| Stephen Morgan
Cornell University
The size, variation, and meaning of the Catholic school effect on achievement for the high school class of 2004
FINAL REPORT:
Parents, Networks, and Academic Achievement in High School (Co-author Jennifer J. Todd, Cornell University).
With the most recent national data available on student and parent social networks, this article examines the conjecture of James S. Coleman that intergenerational social closure promotes student achievement in high schools. Consistent with his predictions, within the Catholic school sector, schools characterized by dense parental networks have higher average student achievement. This association cannot be eliminated by conditioning on available measures of either student network structure or family background. In contrast, in the public school sector, a similar bivariate association between dense parental networks and student achievement can be attributed entirely to these conditioning variables, thereby suggesting that net levels of intergenerational closure are effective only in the Catholic school sector. The relevance of these findings for recent policy interventions is discussed in the concluding section of the article, where implications for the broader concept of social capital are also developed.
A Diagnostic Routine for the Detection of Consequential Heterogeneity of Causal Effects With a Demonstration from School Effects Research. (Co-author Jennifer J. Todd, Cornell University).
Least-squares regression estimates of causal effects are conditional-variance weighted estimates of individual-level causal effects. In this article, we demonstrate how simple weighting procedures can be used to determine whether the implicit weighting of regression has generated misleading estimates of average causal effects and, hence, whether estimates based on explicit weighting schemes of individual-level causal effects should be presented instead. The diagnostic routine that is presented is applied, using data from the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study, to a contested but important causal effect in educational research: the effect of Catholic schooling, in comparison to public schooling, on the achievement of high school students in the United States. Extensions to other research scenarios are discussed in the conclusion.
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