108 Robert Dreebenand students; the

108 Robert Dreeben
and students; the opportunities and constraints governed by time schedules, hierarchical and
collegial arrangements, spatial settings, and curricular agendas; the relation of school and
district organization to such lateral entities as the labor market for teachers and patterned
parental interest organized in communities and in households; and patterns of action and interaction
occurring in the context of these considerations. It has been easy to devise defensible
indications of school outcomes in individual students, harder to identify appropriate structural
properties of schools, and daunting to conceptualize and determine the mechanisms in play at
points where structure and individuals come together in the ongoing work of schooling. Sociologists
have approached school effects problems from a variety of perspectives using a variety
of methodologies, but it is not my purpose to review them. This chapter is about the history
of an idea—structural effects—that, I maintain, has held a pre-eminent position in efforts to
understand schooling.
The burden of the argument is to show how this formulation, derived from Durkheim,
flourished in the intellectual environment of the Columbia Department of Sociology from the
late 1930s to the late 1950s, became transformed over the next 10 years in Coleman's work,
and subsequently achieved long-term durability despite evidence of its limitations. The structural
effects formulation, although not unknown in other areas of sociology (e.g., Berelson,
Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954; Bulmer, 1984; Davis, 1961, 1966; Kerr & Siegel, 1954; Key,
1950; Kobrin, 1951; Lieberson, 1958; Schwartz, 1975; Shaw, 1924; Shaw & McKay, 1942;
Stinchcombe, 1959; Stolzenberg, 1978), does not appear to be as dominant elsewhere as in
studies of schools.
Two studies stand out for having made the structural effects formulation explicit. In 1959,
Wilson published "Residential Segregation of Social Classes and Aspirations of High School
Boys." His analytic scheme, which treated social class at the individual and school levels,
became paradigmatic in the treatment of how schools influence aspirations, attainment, and
other life chances. Blau published "Structural Effects" (1960) in the same journal a few months
later. Both articles employed the same structural effects formulation but extracted it from
strikingly different origins. Blau's (1955, 1960) study derived from a Columbia sociology
tradition concerned with structural analysis; Wilson's came from work on stratification and
the social psychology of group influences on individuals. Blau expressed his formulation generally,
to apply beyond his study of public service agencies (1955); Wilson's dealt just with
schools. The principle underlying both was that net of the effect of an individual characteristic
believed to shape a pattern of conduct, a group property based on the aggregation of that
characteristic influences that conduct.
Wilson (1959) opened with three propositions. First, social classes differ according to
their value systems, a claim based on Hyman's study, "The Value Systems of Different Classes"
(1953), which argued that individuals tend to have value preferences related to their social
class membership, and that classes can be characterized according to their values. This position
held currency at the time, informing studies of class-based and ethnic-based patterns of
child rearing (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1958; Miller & Swanson, 1958; Strodtbeck, 1958). Wilson
saw individual values originating in the value climate of school society (p. 836), based on
the class composition of residential neighborhoods, providing "a significant normative reference
influencing the educational aspirations of boys from varying strata . . . " (p. 837; my
italics). Second, according to early studies of status attainment (Kahl, 1953; Sewell, Haller, &
Straus, 1957), the educational aspirations of students are related to their social origins. Third,
consistent with evidence adduced by Asch (1952), Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), and Newcomb
(1958), individual conduct and judgment are shaped by hierarchic pressures from superordinates