School Choice and Parents’ Political Socialization

• In Event: Schooling and Democratic Citizenship

Abstract

A long line of research shows that Americans learn about politics through their personal interactions with local and state bureaucracies, and that these experiences frequently generalize to ideas about government as a whole. In this paper, we examine how school choice and school quality influence parental engagement, beliefs about education, and attitudes towards the democratic polity as a whole. We use data from the school choice lottery in a large semi-urban school district and match it to annual parental surveys and administrative data. This allows us to leverage randomization in assignment to public vs charter schools in order to estimate causal effects. While we know that civic education in schools can matter for the political engagement of young people later in life and that public, charter, and private schools can differentially shape children’s life trajectories, much less has been said about how school choice can alter parents’ attitudes and behaviors. We argue here that school systems are in fact a key site of political socialization for parents and that school choice systems can matter for political engagement.

Authors

• Amy E. Lerman, UC Berkeley

• Naomi Levy, Santa Clara University