A recent study uses data from Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools in North Carolina along with juvenile and adult arrest data to try to isolate the effect of peers on a range of outcomes, including long-term ones.
The researchers, Stephen Billings at the University of Colorado and Mark Hoekstra at Texas A&M, identify elementary school students whose parents were arrested and categorizes these students as “crime-prone” since it is well-established in the crime literature, as well as their data, that children of parents who are criminals are more likely to commit crimes and misbehave. The researchers attempt to correct for potential selection effects and other potential threats to the validity of their study by, for example, examining differences across cohorts of students studying in the same school, where some cohorts idiosyncratically have more students whose parents committed crimes, i.e., crime-prone peers, than others.
The study finds that there are a range of negative effects on students who have crime-prone peers in their elementary schools, and that the negative effects of having such schoolmates is greater than the effects of having neighbors who are crime-prone. This is particularly important for those of us who are concerned with what is going on in schools. Indeed, neighborhood peers have either smaller effects or no effects on the outcomes of other students, so it is school peers that appear to really matter.
Most of the impacts they report are for a change of 5 percentage points in crime-prone peers. To put that in perspective, just 8 percent of the average student’s peers were classified as crime-prone. This means that a 5-percentage-point increase represents a more than 60 percent increase in crime-prone peers, which is greater than one standard deviation.
For students in sixth through eighth grade, a relatively large 5-percentage-point increase in crime-prone peers has a small negative impact of 1.6 percent of a standard deviation on test scores, as well as a very slight impact on retention. It also leads to a 9.2 percent increase in school crimes by other students (not including the crime-prone students themselves, who were excluded from the outcomes).
When the researchers investigate potential impacts of crime-prone peers on long-term outcomes, they focus on arrests of those between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. These young people have an estimated 2.6-percentage-point higher arrest rate when they have a 5-percentage-point increase in their crime-prone peers. Again, it is school peers, not neighborhood peers, that are driving the results.
These results may be largely intuitive, at least for those who believe that school culture is often driven at least as much by the students as by the teachers and administrators. And the findings are further evidence that removing bad-acting peers via things like suspensions and placement in alternative settings may be a necessary part of effective school discipline strategies and in their peers long-term interests.
SOURCE: Stephen B. Billings and Mark Hoekstra, “Schools, Neighborhoods, and the Long-Run Effect of Crime-Prone Peers,” The National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2019).
