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Ethnic Differences in Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

David W. Galenson
David W. Galenson*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago and National Bureau of Economic Research
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Extract

In recent years social scientists have devoted increasing attention to the question of how members of ethnic and racial minorities are affected by living in segregated neighborhoods. A central concern has been that the poverty of these neighborhoods may be self-perpetuating. One obvious possibility is that this could be caused by reducing human capital formation: children in ghettos might be less likely than their counterparts elsewhere to attend school, perhaps because their demand for education is lower, or because their access to schools is restricted, or as a result of a combination of the two.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 17 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 One influential statement is that of William Julius Wilson, who argued that “development of cognitive, linguistic, and other educational and job-related skills necessary for the world of work in the mainstream economy is … adversely affected [in ghetto neighborhoods] … A vicious cycle is perpetuated through the family, through the community, and through the schools;” The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987), 57.Google Scholar

2 Committee for the Annual Examination of the Grammar Schools, “School Report,” in City Document No. 40, Reports of the Annual Visiting Committees of the Public Schools of the City of Boston, 1847 (Boston, 1847), 5, 53–57. More generally, in surveying school attendance in the nineteenth century Carl Kaestle observed that “By midcentury, poor immigrant youth had replaced blacks as the most worrisome of the nonattenders,” and that “concern for nonattenders was focused on particular pockets like urban slums and factory tenements;” Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1760–1860 (New York, 1983), 107.Google Scholar

3 Galenson, David W., “Ethnicity, Neighborhood, and the School Attendance of Boys in Antebellum Boston,” Journal of Urban History, (forthcoming) Table 6.Google Scholar

4 Galenson, David W., “Determinants of the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago,” History of Education Quarterly, 35 (Winter 1995), Table 7, 390–91.Google Scholar

5 Galenson, David W., “Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons in Boston and Chicago in 1860,” American Journal of Education (forthcoming, May 1997), Table 4.Google Scholar

6 Parallel analyses of the school attendance of girls will be presented in a separate paper.Google Scholar

7 Family relationships were not recorded in the 1860 census manuscripts. In this study, a family head is defined as the first person with a particular surname listed in a household. A boy is considered the son of the family head if he is listed in the same household, with the same surname, and was at least 18 years younger than the head.Google Scholar

8 E.g. Kaestle, Carl F. and Vinovskis, Maris A., Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1980); Perlmann, Joel, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar

9 To allow for the possibility of variation in the effects of independent variables with age, the regression analysis is carried out after dividing the sample into relatively short spans of age. Ward characteristics used as independent variables in the regressions-mean total wealth per family and population composition by nativity – are calculated using the sample constructed for this study. The estimated coefficients of the individual and family variables will not be discussed here. They are discussed in Galenson, , “Determinants of the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago,” 377–85.Google Scholar

10 Table 2 was previously presented in Galenson, , “Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons,” Table 4. It is reproduced here for the reader's convenience.Google Scholar

11 White, Michael J., Dymowski, Robert F., and Wang, Shilian, “Ethnic Neighbors and Ethnic Myths: An Examination of Residential Segregation in 1910,” in Watkins, Susan Cotts, After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (New York, 1994), 185–88.Google Scholar

12 The neighborhood variables are constructed using only families within the same ward as the given family.Google Scholar

13 Galenson, , “Determinants of the School Attendance of Boys,” 396–400; Galenson, , “Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons.” Google Scholar

14 Wells, W. H., Fifth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools, for the Year Ending February 1, 1859 (Chicago, 1859), 58.Google Scholar

15 Wells, W. H., “Report of the Superintendent,” in Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Education, for the Year Ending February 1, 1860 (Chicago, 1860), 33, 40.Google Scholar

16 Wells, , Fifth Annual Report, 58; Wells, , Sixth Annual Report 29–30, 40. For some examples of tension between Catholic immigrants and Protestant public schools, see Kaestle, , Pillars of the Republic, 161–70.Google Scholar

17 E.g. see Sanders, James W., “The Education of Chicago Catholics: An Urban History,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1971), 31–34.Google Scholar

18 Sanders, James W., The Education of an Urban Minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965 (New York, 1977), 44–45.Google Scholar

19 On Chicago's early bishops, see Garraghan, Gilbert J., The Catholic Church in Chicago, 1673–1871 (Chicago, 1921), pp. 108–218; Thompson, Joseph James, The Archdiocese of Chicago: Antecedents and Development (Des Plaines, 1920), 19–43. While Quarter welcomed Catholics of all nativities, he clearly had a particular concern for his fellow immigrants from Ireland, for whom he founded the Chicago Hibernian Benevolent Immigrant Society; ibid., 26.Google Scholar

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23 Thompson, , The Archdiocese of Chicago, 28.Google Scholar

24 Compiled from Sanders, , “The Education of Chicago Catholics,” 16–43; Thompson, , The Archdiocese of Chicago, 209–75; and Garraghan, , The Catholic Church in Chicago, 150–154.Google Scholar

25 Dolan, Jay P., The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore, 1975), 69–72; Sanders, , The Education of an Urban Minority, 44.Google Scholar

26 Garraghan, , The Catholic Church in Chicago, 122. On the Leopoldine Foundation, see Perko, F. Michael, A Time to Favor Zion (Chicago, 1975), 43–46.Google Scholar

27 Garraghan, , The Catholic Church in Chicago, 123–24; Thompson, , The Archdiocese of Chicago, 239. By 1860, two Lutheran congregations in Chicago had also established parochial schools. Although little is known of these schools, they clearly also served to improve educational opportunities for children of German immigrants. On these Lutheran parishes, see Schwartzkopf, Louis J., The Lutheran Trail: A History of the Synodical Conference Lutheran Churches in Northern Illinois (St. Louis, 1950), 31, 82.Google Scholar

28 It might be noted that column 9 of Table 7 is not intended to measure attendance. Attendance at individual schools in 1860 is not available; for 1861, it is given in Department of Public Instruction, Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education, for the Year Ending December 31, 1861 (Chicago, 1862), 59.Google Scholar

29 On the ethnic composition and wealth of wards, see Einhorn, Robin L., Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago, 1991), Appendix 2.Google Scholar

30 Galenson, , “Neighborhood Effects on the School Attendance of Irish Immigrants' Sons,” Tables 3, 5.Google Scholar

31 These studies include Curti, Merle, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford, 1959), 400–01; Wilkie, Jane Riblett, “Social Status, Acculturation and School Attendance in 1850 Boston,” Journal of Social History 11 (Winter 1977), 185–188; Kaestle, and Vinovskis, , Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts, 98; Soltow, Lee and Stevens, Edward, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago, 1981), 133, 147; Perlmann, , Ethnic Differences, 217; Rury, John L., Education and Women's Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930 (Albany, 1991), 58, 218–19; Herscovici, Steven, “Ethnic Differences in School Attendance in Antebellum Massachusetts: Evidence from Newburyport, 1850–1860,” Social Science History 18 (Winter 1994), 481–85.Google Scholar

32 Galensoh, , “Determinants of the School Attendance of Boys in Early Chicago,” Tables 2, 3, 7. The statement excludes the foreign-born sons of immigrants, who did have lower attendance rates than sons of the native-born at a number of ages; ibid., Table 2. Their demand for education could have been lower for a number of reasons, including inability to speak English, and differences between their education in Europe and that available in the US. For discussion see ibid, 385–86.Google Scholar