William R. Morgan

Building Citizenship: How Student Voice in Service‐Learning Develops Civic Values

Objectives. Though many decry the decline in political participation and interest, few academic studies present a clear approach to help reverse these trends. This paper examines the impact of service-learning programs on students’ self-concept, political engagement, and attitudes toward out-groups. Methods. The data come from a pre and post survey given to more than 200 high school students in 10 different schools. We use Huber regression to assess the impact of student voice in the service-learning project on six dependent variables. Results. We show that if students are involved in service-learning projects in which they have a high degree of voice and ownership, their self-concept and political engagement will improve, and they become more tolerant toward out-groups. Conclusion. In short, having a voice in service-learning programs builds citizenship.

The Causes of Racial Disorders: A Grievance-Level Explanation

This paper presents three basic arguments that draw on data from a sample of forty-two American cities. First, the data reveal that three separate factors-frequency, precipitation conditions, and severity-are important to the structure of racial disorders. Much earlier work, especially that of Spilerman, focused only on frequency. Hence, in part two we consider disorder frequency, replicating and extending Spilerinans findings. In particular, we show that certain city-specific differences (nonwhite population size and police force size) have strong effects on disorder frequency. Third, consideration of disorder severity shows the need for a model quite different from that used for frequency. The conditions critical to the dynamics of initial confrontation are not those critical to the dynamics of escalation. Cityspecific grievance variables, especially black-white differences in jobs and housing, are particularly important.

Social Origins, Parental Values, and the Transmission of Inequality

Consensus exist among social scientists on the importance of the family of oring for a multitude of individual outcomes, but a complete understanding of the mechanisms producing these parental-filial linkages is lacking. This paper explores the interpretation of the connection between parental socioeconomic origins and adolescent schooling experiences using Melvin Kohns concept of parental self-direction/conformity values. Using data from public school students in Louisville, Kentucky, and their mothers, we examine the role of maternal self-direction/conformity values in transmiting the effects of parental social position on a variety of schooling variables.Our results replicate the persistent relationship between fathers occupational position and parental values (measured here as maternal values), and they indicate limited support for the sensitivity of adolescent school experiences to parental values for white (but not black) students.

Islamic and Western Educational Accommodation in a West African Society: A Cohort-Comparison Analysis.

Theories of the global expansion of Western mass education tend to assume the replacement of indigenous educational systems. Data from two surveys of youth in an Islamic, West African city, conducted five and nineteen years after national independence, indicate a convergence in the social forces that predispose attendance in the new and old systems. Using a standard nine-variable model of educational attainment, offive variables that had significant but opposite effects on Islamic and Western schooling attendance in the first cohort, only one significant opposing effect still operated in the second. Average years of attendance increased for both Western and Islamic schooling. Hypotheses are offered to explain the apparent structural accommodation of the two systems.

EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS INTO THE EVOLVING LABOUR MARKET OF WEST AFRICA

This case study of Kano, Nigeria, examines changes over the past four decades in an education and labor market relationship that has evolved since the 10th century. We first offer an analysis of the historical origins of Kano’s current three-layered segmented labor market and its corresponding three distinct, but increasingly overlapping, educational pathways. We then compare the labor market entry pathways reported in 1974 and 1992 by two cohorts of young adult males, the respondents having first been surveyed as 17-year-olds in 1965 and 1979. Despite higher levels of modern secular education in 1992 for males in all occupational destinations, apprenticeship participation was significantly lower in 1992 only for young men who entered the professional and clerical positions that dominate Kano’s public sector. Islamic training remained universal, and in fact increased significantly in years of participation across all occupational destinations. We next show that the jointly educated young men who were part of the first, more traditional sector of the labor market, were less seriously impacted in their earnings by Nigeria’s turbulent end-of-the-century economy. Finally, we discuss the possible advantages of an apprenticeship system coupled to modern secular education for moderating social inequality and stabilizing economic development in sub-Saharan Africa and other less-developed regions.

Supplementary education for African American children at risk

African-American preadolescent children attended Saturday programs on African heritage and history offered at an African-American heritage center located in their neighborhood. Assessments of participants and control groups of nonparticipants at the end of years one and two indicated that attending the program increased knowledge of Africa, positive attitudes about Africa, and preferences for African and African-American materials in the school curriculum. Attendance was unrelated to the childrens self-evaluations of their performance of the student role identity after year one and only weakly related to their school achievement test scores after year two. These results provide mixed support for three hypotheses about how supplementary education programs can raise the educational outcomes for at-risk youth—developing ethnic identity, student role identity, and academic interest.