Rising School Disruption: A False Alarm?

Abstract

Judging by these four books, contemporary research on school disruptions treats them as a variety of youth crime. The focus of all the books is on disruptive teenagers rather than on the institutional setting in which they disrupt. This is true even though each of them examines relations between youth and officials and each recognizes that school organizations have important causal relationships to disruptiveness. There is little talk of the psychology of teachers or administrators, however, or of the broader social agenda schools address. Consequently, even in Kelly's explicitly organizational approach to delinquency one has the sense that the "system" is in place and unchanging. Given this, the theory of disruption becomes a theory of how youthful subcultures develop in opposition to official society or of how that official society labels children deviant. Disruptiveness becomes delinquency. This conception differs sharply from those theories of school disruption which are grounded in theories of society. We need not turn only to grand theorists like Parsons (1959) for such macrosociological theories. Pragmatic analysts like Ensign (1921), Counts (1932), Waller (1932), and McCarthy (1972) all see disruptiveness in schools as a direct outcome of social conditions. Schools are a basic vehicle for