Poster #86 - Parents' Perception of School Environment, Religiosity, and the Policy Implications of Texas SB10

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

This study examines whether policies promoting religious and moral values in schools, specifically Texas SB 10, a recently passed state law (September 2025) requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, supported by empirical evidence on parental preferences and child outcomes. This study directly evaluates whether SB 10 is likely to achieve its stated policy goals of moral development and value alignment. Using a cross-sectional Qualtrics survey of private Catholic and public-school parents with children in Pre-K through fifth grade, this project evaluates whether parental religiosity predicts school selection and whether perceived value alignment differs across school types.  Parental religiosity is a statistically significant predictor of private school selection (p < .05). However, findings complicate the assumption that school environments reflect parental values. Private school parents rated public school value measures higher than private school measures (M = 9.11 vs. 7.38), while public school parents rated private school values higher than their own institutional category (M = 8.10 vs. 7.13). These results indicate that school choice is not driven by actual value alignment, but by perceived or symbolic associations. This undermines the policy assumption that religious exposure in schools will match parental value demands. Further, analysis using the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) shows no statistically significant difference in perceived child resilience across school types (p > .05). This provides no empirical support for policy claims that religious schooling or religious exposure improves child development outcomes. This challenges policy claims that religious or value-based schooling produces superior developmental outcomes and instead reinforces the role of families as primary agents of socialization. These findings raise critical policy concerns for SB 10. The policy assumes that embedding religious values in schools will improve child outcomes and align with parental preferences. However, the lack of value alignment and absence of resilience differences suggest that such interventions may be ineffective. From a policy perspective, SB 10 may represent a misallocation of educational resources toward symbolic interventions rather than evidence-based approaches. Additionally, by privileging access to religious schooling, SB 10 risks reinforcing class-based inequalities without producing measurable benefits. These findings suggest that policymakers should reconsider the effectiveness and equity implications of religion-based education policy.

Author

• Miranda Lee Lowensohn, St. Edwards University
  Presenting Author