0
20
.023
-.2
43**
-.0
36
.599
**
.030
Urb
an
resi
denc
e of
88.
.221
**
.019
-.0
20
-.033
.0
48
-.085
-.
129·
· -.2
02**
Inco
me
leve
l of
as.
-.289
**
.055
.0
52
-.08
1 .1
02*
.035
.1
61**
.1
64**
-.1
34**
Fam
ily
situ
atio
n of
es.
.459
**
-.017
-.0
38
.134
**
-.112
**
-.050
-.2
03**
-.2
13**
.2
57**
-.5
93**
Lev
el o
f pa
rent
al
invo
lvem
ent
-.473
**
.021
.0
37
.055
.0
76
-.111
**
-.01
2 .0
21
-.05
0 -.6
24**
-.5
20**
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THE CHILDREN OF HOBBES 277
suggests the possibility that single-parent families are connected to high levels of social disorder because single parents are less involved in the schools.
Table 5 completes our analysis by using multivariate regression to examine predictors of school social disorder. Step 1 regresses our social disorder factor on teacher characteristics and school characteristics. These explain very little of the variance (Ä* = .024), and only grade taught shows a statistically significant coefficient. Step 2 introduces the economic and residential variables: the extent to which teachers reported that their students came from urban areas and the reported economic backgrounds of students. Both of these showed strong, significant associations with social disorder in the schools. The more urban the pupil composition of schools, the greater the reported level of discipline problems and violence. The more economically advantaged the pupil composition, the lower the reported level of these problems. The variables in Step 2 explain 16 percent of the total variance in reported school disorder.
TABLES
STANDARDIZED AND UNSTANDARDIZED COEFFICIENTS (IN PARENTHESES) OF PREDICTORS OF REPORTS OF SOCIAL DISORDER IN SCHOOLS
Education of teacher
Race of teacher
Sex of teacher
Years taught
Grade taught
Claee size
School size
Urban residence of students
Income level of students
Family situation of students
Level of parental involvement
Constant Ä 2
S t e p l
.010 (.012) -.028
(-.055) .025
(.068) -.038
(-.005) .179**
(.193) .029
(.003) -.055
(-.061)
-.351 .024
StepZ
.017 (.022) -.006
(-.012) .024
(.065) .006
(.001) .058*
(.151) .078
(.009) .048
(.054) .218**
(.277) -.282**
(-.326)
-.642* .155
Steps
.000 (.0001) -.005
(-.010) -.006
(-.016) .027
(.003) .121*
(.130) .100*
(.012) .078
(.088) .135**
(.173) -.032
(-.037) .457**
(.618)
-1.763** .275
Step 4
-.008 (-.009)
.003 (.006) .015
(.040) .028
(.003) .089
(.097) .063
(.008) .074
(.084) .149**
(.190) .077
(.089) .351*·
(.479) - .305· ·
(-.337) -1.079**
.337
*p<.05;**p<.01.
Step 3 brings in our indicator of the family structures prevailing in schools: the extent to which teachers reported that their students came from single-parent families. The prevailing family structure is strongly related to social disorder (beta = .457). The coefficient for the income level of students becomes statistically insignificant, suggesting that there tend to be greater-order problems in schools with large proportions of low-income students because these schools are likely to have large
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numbers of students from single-parent homes, not because students from single-parent homes tend to have low incomes. Further, the coefficient for urban residence decreases notably, indicating that part of the reason that urban schools have greater difficulties with discipline and violence is that urban students are more likely to come from households with only one parent.
Finally, Step 4 looks at the question of parental involvement in schools. Are schools with large single-parent student populations associated with relatively high levels of poor discipline and violence because these schools can draw on little parental involvement and support? Apparently, this is not the case. A lack of reported parental involvement is certainly strongly linked to social disorder. Moreover, since the standardized coefficient for family structure declines by the statistically significant amount of. 102 when the parental involvement variable is entered into the equation, it does appear that some part of the association of family structure with disorder may be attributed to low levels of parental school involvement by single parents. However, the family structure variable continues to show a relationship to the dependent variable that is the strongest in the model.
CONCLUSION
We can draw a number of conclusions from our findings: 1. A prevalence of students from one-parent families is associated with comparatively low academic achievement. This association exists apart from the family situations of those students and apart from the economic situations of individual students. 2. Social disorder, in the opinions of the professional educators that we surveyed, not only is an important academic issue, it is also the chief problem facing schools. 3. A prevalence of single-parent families is closely related to the extent of social disorder in schools. 4. Single-parent family structure shows a relationship to social disorder that is independent of the socioeconomic background of students. 5. Prevailing family structure is a more important predictor of social disorder than student socioeconomic background.
These conclusions strongly suggest an explanation of school performance that has important implications for the sociology of education, for sociology of the family and for theoretical approaches to the role of social institutions in shaping general patterns of social relations. From the perspective of the sociology of education, our results are consistent with the view that fellow students form a critical influence on the education of individual pupils. This is, however, not primarily a matter of the socioeconomic background of those fellow students but rather a matter of their familial situations. Schools, then, are not simply mechanisms for reproducing class inequalities. Young people bring their background experiences into schools where these experiences are combined to produce a new social entity that, for good or ill, affects all of its constituents.
From the perspective of sociology of the family, our results imply that it may not be justifiable to view changing forms of family simply as equally valid "alternatives." Applying the maxim de fructibus cognoscenti, we should take seriously the evidence that some household structures yield more desirable fruits than others. At the same time, it should be recognized that the effects of family structure appear to be matters of collections of family types, and not simply matters of individual household characteristics.
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From the perspective of general sociological theory, these results provide intriguing evidence of how social institutions work together to shape workable or unworkable social relations. The family as a social group is clearly related to the educational institution as a social group. This relationship does not, however, appear to be a mechanistic one in which students are socialized at home and then act out socialized roles on the school stage. Instead, families might be seen as providing cues that students draw upon in progressively socializing one another through continual interactions.
The patterns that these interactions take, moreover, may be conducive to varying degrees of order, of cooperative, goal-oriented social relations. The classical sociological topic of social order, then, is a critical one that demands renewed attention. The attempt to understand how degrees of order are produced does not necessarily involve overlooking questions of conflict, competition and unequal distribution. Those in social groups characterized by relatively well-ordered social relations may be seen as enjoying a competitive advantage over those in less well-ordered social groups, and this can affect the distribution of opportunities, power and resources.
This study, we believe, opens a number of avenues for investigation. Although we believe that these results are generalizable, they should be reproduced using data from other geographical areas. Further, alternative methodological approaches can supplement the teacher survey strategy used here. We think it is methodologically sound to use teacher reports of matters such as student family background and discipline problems, particularly since we use these to explain findings from achievement tests. Still, it may be advisable to replicate the study with actual records of discipline problems, socioeconomic status and family structure. Finally, we have here concerned ourselves with social order in a particular institution, the public school. There is a need, we think, for studies of the determinants and consequences of varying degrees of social order in other social environments and among other populations.
Carl L. Bankston III is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He is coauthor of Growing Up American: The Adaptation of Vietnamese Children to American Society (Russell Sage, 1998).
Dr. Charles Edward Palmer is Dean of Community Service and Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Dr. Palmer received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Virginia Tech in 1975, and holds certification from the Sociological Practice Association as a Clinical Sociologist. Dr. Palmer's current research areas are in the fields of community service and medical sociology
NOTES
1. An anonymous reviewer has made the astute point that Hobbes often identified the war of "all against all" with embattled families, rather than with individuals. This is true, but why would families be exempt from a state of total egoistic conflict? The same reviewer observes that Rousseau ([1755] 1984) makes virtually the same objection to the Hobbesian view of human nature that we are making, pointing out that infants would murderously assault their mothers' breasts if Hobbes were correct.
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2. Since there are only two variables in the factor analysis, the factor loadings are the same for frequency of discipline problems and frequency of violence.
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