School choice in Chile: Is it class or the classroom?

Skeptics of school choice are concerned that parents, especially low‐income ones, will not choose schools based on sound academic reasoning. Many fear that, given choice, parents will sort themselves into different schools along class lines. How‐ever, most surveys find that parents of all socioeconomic groups cite academic aspects as important when choosing a school. Moreover, almost no parents refer to the social composition of the student body. Many advocates of choice hold up these results as proof that choice will produce desirable outcomes. However, these results may not be reliable because they may simply be verbal responses to survey items rather than indicators of actual behavior. In this research, we report on the search behavior of parents in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile, examining how they construct their school choice sets and comparing this to what they say they are seeking in choosing schools. The data indicate that parental decisions are influenced by demographics. Based on this evidence, we argue that unfettered choice may reduce the pressure on schools to improve their performance and could potentially increase stratification. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

What Research Can Tell Policymakers about School Choice

American school systems have implemented several different kinds of school choice policies, and most of them are controversial. The research literature on various forms of school choice reveals some areas of consensus, but other areas where the results of studies diverge. Consensus results show that parents are more satisfied with choice, that they report using academic preferences to make choices, and that they tend to be more involved with their child's education as a consequence of choice. There is some, though mixed, evidence of improved test scores for children involved with various forms of choice. Actual parental use of choice and gathering of information, however, show some evidence of stratification, not always by race or income, but often by the level of parental involvement and motivation. These results provide considerable evidence about the effects on students whose parents have made an active choice, but more policy research is needed on the effects of competition on students in schools that have not been chosen. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Performance Measures,Ranking and Parental Choice: An Analysis of the English School League Tables

ABSTRACT

Parental choice among schools in England is informed by annually published school performance (league) tables. The 2006 league tables included a measure of contextual value added (CVA) for the first time. By explicitly accounting for the characteristics of a school's intake, the aim is that CVA should isolate the impact a school has on its pupils' progress and so provide a measure of school effectiveness. In this paper we use UK government administrative data to replicate CVA and other key performance measures in order to investigate the extent to which the current league tables provide the information necessary to support parental choice on the basis of school effectiveness. We find that school rankings based on CVA are largely uninformative for parents: almost half of English secondary schools are indistinguishable from the national average level of CVA.     

School Vouchers and Student Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Washington,DC

School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation for participating students. The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nation's capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the “gold standard” evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent policy developments including the reauthorization of the OSP and the enactment or expansion of more than a dozen school voucher or voucher‐type programs throughout the United States in 2011 and 2012.     

“The Information Gap?”

While the “achievement gap” generally and appropriately focuses upon gaps in test scores and other outcome measures, there may also be an “information gap” between higher and lower income parents that creates a disadvantage for lower income families in choosing good schools. In this article, we examine the extent to which there is such a gap, with a focus on data from a new survey of low‐ and moderate‐income parents who have made school choices. We find that, at least in relatively mature school choice environments like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Washington, DC, most low‐ and moderate‐income parents report being quite well informed and they engage in a variety of different activities to become informed. Thus, the information gap between lower and higher income parents may not be as large as scholars and policymakers had assumed. We do find that parents at the very lowest end of the income spectrum, especially those earning less than $10,000 per year, do feel less well‐informed and gather less information, but even here the differences are not enormous, relative to higher income parents.     

Local School Choice Policies in Sweden

More choice for parents and students is a major recent change in school policies in most Western countries. In Sweden, these changes coincided with the decentralization of power and responsibilities within primary and secondary education from central to local government. This gave municipalities an important role in the actual implementation of choice policies. The question addressed here is how and why local authorities vary with regard to their promotion of choice in schooling. A theory of local government school choice policies is developed, focusing on the social and political composition of the locality. Four factors are seen as likely to be particularly important: the strength of liberal conservatism, the size of the middle class, ethnic diversity and urban location. The empirical investigation is based on data from the 288 municipalities in Sweden. All four factors turn out to be important, but contrary to previous assumptions, choice policies are not primarily linked to the success of the Moderate (Conservative) Party. Instead, the strength of the middle class is the major explanation. In Sweden, but also in other Western societies, the middle class has emerged as the dominant social stratum. Middle class parents, who themselves are well educated, take a keen interest in their children's education and are more likely to demand greater opportunities for choice. In the final analysis, this is linked to the changing position of the Social Democratic Party and its aim to broaden its electoral basis by appealing to middle class voters.     

Social capital,voluntary associations and collective action: Which aspects of social capital have the greatest ‘civic’ payoff?

Abstract

Despite a great variety of theoretical approaches, empirical analyses of social capital are surprisingly similar. Virtually all of them treat membership in voluntary associations as the chief indicator of community involvement while neglecting another form of community involvement: participation in elite-challenging actions. Likewise, authors readily attribute manifold civic benefits to associational life, while hesitating to attribute such benefits to elite-challenging activity. We question these views on two grounds. Firstly, we argue that elite-challenging action reflects social capital, even though this is a specific form of it: an emancipative form typical of self-assertive publics. Secondly, we use data from the Value Surveys to demonstrate that elite-challenging action is linked with greater civic benefits, at both the individual and societal level, than is membership in voluntary associations. This finding confirms the concept of human development, which suggests that emancipative forms of social capital are more civic in their consequences than others. Following this concept, we show that mass self-expression values nurture emancipative social capital, in motivating elite-challenging action. Finally, we locate self-expression values and elite-challenging actions in a theory of emancipative social capital.     

Markets,Hierarchies, and Networks: An Agent‐Based Organizational Ecology

Markets, hierarchies, and networks are widely understood to be the three primary forms of social organization. In this article, we study the choice between these forms in a general, agent‐based model (ABM) of cooperation. The organizational ecology is the product, an emergent property, of the set of choices made by agents contingent on their individual attributes and beliefs about the population of agents. This is one of the first attempts to theorize explicitly the choice between different organizational forms, especially networks and hierarchies, and certainly the first to do so in an ABM. The insights of the model are applied to current research on transnational networks, social capital, and the sources of hierarchy and especially autocracy.     

Parent Involvement and Educational Outcomes for Latino Students

This study focuses on the determinants and effects of parent involvement in schools, in the context of urban school districts, and particularly with regard to the schools that serve Latino students. Three research questions are investigated in this article: (1) What are schools doing to support parents, foster involvement and engagement in their children's schools, and generally create strong parent‐school relations? (2) How effective are schools at fostering parent involvement? (3) Do schools with more effective parent involvement practices and greater parent participation perform at higher levels than those with less effective practices and lower levels of parent involvement? Data on Latino representation on Local School Councils (LSCs), school‐level demographic and performance indicators, and information on effective school organization, parent involvement, and school practices regarding outreach and engagement with parents and communities are used to investigate these questions. The empirical analysis demonstrates that in addition to previously established aspects of effective school organization, governing arrangements and Latino political incorporation play a critical role in building stronger, more supportive school–parent relations and in encouraging higher levels of parent involvement in formal school activities. Moreover, these practices and relations were found to have important implications for Latino student performance.     

Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden1

That organizational involvement has a positive impact on political action is a well‐established finding in empirical research around the world. To account for this, theorists since Tocqueville have pointed to the returns in human capital, in particular ‘civic skills’, yielded by associations. This article, by contrast, is a study of whether social capital theory can help explain the same effect. According to the logic of ‘weak ties’, organizational involvement provides bridging social capital by connecting the individual to a wider range of people. As a result, the input of requests for participation increases and this ultimately leads to more activity. Unspecified in this argument, however, is what aspect of associational memberships is most conducive to such weak ties: the sheer number of memberships, or the extent to which one's memberships provide links to people of dissimilar social origin. In an unprecedented empirical test based on survey data from Sweden in 1997, it is shown that being connected to multiple voluntary associations is what matters for political activity, not the extent to which one's memberships cut across social cleavages. Moreover, the social capital mechanism of recruitment is more important in explaining this effect than the human capital mechanism of civic skills, since the former can account for why even passive members, not just organizational activists, may become more prone to take political action.     

Japan’s ‘pro-nuclear civil society’: Power in the analysis of social capital and civil society

ABSTRACT

Civil society research can be categorized into a school in the tradition of Gramsci focusing on social movements and a Tocquevillean school focusing on associations and social capital. The author reviews both schools’ research on the Japanese case and analyses a number of pro-nuclear citizen groups built up by the Japanese nuclear industry. The author analyses their financial data and historical development to demonstrate that they have been built up as countermovement by the nuclear industry. The author traces their mobilization processes to criticize the social capital approach. In Japanese political science, traditionally a dense web of hierarchical associations and ties of obligation have been seen as enforcing clientelism and top-down political control. This makes Japan an interesting case for the social capital approach. Social capital researchers have reinterpreted hierarchical networks as indicators of a strong civil society. Taking into account Bourdieu’s notion of social capital challenges this view and supports arguments of state influence forwarded by parts of the Gramscian school.     

Interesting but irrelevant: Social capital and the saliency of politics in Western Europe

Abstract. Many explanations of political involvement are based on the idea that higher levels of resources will be matched by higher levels of political involvement. Yet these kind of interpretations seem to overlook the fact that resources potentially increase individual autonomy and widen the scope of alternative actions, and so facilitate a decrease of political involvement. The analyses presented here are based on the rather paradoxical expectation that we will find a higher level of subjective political interest and, simultaneously, a lower level of political saliency among people commanding relatively high levels of social capital or other resources. The empirical evidence available for Western European countries in 1990 and 1998 essentially confirms the notion of diverging consequences of social capital (and other resources) for political involvement. People combining high political interest with a low saliency of politics are labelled spectators here. For them politics has lost its obligatory character – it is interesting and probably important to follow what goes on in this area, but compared with other matters its relevance is relatively low. Besides, a strong gender bias still can be found for each and every aspect of political involvement.     

Japanese Network Capital: The Impact of Social Networks on Japanese Political Participation

Recent scholarship shows that social capital has a large influence on political behavior. Social capital’s definition includes trust, norms of reciprocity, and social networks. Most studies, however, ignore the networking component. Here, we test the influence of social networks on political participation using new Japanese survey data. We separately test the effects of involvement in formally organized voluntary associations and informal social networks. We also examine whether hierarchical networks have a different impact on participation than equal relationships. To determine if networks with bridging or bonding social capital affect participation differently, we also measure the openness to outsiders of these networks. Negative binomial regression models indicate a strong positive relationship between formal and informal social networking—including network hierarchy and some forms of openness—and political participation.     

Social Capital in Denmark: A Deviant Case?

If social capital is important for democratic governance, then it is important how social capital develops. In this article the development of social capital in Denmark is studied on four dimensions: civic norms, social trust, civic involvement and social networks. In contrast to Robert Putnam's findings for the US, no evidence is found of a general weakening of social capital in Denmark. The findings are surprising, because Denmark faces some of the same tendencies that according to Putnam lie behind the decline of social capital in the US. The last section therefore discusses various institutional aspects that may help explain the difference. It is argued that the welfare state facilitates the production of social capital, partly by supporting civil society infrastructure, partly by the very structure of its institutions.     

Virtual Civil Society: The New Frontier of Social Capital?

Although many scholars agree that social interactions within traditional social groups build social capital, there is less consensus on the benefits of virtual interactions for political engagement. Our research examines how interpersonal social group activity and virtual activity contribute to two dimensions of social capital: citizen norms and political involvement. We rely on data collected in the 2005 Citizenship Involvement in Democracy survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University. This survey provides unique detail on participation in both social groups and virtual interactions. Our findings suggest that social group activity and virtual interactions both foster many of the same positive aspects of social capital.     

Motivating and Retaining Government Employees: The Role of Organizational Social Capital

While a great deal of attention has been given to the role of performance pay and extrinsic rewards in understanding how to motivate and retain employees, this study points towards the importance of organizational social capital, defined as the sum of collaboration, trust, and value congruence among employees. Using a four-year panel data set of 170 federal agencies, we find a positive effect of social capital on intrinsic motivation but contradicting effects on turnover. Changes in social capital across time mitigate turnover intention but are unrelated to turnover behavior. A cross-sectional analysis shows, however, that the relationship between social capital and turnover behavior is curvilinear and has an inverted u-shape. The findings suggest that social capital can be a double-edged sword, as it is harmful in lower doses but beneficial if a critical mass of employees can participate in the social network, thereby avoiding conflict-laden in- and out-group constellations.     

The bigger the better? Evidence of the effect of government size on life satisfaction around the world

This paper empirically analyzes whether government size is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. We thus provide a test of the longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory and public choice theory. According to the neoclassical view, governments play unambiguously positive roles for individuals' quality of life, while the theory of public choice has been developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement in – and regulation of – the economy, thereby harming their citizens' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government consumption. For low, middle income, and male people, this result is stronger when the government is leftwing, while government consumption appears to be less harmful for women when the government is perceived to be effective. Government capital formation and social spending have no significant impact on life satisfaction.     

提升社会治理效能:社会企业生产要素社会性变革及其制度优势

社会企业通过市场机制参与社会治理的行动根植于经济嵌入社会的关系之中。生产要素本身具备多种属性和功能,长期以来商品经济理论对生产要素的单向商品化使用,造成了经济与社会、文化等非商品化属性的隔离。正如波兰尼所言,土地作为自然存在,劳动力和企业管理者作为社会人,本身并不是生产出来供销售的商品,资金使用的信用、信任和合法认可也不能作为商品去生产。因此,重新审视经济行为的目的,可以发现社会企业的发展动因。社会企业以社会企业家精神为内生动力,以企业家管理才能为社会目标通向经济行动的镶嵌通道,通过制度创新改变社会问题,并运用社会管理技术系统提升社会治理效能,将组织的制度优势转化为社会治理效能,对推动良性社会运行具有积极的作用。     

Choice in Public Services: Crying 'Wolf' in the School Choice Debate

Choice, diversity and personalisation have been key to the New Labour project in public services. With the emergence of a reinvigorated Conservative party as a credible electoral threat, and the end of the Blair era, it seems appropriate to consider the continuing viability and longevity of the New Labour public service project. In this article, I approach the issue of choice in public services through an examination of the long-running controversy over choice in the English secondary school system. I argue that the opponents of choice have been reluctant to engage with the notion of choice in public services due to concerns over the supposed negative effect that consumer choice has on the equity and quality of service provision. This paper aims to challenge the claim that any element of choice in education necessarily has deleterious effects on social justice. I argue that the case against school choice has not been decisively made and that school choice can, in principle, form part of a socially progressive educational project by redistributing power to service users and helping to maintain popular support for public provision of education.     

State supported segregation? Examining migrant clustering in schools in Ireland

Recent education policy debates in Ireland have focused on whether the dominance of the Catholic Church in primary school provision is an appropriate model for an increasingly diverse population, rather than concern with migrant clustering and/or segregation per se. Efforts to ensure that students from a range of religious or non-religious backgrounds are catered for in education contexts are to be lauded. However, this research provides clear evidence of migrant segregation as a result of how school choice impacts attendance patterns on the ground. This is not surprising, given the evidence from research on school choice which highlights the fact that it can exacerbate socio-economic and demographic segregation. As such, enshrining parental choice as the corner-stone of school provision in Ireland is flawed since it, intentionally or otherwise, builds an educational infrastructure that encourages school segregation.