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Are Involved Parents Providing Public Goods or Private Goods?St. Michael's College Parents who lobby their children's schools for better or increased educational resources may be providing a schoolwide public good. However, they may also be capturing a larger share of school resources, possibly leaving other families worse off. A regression of within-school variation in input quality on parent-initiated school contact identifies this ``private-good'' effect, using involvement in civic organizations to instrument for contact. A 10 percent increase in the probability of parental contact raises the probability of inclusion in a gifted program by 2 percent to 3 percent. At the average school, the highest ``non-gifted'' students significantly outscore the lowest ``gifted'' students, suggesting that this lobbying crowds out deserving students. Alongside these private-good effects, involved parents also provide public goods: again instrumenting with civic involvement, higher participation in a school's parent—teacher organization leads to a higher probability that principals frequently observe and evaluate all teachers at that school.
Key Words: parental involvement • school resource allocation • gifted programs
This version was published on November
1, 2008 Public Finance Review, Vol. 36, No. 6,
678-705 (2008) |
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