General Social Capital, Education-Related Social Capital, and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities-which we shall call education-related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education-related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non-choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education-related social capital could be spurious-due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education-related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school-related home resources that parents may provide.