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

在过去的二十年里，学校系统如何发展，以及为什么发展，在社会学中受到了相当大的关注。一般来说，研究表明，通常被认为起决定作用的因素--如人口增长或工业化--实际上几乎没有什么影响。诸如民族独立和寻求民族认同等社会和文化因素往往与教育的发展直接相关。这些影响是由于确定因果因素的理论工作和历史社会学分析中的新技术而变得明显的。这项建议旨在研究社会上对“犯罪”和“特殊”儿童人口的定义如何通过“遏制”这些人口来影响学校系统的发展。该理论提出，这两个群体最初会被认为是截然不同的，但通过遏制功能，将在学校中占据类似的位置。一个类似的分析也适用于女性和非白人的教育，但略有修改。这一理论将使用来自八个州的档案数据进行测试，其中四个州的义务教育最近发展起来，以及四个较老的学校系统。结果将包括检验这一理论，并建立可供其他调查人员使用的学校、法律和政治记录的大型数据库集。

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.