EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined

James H. Cox and Christopher Witko

American Journal of Political Science, 2008, vol. 52, issue 1, 142-155

Abstract: Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual‐level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Unlike most school choice studies, this data set has a large, representative national sample. More importantly, the panel structure of the data allows us to examine the same parents both before and after the school choice decision has been made, permitting a true dynamic analysis. The results demonstrate that actively choosing a child's school does not make parents more likely to participate in school activities. Some institutional attributes of schools do appear to increase parental involvement in school activities, however.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00304.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:amposc:v:52:y:2008:i:1:p:142-155

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Political Science from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:52:y:2008:i:1:p:142-155