Delinquency, Exceptionality and Common Schooling: Institutional Covergence and the Expansion of Special Education

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How and why school systems grow have received considerable attention in sociology within the last two decades. Generally, research shows that factors often thought to be determining - such as population growth or industrialization - actually have little effect. Social and cultural factors such as national independence and a search for a national identity are often directly related to growth in education. These effects became visible as the result of theoretical work identifying the causal factors, and new techniques in historical sociological analysis. This proposal is to examine how the social definition of 'delinquent' and 'exceptional' populations of children affect growth of school systems through a desire to 'contain' those populations. The theory proposes that the two populations initially will be thought quite distinct, but will come to occupy a similar place in schools through the containment function. A parallel analysis applies, with slight modifications, to the education of females and non-whites. The theory will be tested using archival data from eight states, four in which compulsory education developed recently, and four older school systems. Outcomes will include testing the theory and establishing a large data set of school, legal, and political records available to other investigators.