Some cities are using these insights to build social capital and citizen participation within their public schools. In one of the earliest, most successful, and longest-running school reform initiatives, the Yale child psychiatrist James Comer has developed a model of effective linkage among schools, parents, and the community. Two of the guiding principles of a Comer school include “[c]oordination and cooperation among all adults concerned with the child’s best educational interests” and “active involvement of parents every step of the way.”20 Comer and his colleagues found that parental participation can improve school performance and family support for kids’ achievement—but only if parents are given real decision-making responsibility and are placed in positions suited to their knowledge and skills.21 Where these elements aren’t present, parents tend to become disillusioned and distrustful, undermining the community-based social capital so vital to public schools.
In the late 1980s Chicago launched a path-breaking education reform initiative whose cornerstone is parent participation in decision making. Although the reform plan did not work as well as hoped, evaluators still found that social capital within schools can make a difference. When there is a high level of trust among teachers, parents, and principals, these key players are more committed to the central tenets of school improvement. Teachers in high-trust settings feel loyal to the school, seek innovative approaches to learning, reach out to parents, and have a deep sense of responsibility for students’ development. Even after taking into account all the other factors that influence the odds of successful reform, trust remains a key ingredient.22
As these studies suggest, parental and community engagement are at the center of current efforts to improve schooling. Indeed, two of the more controversial reform approaches—the creation of charter schools and the provision of publicly financed vouchers for kids to attend private schools—may be viewed as attempts by parents to give their kids the benefits of the “communal orientation” that produces exceptional student behavior and performance. Critics of “choice” programs fear they will only exacerbate existing educational inequities. Supporters argue that putting schooling into the invisible hand of the free market will improve quality for everyone because schools will be forced to compete on outcomes. While it is too soon to tell which side is right, we do have evidence that if “choice” programs work, their success may turn less on the magic of the marketplace than on the magic of social capital. School reform initiatives that encourage kids to attend smaller, more communal schools may have the unintended result of increasing both student and parental involvement in clubs, classroom activities, governing bodies, and education lobbying groups.23 In this way, such education reform could be an engine of civic reengagement, although if only the most engaged parents removed their children to the new schools, thus also removing the “positive externalities” that their engagement produces for other kids, the net effect could be to exacerbate inequality.
Social capital at the neighborhood or community level clearly has an impact on child learning. But social capital within families also powerfully affects youth development.24 Families that enjoy close social bonds and parents who instill the value of reciprocity in their kids are more likely to “gain a greater degree of compliance and adherence to their values.”25 Even holding constant many other things that affect educational achievement, including parents’ education and income, race, family size, region, and gender, children whose parents are closely involved with their kids and their kids’ schools are much less likely to drop out of high school than children who lack these forms of social capital. Kids of parents who attend programs at their kids’ school, help with homework, and monitor their kids’ behavior outside school are likely to have higher grade-point averages, to be more engaged in the classroom, and to shun drugs and delinquent activity.26 One long-term study of low-income teen mothers in Baltimore found that in those families where high levels of emotional support existed between a mom and her child, and where the mom had a strong support network, the child was dramatically more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college, and have a steady job. In other words, “at risk” children can succeed in life if their mothers have enough social capital.27
The beneficial effects of social capital are not limited to deprived communities or to primary and secondary education. Indeed, precisely what many high-achieving suburban school districts have in abundance is social capital, which is educationally more important even than financial capital. Conversely, where social connectedness is lacking, schools work less well, no matter how affluent the community. Moreover, social capital continues to have powerful effects on education during the college years. Extracurricular activities and involvement in peer social networks are powerful predictors of college dropout rates and college success, even holding constant precollegiate factors, including aspirations.28 In other words, at Harvard as well as in Harlem, social connectedness boosts educational attainment. One of the areas in which America’s diminished stock of social capital is likely to have the most damaging consequences is the quality of education (both in school and outside) that our children receive.
CHAPTER 18
Safe and Productive Neighborhoods
AS WE SAW in the previous chapter, the healthy development of kids depends in large part on the social context in which they come of age. Neighborhoods with high levels of social capital tend to be good places to raise children. In high-social-capital areas public spaces are cleaner, people are friendlier, and the streets are safer. How do trust, social networks, and citizen engagement translate into nice, safe neighborhoods?
Scholars, especially criminologists, have puzzled over these questions for years. Most of the early work was concerned with why some neighborhoods seemed to have so much more vandalism, graffiti, street crime, and gang scuffles than did others. These neighborhood characteristics persisted over many decades, despite population turnover. Beginning in the 1920s, some of the nation’s leading criminologists began to develop “ecological” theories of crime and juvenile deliquency. The theories varied in their particulars but generally focused on “social disorganization” as the engine of bad behavior. Such disorganization marked many urban communities where population turnover was high, neighbors anonymous, ethnic groups uneasily mixed, local organizations rare, and disadvantaged youths trapped in “subcultures” cut off from the adult world.
Noted criminologist Robert J. Sampson, summarizing many empirical studies, concludes that even controlling for poverty and other factors that might encourage criminal behavior, “communities characterized by (a) anonymity and sparse acquaintanceship networks among residents, (b) unsupervised teenage peer groups and attenuated control of public space, and (c) a weak organizational base and low social participation in local activities face an increased risk of crime and violence.” For example, comparing neighborhoods matched on other social and economic factors, national surveys show that living in a neighborhood of high mobility doubles your risk of becoming a victim of crime, compared to living in a more stable neighborhood. However, Sampson adds, the “social disorganization” school did not adequately explain how and why these neighborhood characteristics seemed to produce increased levels of crime.1
Jane Jacobs, the great scholar of urban life, offered an answer in her now classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs noted that “social capital”—a term of which she is one of the inventors—is what most differentiated safe and organized cities from unsafe and disorganized ones. In a scathing indictment of twentieth-century urban planning and renewal efforts, she argued that where cities are configured to maximize informal contact among neighbors, the streets are safer, children are better taken care of, and people are happier with their surroundings. To Jacobs, regular contact with the local grocer, the families on the front stoop, and the priest walking the blocks of his parish, as well as the presence of street fairs and conveniently traversed parks, developed a sense of continuity and responsibility in local
residents. “The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal and neighborhood need.”2
In the decades since these influential studies, many other scholars across a range of disciplines have elaborated the basic insights. The conclusions of this work are straightforward and just as Jacobs and the early criminologists would have predicted: Higher levels of social capital, all else being equal, translate into lower levels of crime.
A state-level analysis of homicide statistics is illustrative. (Murder rates are generally accepted as the most reliable index of the incidence of crime, the least susceptible to distortion from one jurisdiction to another.) States with more social capital have proportionately fewer murders. (See figure 84.) This inverse relationship is astonishingly strong—as close to perfect as one might find between any two social phenomena.3 Of course, there are many reasons why states high in social capital might happen to have low homicide rates. States rich in social capital, for example, tend to be wealthier, better educated, less urban, and more egalitarian in their distribution of income. But further analysis, which takes account of these and other factors, finds that the relationship between social capital and safe streets is real. In fact, social capital is about as important as poverty, urbanism, and racial composition as a determinant of homicide prevalence. Surprisingly, social capital is more important than a state’s education level, rate of single-parent households, and income inequality
Figure 84: Violent Crime Is Rarer in High-Social-Capital States
in predicting the number of murders per capita during the 1980–95 period. Intriguingly, this correlation remains strong when we control for statewide levels of fear about crime; that unexpected fact implies that the causal arrow runs, at least in part, from social capital to crime.4
Our story here intersects with an age-old historical puzzle—why is the South different? Historians have known for more than a century that lethal violence is much more common in the states of the former Confederacy than in the rest of the country. In fact, murder rates have been much higher in the South since well before the Civil War, and this difference continued more or less undiluted throughout the twentieth century. During the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the murder rate in the South was roughly twice that in the North. Moreover, the same regional distinction is found both among whites and among blacks. Many interpretations have been offered—psychological, cultural, societal, economic, even racial. However, the regional difference persists even when we hold constant race, age, economic inequality, urbanization, education, poverty, and other established predictors of murder rates. Something about “southernness” seems to be associated with high potential for lethal violence.
Some observers have blamed “a southern world view that defines the social, political, and physical environment as hostile … the symbiosis of profuse hospitality and intense hostility toward strangers.” Others suggest that the key to the puzzle is a distinctive southern “culture of honor,” manifest in the nineteenth-century tradition of dueling and traceable perhaps to eighteenth-century immigration patterns.5 Figure 84 suggests instead that social capital (or, rather, its absence) may be the missing link. Once differences in social capital are taken into account, the hoary regional difference vanishes. The South is no more violent than you would expect it to be, given its well-established social-capital deficit. This explanation accounts not only for the gross difference between North and South, but also for differences within the North and South.6 In other words, lethal violence is endemic wherever social capital is deficient.
To probe further the link between social capital and violence, we can take advantage of a charming question posed in the DDB Needham Life Style surveys over the last several decades. “Do you agree or disagree with the following sentence?” respondents were asked: “I’d do better than average in a fist fight.” On average, 38 percent of all Americans pick the pugnacious alternative. (Men are twice as likely to agree as women, 53 percent to 26 percent, but women have slowly narrowed the truculence gap, rising steadily from 20–25 percent agreement in the late 1970s to 30 percent in the late 1990s.) More to the point, there turn out to be significant differences from state to state. At the top of the scale, nearly half of the residents of Louisiana, West Virginia, and New Mexico agree with that sentence, as compared with less than a third of residents in South Dakota, Maine, Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Nebraska. As figure 85 shows, pugnacity is strongly correlated with low social capital, perhaps because in the absence of the emollient effects of community connectedness and social trust a self-help system of enforcing social order has emerged. In any event, citizens in states characterized by low levels of social capital are readier for a fight (perhaps because they need to be), and they are predisposed to mayhem.7
These state differences dovetail nicely with a body of research that has examined crime and delinquency rates at the local or even census-tract level. Besides looking at criminal misbehavior, these studies have used sophisticated statistical techniques to explore “neighborhood effects” on other problems that beset American cities—everything from child abuse, to dropout rates, to teen pregnancy, to drug use.8 The unifying premise of these studies is that a person’s behavior depends not only on his own characteristics, but also on the characteristics of those around him—his neighbors, school peers, and so forth.
These studies have been at the center of a rigorous debate, mostly over whether they have actually proven anything besides the tendency of likeminded
Figure 85: States High in Social Capital Are Less Pugnacious
people to congregate in the same places. This criticism is as follows: Sure, teenage dropouts tend to be found in the same neighborhoods, but it’s not because these kids are influencing each other to leave school. Rather, the clustering appears because families with similar values or parenting practices feel more comfortable living near one another. Critics rightly note that the most sophisticated statistical analysis has trouble identifying the invisible forces that might cause “birds of a feather” to flock together. What is more, even if neighborhood effects do exist, they might be trivial compared to “family effects” such as parental nurturing and guidance.9
I take these critiques seriously. Nonetheless, the sheer number and diversity of studies that have found neighborhood effects on crime have persuaded me that these effects are real. Although the magnitude of the neighborhood influence varies, scholars have been able to demonstrate that, over and above their individual predisposition to engage in risky behaviors, kids who live amid other risk-taking kids are more likely to fall into bad patterns. In Boston, for example, kids whose neighborhood peers use drugs, commit crimes, and befriend gang members are themselves substantially more likely to do so as well, regardless of their initial proclivities. In Chicago young black men who live in neighborhoods with lots of white-collar professionals are more than three times as likely to graduate from high school than are comparable young men who live in neighborhoods with less educated residents.10 These and dozens more studies suggest that people are profoundly motivated not merely by their own choices and circumstances, but also by the choices and circumstances of their neighbors. My fate depends on not only whether I study, stay off drugs, go to church, but also on whether my neighbors do these things.
Although the methods of analysis have not always allowed researchers to pinpoint how neighborhood effects work, there have been recent scholarly efforts to understand those processes better.11 Researchers have come to believe that social capital—or lack of it—is a big piece of the puzzle. On one hand, the presence of social capital—individuals connected to one another through trusting networks and common values—allows for the enforcement of positive standards for youths and offers them access to mentors, role models, educational sponsors, a
nd job contacts outside the neighborhood.12 Social networks may also provide emotional and financial support for individuals and supply political leverage and volunteers for community institutions.13 By contrast, the absence of positive norms, community associations, and informal adult friendship and kin networks leaves kids to their own devices. It is in such settings that youths are most likely to act on shortsighted or self-destructive impulses.
It is in such settings too that youths are most prone to create their own social capital in the form of gangs or neighborhood “crews.” As sociologist Robert Sampson states: “Lack of social capital is one of the primary features of socially disorganized communities.”14 The best evidence available on changing levels of neighborhood connectedness suggests that most Americans are less embedded in their neighborhood than they were a generation ago.15 This is due in part to the fact that women—long the stalwart neighborhood builders—are now much more likely to be away at work during the day than their mothers were. And professional men, who once lent their skills to neighborhood associations, are spending longer hours on the job than their fathers did. As we noted in section II, people are less likely today to socialize with neighbors and to work on community projects.
Indeed, the decline in neighborhood social capital—community monitoring, socializing, mentoring, and organizing—is one important feature of the inner-city crisis, in addition to purely economic factors. Many students of urban life have commented on the flight of jobs and middle-class families from American cities. Their departure represents a drain of both human and financial capital and, by extension, social capital. The nation’s leading urban sociologist, William Julius Wilson, described the downward spiral in his 1987 classic The Truly Disadvantaged: “The basic thesis is not that ghetto culture went unchecked following the removal of higher-income families in the inner city, but that the removal of these families made it more difficult to sustain the basic institutions in the inner city (including churches, stores, schools, recreational facilities, etc.) in the face of prolonged joblessness. And as the basic institutions declined, the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods (defined here to include a sense of community, positive neighborhood identification, and explicit norms and sanctions against aberrant behavior) likewise declined.”16
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