The Effect of School Type on Student Civic Competency : Evidence from South Korea

• In Event: Youth and civic development

Proposal

Using Social Participation Competency data (2014-2015) from Korean National Youth Policy Institute, this study examines the effect of school type on student civic competency in South Korea (hereafter Korea). Prior Western-based (most notably US-based) research has documented that private schools, especially Catholic private schools are more effective than public schools in fostering student civic competency (e.g., Dill, 2009). In Korea, however, researchers have rarely questioned the effect of school type on student civic competency, because of its unique High School Equalization Policy (HSEP), which assigns academic high school-bound students schools within their residential area based on a random computerized lottery (Byun et al., 2012), has resulted in little variation across school types with respect to student makeup and learning environments. However, with the ascendency of neoliberal education policies since the mid-2000s, school choice has been increasingly adopted as part of education reforms and high school assignment programs have changed from within-district randomization to open enrollment in Korea (Choi & Hwang, 2017). As a result, students in certain types of Korean high schools appear to come from better socioeconomic background and have better performance, thereby necessitating an investigation of the effect of school types on student civic competency in the Korean educational setting.

Utilizing a recently collected, nationally representative sample of South Korean high school students, this study investigates whether some school types (i.e., selective private high schools) are more effective than others (i.e., public high schools) in fostering Korean high school students' civic competency, measured by 1) expected participation in voting, 2) expected participating in illegal protest, 3) support for democratic rights and responsibilities, and 4) support for democratic procedures. In doing so, this study also examines whether an array of student-level (e.g., family socioeconomic background) and school-level (school climate) characteristics can explain the school-type differences in student civic competency, if any. Toward this end, this study first uses Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to control for preexisting differences between students who attend selective private high schools and public high schools. In what follows, two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) are used to test the relevance of student-level and school-level characteristics for explaining the school-type differences in student civic competency.

My preliminary analyses show that Korean students attending selective private high schools are more likely to be female, perceive their classroom climate to be open, and come from advantaged family background compared to their counterparts attending public high schools. However, once controlling for an array of student background and school characteristics, there is no significant school-type difference on students' average civic competency, with substantial variation across civic competency measures. In light of the study's empirical findings, theoretical and policy implications will be also discussed in the full paper.

Authors

• KAHYEON YU, Seoul National University

• Hyungryeol Kim, Seoul National University

• Jilli Chong, Seoul National University