School Structures, Teachers Attitudes and Behaviors, and Student Deviance

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Crime, Deviance, and Education

Abstract

This paper addresses how the organizational structure of schools affects teachers and students. This paper has two goals. First, I determine how coupling (i.e., the linkages between principals and teachers) affects teachers’ bonds (attachment, involvement, commitment, belief) to their school. Second, I examine how the organizational structure affects student deviance and disorganization at the school level. I rely on a theoretical framework of neo-institutionalism and coupling, but I supplement this foundation with a perspective on organizational deviance and social control theory. By infusing these perspectives with more traditional theories of deviance and disorganization I can better explain the social processes within schools. I analyze the relationship between couplings, teachers’ social bonds, and student deviance, at the school level. Using data from SASS, I combine multiple waves of data to understand how the organization of the school affects teachers’ occupational bonds and student deviance. The SASS dataset is a repeated cross-section of schools, but many schools are sampled more than once over the course of multiple waves of data. I take advantage of this by using fixed effects regression analyses for those schools. Findings reveal a number of insights into the relationship between a school’s organizational structure and school-wide deviance. Tight coupling is positively associated with school-wide deviance. Next, I wanted to understand how the school’s couplings directly affect teachers. Overall, the findings show a negative relationship between a tightly coupled school and teacher’s occupational social bonds. As principals and teachers become more closely linked, teachers report lower degrees of occupational bonds. Finally, as teachers’ occupational social bonds strengthen, deviant behavior in the school decreases. Comprehensive models show that teachers’ social bonds may mediate the relationship between tight micro-level coupling and student deviance, although tight coupling is still a strong predictor of school-level student deviance.

Author

• Maria T. Paino, Oakland University