Variation in Effectiveness Between Private and Public Schools: The Impact of School and Family Networks*

Abstract

Building upon the assumption that cohesion between different levels of the school is essential to the schools’ effectiveness, the hypothesis is tested that a close kinship between school and parental community causes a positive effect on student outcomes in primary schools. Recent theories regarding the effects of ‘functional communities’ on academic achievement mainly focus on the characteristics of the parental community that surrounds a school. Recognizing, however, that schools differ regarding their responsiveness to the role of parents and other actors around the school, our expectation is that a definition of functional community which comprises interactions between characteristics of the parental network around the school and the governance structure of the school offers a better explanation of variation in student achievement. Based on a national sample of 90 schools for primary education in the Netherlands, our analysis shows that the differences in math achievement for public and private primary schools are mediated by characteristics at both the family and the institutional level. It also indicates that characteristics at the institutional level are conditional for the effects of parental networks around schools.

^*The authors would like to thank the participants of the Education Seminar at the Ogburn‐Stouffer Center at the University of Chicago for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

A previous version was presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. The data used in this paper have been collected in the scope of the study Characteristics of elementary schools and the quality of schooling (Brandsma, 1993), the study Effective school board. The contribution of school boards to the effectiveness of primary schools(R. Hofman, 1993), and the study Effects of religion on socialization and success in education(Dijkstra & Peschar, 1996). The first two projects were financed by the SVO Institute for Educational Research (grants #6009 and #0306) and the last study was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (#500–277‐215).

Notes

^*The authors would like to thank the participants of the Education Seminar at the Ogburn‐Stouffer Center at the University of Chicago for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

A previous version was presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco. The data used in this paper have been collected in the scope of the study Characteristics of elementary schools and the quality of schooling (Brandsma, 1993), the study Effective school board. The contribution of school boards to the effectiveness of primary schools(R. Hofman, 1993), and the study Effects of religion on socialization and success in education(Dijkstra & Peschar, 1996). The first two projects were financed by the SVO Institute for Educational Research (grants #6009 and #0306) and the last study was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (#500–277‐215).