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Sense of justice in school and civic attitudes

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Abstract

Contending that justice experiences in school serve as a hidden curriculum that conveys messages about the wider society and impact student attitudes and behavior, we investigate the effects of students’ sense of distributive and (school) procedural justice on democratic-related attitudes: liberal democratic orientation (civil rights), social trust and institutional trust. The study was carried out among about 5,000 8th- and 9th-grade students in a national sample of 48 junior high schools in Israel in the 2010–2011 school year. The two-level data—individual and school—were analyzed by the hierarchical linear model (HLM7) program. Findings basically support our hypotheses: sense of distributive instrumental and, especially, of relational justice at school have a positive effect on liberal democratic orientation and on trust in people and in formal institutions. Furthermore, school (aggregate) sense of procedural justice adds to these positive effects and, in the case of democratic orientation, also interacts with instrumental justice and intensifies its effect on this outcome. However, these attitudes are also dependent on sectorial affiliation (Jewish secular, Jewish religious, Israeli–Arab), which explains a considerable portion of between-school variation in student attitudes.

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Notes

  1. These relational rewards are also “goods” distributed according to some norms of entitlement (see, e.g., Jencks 1988, about teacher’s attention). While the distribution of instrumental rewards is quantitative, relational rewards are qualitative.

  2. We base our definition of procedural justice as a school feature on abundant literature on organizational culture and climate, which is usually measured as the aggregated perceived attitudes or evaluations of the organization’s members about various aspects of its life (e.g., Anderson 1982; Denison 1996; Schein 2004; Van Houtte 2005).

  3. Torney-Purta et al. (2004) suggest three types of trust: delegated trust (similar to institutional), collective trust and affective trust (two types of social trust).

  4. Zemerli and Newton (2008) did find, however, a rather significant correlation between social and institutional trust on the aggregate level (between states).

  5. In recent decades, there is also a growing ultraorthodox sector, which is State-funded but completely autonomous. It usually does not cooperate with academic research efforts and did not participate in the current investigation.

  6. For a detailed historical account of civic education in the heterogeneous Israeli society, see Ichilov (1999) and Ichilov et al. (2005).

  7. Israel’s educational system is almost entirely public, with free and compulsory schooling of one year of kindergarten and 12 years of primary (grades 1–6), junior high (grades 7–9) and senior high school (grades 10–12).

  8. The index is an administrative measure based on socioeconomic and demographic (center/periphery) properties of the school’s student population and serves as the basis for extra resource allocation to schools.

  9. Since age/grade-level differences did not appear in most of our analyses, the two grade levels were combined in all analyses.

  10. We assumed that the four sampled classrooms represented the student population in the school well. Parents’ education was preferred over the disadvantage index, as the latter is also based on non-SES parameters. Two extra school variables—school size and location (center-periphery)—did not have an effect in any of the HLM analyses, so we do not present them.

  11. As only the interaction of justice in grades and procedural justice was significant, we removed the (insignificant) term of justice in teachers’ relations X procedural justice from the analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, 91505 , Jerusalem, Israel

    Nura Resh

  2. Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, 31905 , Haifa, Israel

    Clara Sabbagh

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  1. Nura Resh
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  2. Clara Sabbagh
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Correspondence to Nura Resh.

Additional information

This study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant No. 568/09. We thank Yechezkel Dar and Orit Ichilov for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper, and Helene Hogri for her editorial assistance.

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Resh, N., Sabbagh, C. Sense of justice in school and civic attitudes. Soc Psychol Educ 17, 51–72 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-013-9240-8

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