A Meta-Analysis of Private Schooling Effects on Civic Outcomes around the Globe

• In Event: School Policies, COVID, and Student Achievement, Emotional, and Civic Outcomes

Abstract

Political theorists long have debated which types of schools are more effective in forming democratic citizens. Theorists from Plato through Aristotle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Horace Mann, John Dewey, Amy Gutmann, Alan Wolfe, Jennifer Hochschild, and Stephen Macedo have written about the civic purposes of education and the responsibility of schools to inculcate civic values and skills in the country’s youth. A strong assumption running through much of this work is that government-run public schools are more effective than private schools at promoting civic values including political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge, and community involvement. The “publicness” of government-run public schools is a necessary condition, or at least an inherent advantage, for schools to promote civic-minded citizens, they argue. Few of these theoretical claims are grounded in empirical evidence for support, despite dozens of quantitative studies of the effects of various types of schools (government-run public schools, public charter schools, Catholic parochial schools, Evangelical Protestant schools, secular private schools, etc.) on the civic outcomes of young adults. Moreover, Barry Bozeman reminds us that “publicness” is a matter of degree and not kind, as “all organizations are public.” We conduct a statistical meta-analysis of the effects of private schools, relative to government-run public schools, on various civic outcomes. Using robust variance estimation, we determine if private schooling generally produces higher or lower levels of civic outcomes in students, all else equal. We proceed to use meta-regression to identify possible mediators and moderators of the effects of private schooling on civic outcomes.

Authors

• Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas

• M. Danish Shakeel, University of Buckingham

• James David Paul, University of Arkansas

• Jessica Goldstein Holmes

• Alison Heape, University of Arkansas