Social capital and education

Coleman and Hoffer collected quantitative data of 28,000 students in total 1,015 public, Catholic and other private high schools in America from the 7 years’ period from 1980 to 1987.^[38] It was found from this longitudinal research that social capital in students' families and communities attributed to the much lower dropout rates in Catholic schools compared with the higher rates in public.

Morgan and Sorensen^[39] however directly challenge Coleman for his lacking of an explicit mechanism to explain why Catholic schools students perform better than public school students on standardised tests of achievement.^[40] Researching students in Catholic schools and public schools again, they propose two comparable models of social capital effect on mathematic learning. One is on Catholic schools as norm-enforcing schools whereas another is on public schools as horizon-expanding schools. It is found that while social capital can bring about positive effect of maintaining an encompassing functional community in norm-enforcing schools, it also brings about the negative consequence of excessive monitoring. Creativity and exceptional achievement would be repressed as a result. Whereas in horizon expanding school, social closure is found to be negative for student's mathematic achievement. These schools explore a different type of social capital, such as information about opportunities in the extended social networks of parents and other adults. The consequence is that more learning is fostered than norm-enforcing Catholic school students. In sum, Morgan and Sorensen’s (1999) study implies that social capital is contextualised, one kind of social capital may be positive in this setting but is not necessarily still positive in another setting. ^[39]

Teachman et al.^[41] further develop the family structure indicator suggested by Coleman. They criticise Coleman, who used only the number of parents present in the family, neglected the unseen effect of more discrete dimensions such as stepparents' and different types of single-parent families. They take into account of a detailed counting of family structure, not only with two biological parents or stepparent families, but also with types of single-parent families with each other (mother-only, father-only, never-married, and other). They also contribute to the literature by measuring parent-child interaction by the indicators of how often parents and children discuss school-related activities.

In their journal article “Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children”, Sampson et al.^[42] stress the normative or goal-directed dimension of social capital. They claim, "resources or networks alone (e.g. voluntary associations, friendship ties, organisational density) are neutral--- they may or may not be effective mechanism for achieving intended effect"^[43]

Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston^[44] in their study of a Vietnamese community in New Orleans find that preserving traditional ethnic values enableimmigrants to integrate socially and to maintain solidarity in an ethnic community. Ethnic solidarity is especially important in the context where immigrants just arrive in the host society. In her article “Social Capital in Chinatown”, Zhou examines how the process of adaptation of youngChinese Americans is affected by tangible forms of social relations between the community, immigrant families, and the younger generations.^[45] Chinatown serves as the basis of social capital that facilitates the accommodation of immigrant children in the expected directions. Ethnic support provides impetus to academic success. Furthermore maintenance of literacy in native language also provides a form of social capital that contributes positively to academic achievement. Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch^[46] found that bilingual students were more likely to obtain the necessary forms of institutional support to advance their school performance and their life chances.

Maljoribanks and Kwok^[47] conducted a survey in Hong Kong secondary schools with 387 fourteen-year-old students with an aim to analyse female and male adolescents differential educational achievement by using social capital as the main analytic tool. In that research, social capital is approved of its different effects upon different genders.

Putnam (2000) mentioned in his book Bowling Alone, "Child development is powerfully shaped by social capital" and continued "presence of social capital has been linked to various positive outcomes, particularly in education".^[48] According to his book these positive outcomes are the result of parents' social capital in a community. States where there is a high social capital, there is also a high Education performance.^[49] The similarity of these states is that parents were more associated with their children' education. When there is more parents' participation to their children' education and school, teachers have reported these engagements lower levels of students misbehavior, such as bringing weapons to school, engaging in physical violence, playing hooky, and being generally apathetic about education.^[50] From these Putnam's arguments and evidents in order to find out relationship between social capital and education, one needs to consider amount of parents engagement to education and a school and existence of amount of social capital in a community. Borrowing Coleman's quotation from Putnam's book, Coleman once mentioned we cannot understate "the importance of the embeddedness of young persons in the enclaves of adults most proximate to them, first and most prominent the family and second, a surrounding community of adults".^[51]