Bad Schools or Bad Pupils? School Effects on Misbehaviour in Barcelona

Abstract

School effects on students’ behaviour are a major issue in educational sciences with a relevant transfer to policymakers and community stakeholders. In Barcelona, as well as the rest of Spain, a lot of research has been done focusing on this issue, particularly in pedagogy; that means how to find a better methodology to improve the engagement of students and, as a consequence, better results in both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Many of the research projects have as a goal to assess in some way the effectiveness of new methods or proposals, in the sense of ‘What works in education?’ (Ivalua, 2015). Research done in sociology used to focus on social differentiation among schools. We will use the ISCY research data to test the main variables on school features, like rules, climate, teacher performance and ability grouping, on the production of school disengagement and misbehaviour. Our hypothesis about Barcelona context is that the school composition has a stronger effect rather than school methodology or school features, because the urban and school segregation are higher than other cities in the international context. According to this, several theoretical and political issues will rise in coping with ‘bad schools’ and ‘bad students’.