The apple doesn’t fall far from the parent’s school: intergenerational continuity in school sector enrollment

ABSTRACT

This article investigates whether parents in the United States and Canada send their children to schools that are similar to the schools they attended. Intergenerational continuity in the type of high school attended may be generated by social status or religious socialization concerns, or simply through familiarity, identity, and network ties built through parents’ high school experiences. Social reproduction as well as social identity processes, we argue, explain intergenerational continuity in schooling choices for children. Findings reveal that public schools are the most likely destination for children regardless of the type of school a parent attended. We also find intergenerational continuity in school sector among parents who opt out of traditional public schools. The school sector boundaries vary by educational context, however, with much higher boundaries between most sectors in the United States than in Canada. A notable exception is the very high levels of intergenerational continuity in the public Catholic sector in Canada, which reflects social identities built within the historical nexus of family, community, and religion. We conclude by discussing implications for researchers who study sector effects and school choice as well as practitioners vying for students in an increasingly competitive educational market.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholic and Protestant schools
• family
• private schools
• religion
• religious schools
• schooling choices for children
• social reproduction

Notes

¹ Given data limitations, we were unable to control for the educational marketplace in which the family currently resides. However, a supplementary analysis was conducted in which controls were added for region (both 4 and 9 regions as defined by the Census were included in separate models), population size of the county of residence, and an indicator variable for (non-Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)) rural areas. Including these control variables did not change the primary findings nor the substantive conclusions found in this article. This may reflect the fact that marketplace changes related systematically to school sector are not strong enough to alter the pattern of associations between parent’s school sector and the choice of a school sector for children. Still, a more careful assessment of the educational marketplace faced by the respondent may lead to higher estimates of intergenerational consistency than we report here.