"Catholic Schools and Broken Windows"

Mary McConnell has a must-read post up over at Law, Religion, and Ethics, called "Catholic Schools and Broken Windows," which engages a must-read law-review article by my colleagues Margaret Brinig and (ahem) Nicole Stelle Garnett.  Here's the article's abstract:

This paper represents the second stage of an effort to test previously unstudied implications of a dramatic shift in the American educational landscape, namely, the rapid disappearance of Catholic schools from urban neighborhoods. In a previous study, we used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to measure how Catholic school closures affected perceived levels of disorder and social cohesion in Chicago neighborhoods. In this paper, we use data provided by the Chicago Police Department to test two related hypotheses about the effects of Catholic school closures on violent crime rates. The first is that Catholic school closures will lead, in relatively short order, to increased crime in a neighborhood. The second is that that crime will increase most dramatically in those police beats where previous school closures led to elevated levels of physical and social disorder and suppressed levels of social cohesion in 1995. We find that Catholic school closures are linked to increase in violent crimes, and that the most significant increases occur in police beats with the highest levels of school-closure-related disorder and -suppressed social cohesion in 1995.

Our study contributes in unique ways to two critical legal-policy debates about policing and education policy. First, and most significantly, our data provides a novel means of testing the broken windows hypothesis. We know, from our previous investigation, where school closures have elevated disorder and suppressed social cohesion, and, using a 3SLS analysis to solve simultaneous equations, we are able to link these findings with subsequent elevated levels of serious crimes. These findings suggest a connection between disorder and serious crime, even if not the direct one posited by Wilson and Kelling. Second, the study contributes new and important evidence to debates about school choice, especially in light of the very real possibility that urban Catholic schools will continue to disappear unless new sources of tuition assistance become available to the students that they serve.

McConnell writes, among other things:

It strikes me that Catholic school principals and teachers in fact embraced a version of the broken windows hypothesis long before this catchy phrase surfaced in academic discourse. More specifically, Catholic schools’ relentless insistence that students wear uniforms, walk in orderly lines, observe decorum in the hallway and generally obey a myriad of sometimes petty rules reflected a profound conviction that faithfulness in these small things would encourage learning. The link between enforced order and educational excellence may have been obvious to the nuns, but as the twentieth century progressed it flew in the face of an educational establishment that embraced creativity and individuality and eyed rules with increasing skepticism . . .

Read the whole thing(s)!