While I agree with most of the information Coleman presented in his paper on social capital, I did find myself disagreeing with his conclusions on Catholic high schools. When he first introduced the idea that parents of a Catholic school are closely related due to their children going to the same school and shared religion, I thought of the Catholic high school in my hometown. I know many of the students who attended the high school and not only did most of their parents not know each other, but most of the parents and students did not practice the religion or were not Catholic at all. Most parents had enrolled their children in this high school expecting them to be well behaved as a result, but it actually had the opposite effect. Students from the Catholic high school partied much more frequently and drug use was more prevalent there then at the public high school. Although this is only one example and could be misleading of what most other Catholic schools are like, it led me to question Coleman’s data and conclusions.
As I began to question why the data showed the low dropout rates I began referring back to original data of the family effects on dropout rate. I noticed that the difference incurred from whether or not the students mother expected college (8.6 %)was similar to the difference between public schools and Catholic schools (9.2 %). I thought there would be a correlation between these two numbers because it is my guess that the mother of every Catholic school child would expect them to go to college. My reasoning for this is that if the parents were paying money for their child’s high school education, they would expect them to go to college to further their education and get more out of their investment. There are many other factors to consider and this would not be the only explanation but I feel as though the difference in dropout data between Catholic and public high schools is more of a result of family structure than religion. I think that religion has some impact but Coleman ignored too many other factors when forming his conclusions on the reasons for a low dropout rate in Catholic schools.
I suppose that religious cohesion might have an effect for religious schools where an overwhelming majority of the students/families belong to that religion - although that seems likely to disadvantage students from other religions because they aren't part of that wider community.
ReplyDeleteI think that Catholic schools in particular have undergone a demographic shift away from religious homogeneity. They're often among the cheapest options for private schooling, they have a good reputation on the whole, and many of them market themselves fairly aggressively to the general public.