Children and Neighborhood Context 1

Children and Neighborhood Context 1

CHILDREN AND

NEIGHBORHOOD CONTEXT

Neighborhood Effects and Education

Literature Review

Jackey Elinski, M.A.

Doctoral Student

Sociology Department

State University of New York at Buffalo

Peter St. Jean, Assistant

Michael Farrell, Professor

Sociology Department

State University of New York at Buffalo

Meg Brin, Child Welfare Administrative Director

Betsy Johnson, Children Welfare Trainer

Diane Porcelli, Child Welfare Trainer

Mike Rowe, Sr. Child Welfare Trainer

Jeannette Clementi, Child Welfare Trainer

Funding for this research project was provided by NYS Office of Children and Family Services, Contract year 2004: Project 1037122, Award: 31183; through the Center for Development of Human Services, College Relations Group, Research Foundation of SUNY, Buffalo State College.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………….p.3

II. Models of Neighborhood Effects………………………………………..….….…..p.4

III. Neighborhood Effects and Educational Attainment and Cognitive Skills.…....p.9

IV. Conclusion………………………...………………..………………………….….p.13

V. Additional Articles Dealing with Neighborhoods and Education………….…..p.14

I. Introduction

In the past several years there has been an increase in the interest in looking at how neighborhoods impact on children and adolescents. In particular, researchers have been interested in how poor neighborhoods play a part in shaping the life chances of the children and adolescents who live in them. Not only are social scientists concerned with the mechanisms by which neighborhoods influence children and adolescents, they are also interested in finding out exactly in what ways neighborhoods influence youths and what can be done to possibly mediate any “neighborhood effects.” Much of the literature on this topic credits Wilson’s 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged as being the catalyst for this new flurry of research about neighborhoods.

In this book Wilson attempts to explain the creation and expansion of the mostly African American underclass in American cities since the middle of the twentieth century. He argues that the extreme social isolation of the members of the underclass brought on by changes in the United States’ economy is primarily to blame for this. According to Wilson, the shift from an industrial economy to a service oriented economy saw most of the industrial manufacturing jobs disappear from American cities. These positions, which were generally well-paying jobs for unskilled workers, were mostly replaced with low wage service sector jobs and more skill intense jobs located out in the suburbs. As a result, many inner city residents lost their jobs and middle-class African Americans fled the inner cities in pursuit of the newly created suburban jobs.

Those left behind in the city cores were faced with very limited employment opportunities and little contact with middle-class America. Therefore, as joblessness became rampant among the urban poor, poverty and the social evils associated with it became concentrated in the inner cities thus creating an underclass that is so socially isolated from other segments of society that a vicious cycle of concentrated poverty is almost certain to continue.

Subsequent researchers studying neighborhoods have viewed the implications of Wilson’s argument about concentrated poverty as potentially affecting the life chances and developmental outcomes of the children and adolescents who grow up in such disadvantaged neighborhoods. While Wilson’s book may have ignited a flame, a 1990 analysis of the existent literature by Jencks and Mayer helped to create an explosion of interest in neighborhoods and their impact on children. In fact, so much research on this topic has been done recently that Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley (2002) contend that “the study of neighborhood effects, for better or worse, has become something of a cottage industry in the social sciences.”

II. Models of Neighborhood Effects

There are a number of theoretical frameworks used by social scientists to try to explain how neighborhoods impact the children who grow up in them. In the following section, the most prevalent models are briefly described. They include epidemic/contagion models, collective socialization models, models of competition, institutional models, and relative deprivation models.

Epidemic/Contagion Models

In their review of the neighborhood effects literature, Jencks and Mayer (1990) found that some researchers see the behaviors and problems in a neighborhood as being contagious. Their epidemic models imply that individual behavior is linked to the behavior of others in the neighborhood. When negative behaviors persist, these models predict that problem behavior will infiltrate the behaviors of the children and adolescents who reside in these neighborhoods and negative behavior will beget negative behavior.

According to Small and Newman (2001), epidemic models, as well as other socialization models, tend to view individuals as “relatively passive recipients of powerful socializing forces, suggesting that neighborhoods mold those who grow up in them into certain behavioral patterns” (p. 33). Therefore, according to epidemic models, children and adolescents can “catch” the negative behaviors of their neighborhood peers and they will then be socialized into behaving in similar negative ways.

So for example, these models would predict that in an area where delinquent behavior is prevalent, neighborhood children and adolescents may be more likely to engage in delinquent behaviors themselves. This is because they see these behaviors as the “norm” of their neighborhood.

Collective Socialization Models

Other researchers, according to Jencks and Mayer (1990), use collective socialization models to explain how neighborhoods influence residents. These predict that the level of social organization in a neighborhood influences children and adolescents. Baumer and South (2001) assert that these models emphasize “the impact of parents and other adults in the community as both family role models and as agents of social control” (p. 541).

According to this model, the higher the level of neighborhood social organization, the more positive the outcomes for the youth who live in the area. However, low neighborhood social organization, indicated by such symptoms as the absence of adult mentors, adult supervision, and the lack of adult daily routines that reflect “mainstream” lifestyles, impacts negatively on children and adolescents. According to Newman (1999) a lack of successful adult role models in a socially disorganized neighborhood leaves the children and adolescents of the neighborhood less likely to foresee themselves as successful adults. Therefore, these collective socialization models predict that neighborhood adults are instrumental in socializing children and adolescents into becoming successful adults.

So, for example, these models would predict that in a neighborhood where adult unemployment is chronic and pervasive, and where adults do not actively participate in the lives of the neighborhood youth, the children in these areas may be less likely themselves to grow into adulthood and be active members of the labor force. Furthermore, these models would predict that this would occur not only because of the economic disadvantages that these children grow up with but, also, because they have grown up in a neighborhood where the adults have not been role models with regard to work and career.

Models of Competition

Another theoretical framework that Jencks and Mayer (1990) identified and that continue to be in use with regard to studying neighborhood effects is the use of models of competition. These predict that neighbors must compete for community resources. This implies that the life chances of economically disadvantaged youths may be hurt by the presence of more affluent neighbors who are more readily able to compete for scarce neighborhood resources. Relatively less advantaged neighborhood youths, according to these models, will be left behind as those who are more successful in obtaining and utilizing community resources will be the ones who reap any benefits.

These models would predict, for example, that in a disadvantaged neighborhood with only a few resources to offer, the most disadvantaged children will be the least likely to benefit from the community’s scarce resources because others are better able to obtain and utilize them. For example, neighbors who can afford access to the internet or the daily newspaper may know of more opportunities in the neighborhood for their children than do those who must rely on other sources to seek out area resources for their children.

Neighborhood Institutional Models

Jencks and Mayer (1990) also noted that neighborhood institutional models have been in use. These focus on how adults from outside of the neighborhood treat and influence children through their work in neighborhood institutions such as schools, libraries, and the police force. They posit that adults who come into the neighborhood to work may have preconceived notions about poor children in poor neighborhoods and react to them accordingly. According to these models, the presence or absence of such adults may affect the children and adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

According to Small and Newman (2001), these institutional models “focus on how individual agency is limited by neighborhood environment,” while socialization models “explain how neighborhood environments socialize individuals” (p. 33).

Relative Deprivation Models

And lastly, Jencks and Mayer (1990) identified that social scientists have used relative deprivation models to explain how neighborhoods impact the children and adolescents who live in them. As with models of competition, these models too imply that the presence of affluent neighbors will hurt the life chances of economically disadvantaged youths. When poor children, as well as adults, judge that they have less or are failures compared to their affluent neighbors, this will adversely affect them. However, if their neighbors are on an equal socioeconomic playing field or are economically worse off then they are themselves, children, as well as adults, will judge themselves more favorably.

Much of the research on neighborhood effects that has been done recently use these theoretical models. And much of the current research is still preoccupied with finding out if and how outcomes are influenced by the neighborhood context in which children and adolescents grow up in. This is especially true when it comes to the areas of educational attainment, cognitive skills, crime, teenage sexual behavior, and eventual labor market success.

While all of these areas are important domains within the lives of youth, the following will specifically focus on neighborhoods and how they may influence the educational paths of the children and adolescents who reside in them. Therefore, the following will present an overview of the past and current academic research focusing on neighborhoods and their impact on educational attainment and cognitive skills of children and adolescents.

III. Neighborhood Effects and Educational Attainment and Cognitive Skills

In their review of the literature, Jencks and Mayer found that some of the earliest research on neighborhood effects looked at education. These early studies examined whether a high school’s mean socioeconomic status had an impact on students’ plans to attend college. However, different studies yielded different results. For example, after analyzing the existent literature, Jencks and Mayer concluded that students in higher socioeconomic status neighborhoods expected to complete more years of education than did students in other neighborhoods, even after their family characteristics were controlled for. However, they also found that a “high school’s social composition, in contrast, has very little effect on a student’s chances of finishing high school or attending college” suggesting that “neighborhood mix matters while school mix does not” (Jencks and Mayer 1990:137).

In addition, they also found that attending a racially mixed high socioeconomic status high school may be more beneficial to African American students. While attending these schools does not alter college plans for European American students, African American students appear to be more likely to plan to attend college than their counterparts in other high schools. In the end, however, according to Jencks and Mayer (1990), “teenagers who grow up in affluent neighborhoods end up with more schooling than teenagers from similar families who grow up in poorer neighborhoods” (p.174).

Similar results regarding school and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics have been echoed in more recent research. For example, Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) found support for collective socialization theories that suggest that the absence of affluent families in a neighborhood is more detrimental to child and adolescent development than is the presence of low-income families, which epidemic theories posit. Specifically, they found significant effects of affluent neighbors on adolescent school leaving that persist even after the socioeconomic characteristics of students’ families were controlled for. In addition, contrary to what Jencks and Mayer concluded, their results suggest that the benefit of affluent neighbors in regard to school leaving is restricted to European American students.

Other recent studies too, have yielded similar results. Duncan (1994), for example, found evidence that high neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics are positively associated with educational attainment levels for adolescents. Ensminger et al. (1996) found this to be true even when studying a group of adolescents that was predominantly African American. And Crane (1991) found that when the percentage of professional and managerial workers in a neighborhood falls below 5%, neighborhoods have a more significant negative influence on resident students’ school leaving. In addition, according to Rosenbaum and Harris (2001), after leaving Chicago’s public housing, mothers who moved to higher-income neighborhoods reported that their children were more likely to graduate from high school than were children in the neighborhoods that these mothers had recently moved from. All of these results suggest that theories of collective socialization may be on target. It seems that affluent neighbors have a positive impact on students’ educational attainment.

Once again, Jencks and Mayer found evidence of contradictory results when they looked at the studies of neighborhood effects on child and adolescent cognitive skills. They found that outcomes depended considerably on the ages and races of students. They reported, for example, that a high school’s mean socioeconomic status has little effect on the amount that European American students learn in high school. In contrast, it may have a significant impact on the amount that African American high school students learn. In addition, they concluded that the cognitive growth of both African American and European American elementary school students is influenced substantially by their school’s mean socioeconomic status.

More recently, researchers have looked at child and adolescent IQ scores and school achievement in relation to neighborhood context. Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) found that having affluent neighbors had significant effects on childhood IQ. This was true even after family-level differences were controlled for. In addition, Halpern-Felsher et al. (1997) and Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson (1994) found that neighborhood socioeconomic status is positively associated with high school students’ grade point averages, math scores, and basic skills. Furthermore, both of these studies found evidence to indicate that neighborhood effects in this area are stronger for boys than they are for girls.