BOWLING ALONE
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One indication of the strong connection between social capital and child development is the remarkable convergence between the state-by-state Social Capital Index that we have constructed and a popular measure of child well-being (the Kids Count indexes published annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation).2 (Table 5 summarizes the measures that make up the Kids Count index of child welfare.)
STATES THAT SCORE HIGH on the Social Capital Index—that is, states whose residents trust other people, join organizations, volunteer, vote, and socialize with friends—are the same states where children flourish: where babies are born healthy and where teenagers tend not to become parents, drop out of school, get involved in violent crime, or die prematurely due to suicide or homicide. (See figure 81.) Statistically, the correlation between high social
Table 5: Kids Count Index of Child Welfare
Percent low-birth-weight babies
Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1,000 live births)
Child death rate (deaths per 100,000 children ages 1–14)
Deaths per 100,000 teens ages 15–19 by accident, homicide, and suicide
Teen birth rate (births per 1,000 females ages 15–17)
Percent of teens who are high school dropouts (ages 16–19)
Juvenile violent crime arrest rate (arrests per 100,000 youths ages 10–17)
Percent of teens not attending school and not working (ages 16–19)
Percent of children in poverty
Percent of families with children headed by a single parent
capital and positive child development is as close to perfect as social scientists ever find in data analyses of this sort.3 States such as North Dakota, Vermont, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa have healthy civic adults and healthy well-adjusted kids; other states, primarily those in the South, face immense challenges in both the adult and youth populations.
Of course, the mere fact that social capital is correlated with good outcomes for kids does not mean that social capital causes these outcomes or, conversely, that a social-capital deficit is leading kids to take wrong turns in life. Besides social capital, states also differ in many other ways that might influence child well-being—parental education levels, poverty rates, family structure, racial composition, and so forth. To make matters more complicated, social capital itself is associated with these factors. Thus states with disproportionately large numbers of poorly educated adults and low-income single-parent families tend not to have as many vibrant civic communities as do states where residents have the economic luxury and practical skills to participate. Because of this complicated set of relationships among child outcomes, social capital, and demographics, we must be vigilant not to draw spurious conclusions from the data. What we really want to know is whether the observed differences across states in child well-being are linked directly to social capital itself or to some other factor or factors that influence both child well-being and social capital.
Fortunately modern statistical tools help us to sort through the confusion by allowing us to hold constant other factors while examining the specific links between social capital and child well-being. In essence, our analysis finds that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics do matter—but so does social capital.4 Indeed, across the various Kids Count indicators, social capital is second only to poverty in the breadth and depth of its effects on children’s lives. While poverty is an especially potent force in increasing youth fertility, mortality, and idleness, community engagement has precisely the opposite effect. Social capital is especially important in keeping children from being born unhealthily small and in keeping teenagers from dropping out of school, hanging
Figure 81: Kids Are Better Off in High-Social-Capital States
out on the streets, and having babies out of wedlock. A state’s racial composition and rate of single-parent families also affect child well-being, though far less consistently or strongly than do poverty and low social capital. In general, the education level of the adult population does not have a significant independent influence on child outcomes, after poverty, social capital, and demographics are taken into account. A state’s social infrastructure is far more important than anyone would have predicted in ensuring the healthy development of youth.
Similar conclusions have been reached by scholars studying family life at the level of the neighborhood and even the individual family. Community psychologists have long noted that child abuse rates are higher where neighborhood cohesion is lower.5 For example, in a widely cited study of two neighborhoods, one with a high child maltreatment rate and the other with a low rate, social capital turned out to be the main factor that distinguished the two communities. These neighborhoods had similar income levels and similar rates of working women and single-parent households. However, in the high-risk neighborhoods, residents were far more reluctant to ask for help from a neighbor. Parents in the high-abuse area were also far less likely to report exchanging child care with a neighbor or allowing their kids to play with others in the neighborhood. Kids in low-risk neighborhoods were more than three times as likely as kids in high-risk areas to find a parent home after school. The authors of the study concluded that in areas with high abuse rates, a “family’s own problems seem to be compounded rather than ameliorated by the neighborhood context. Under such circumstances strong support systems are most needed, but least likely to operate.”6 Informal social networks help shield children from their parents’ worst moments.
Individual children at risk have proved particularly vulnerable to social-capital deficits. More hopefully, precisely such children are most susceptible to the positive benefits of social connectedness, if it can be provided. Pediatrician Desmond K. Runyan and his colleagues, for example, followed a large group of preschool children identified as at high risk of abuse and neglect. After several years fully 87 percent of these at-risk children were suffering from behavioral and emotional problems. However, the best predictor of which children successfully avoided such problems was the degree to which they and their mothers were enmeshed in a supportive social network, lived in a socially supportive neighborhood, and attended church regularly. As the authors conclude, even in these preschool years “the parents’ social capital … confers benefits on their off-spring, just as children benefit from their parents’ financial and human capital. Social capital may be most crucial for families who have fewer financial and educational resources.” Another study found that inner-city African American adolescents living in neighborhoods with relatively high levels of social capital were less depressed than those living in less close-knit neighborhoods; this positive effect of neighborhood support was especially marked for kids who lacked strong family ties. Similar results have been found in both urban and rural settings.7
Social capital matters for children’s successful development in life. We can draw the same conclusion about the link between social capital and school performance. The quality of American education has been of growing concern in recent decades; in fact, many knowledgeable observers believe that public schooling has reached a crisis.8
Yet not all states are faring poorly. Mirroring our findings on healthy children, those states with high social capital have measurably better educational outcomes than do less civic states. The Social Capital Index is highly correlated with student scores on standardized tests taken in elementary school, junior high, and high school, as well as with the rate at which students stay in school.9 (See figure 82.) The beneficial effects of social capital persist even after accounting for a host of other factors that might affect state educational success—racial composition, affluence, economic inequality, adult educational levels, poverty rates, educational spending, teachers’ salaries, class size,
Figure 82: Schools Work Better in High-Social-Capital States
family structure, and religious affiliation, as well as the size of the private-school sector (which might “cream” better students from public schools). Not surprisingly, several of these factors had an independent effect
on state test scores and dropout rates, but astonishingly, social capital was the single most important explanatory factor. In fact, our analysis suggests that for some outcomes—particularly SAT scores—the impact of race, poverty, and adult education levels is only indirect. These factors seem to influence the level of social capital in a state, and social capital—not poverty or demographic characteristics per se—drives test scores.10
Unexpectedly, the level of informal social capital in the state is a stronger predictor of student achievement than is the level of formal institutionalized social capital. In other words, level of social trust in a state and the frequency with which people connected informally with one another (in card games, visiting with friends, and the like) were even more closely correlated with educational performance than was the amount of time state residents devoted to club meetings, church attendance, and community projects. That is not to say that formal activities were unimportant. Rather, what this admittedly crude evidence is saying is that there is something about communities where people connect with one another—over and above how rich or poor they are materially, how well educated the adults themselves are, what race or religion they are—that positively affects the education of children. Conversely, even communities with many material and cultural advantages do a poor job of educating their kids if the adults in those communities don’t connect with one another. Sadly, the evidence of section II is that more and more American communities are like that.
One can see the importance of social capital by comparing specific examples. Take two medium-size states on the East Coast: North Carolina (ranked number forty-one in the nation in terms of SAT scores, achievement tests, and dropout rates) and Connecticut (ranked number nine). Controlling for all the other ways in which the two states differ (wealth and poverty, race, adult educational levels, urbanism, and so on), for North Carolina to see educational outcomes similar to Connecticut’s, according to our statistical analysis, residents of the Tar Heel State could do any of the following: increase their turnout in presidential elections by 50 percent; double their frequency of club meeting attendance; triple the number of nonprofit organizations per thousand inhabitants; or attend church two more times per month. These may seem like daunting challenges, requiring a great deal of community organizing, and in any event I do not mean to imply that the link between, say, adult club attendance and school performance is simple, direct, and mechanical. On the other hand, the data also suggest how hard it would be for North Carolina to match Connecticut’s performance simply through traditional educational reforms—by decreasing class size, for example. Because the effect of class size on state-level performance is modest by comparison to the effects of social capital, it would be virtually impossible to achieve the same progress simply by reducing class size.11 In reality, of course, a multipronged approach to improving education is needed, for there are no magic bullets; my point is merely that the potential leverage offered by social capital is surprisingly great compared to more conventional approaches.12
Why does the density of social connectedness in a state seem to have such a marked effect on how well its students perform in school? The honest answer is that we are not yet entirely sure, but we have some important clues. First, where civic engagement in community affairs in general is high, teachers report higher levels of parental support and lower levels of student misbehavior, such as bringing weapons to school, engaging in physical violence, playing hooky, and being generally apathetic about education. The correlation between community infrastructure, on the one hand, and student and parental engagement in schools, on the other hand, is very substantial even after taking into account other economic, social, and educational factors, like poverty, racial composition, family structure, educational spending, class size, and so forth. In light of the rash of deadly school violence in 1999 it is worth noting that among all these factors the strongest predictors of student violence across the states are two-parent families and community-based social capital, dwarfing the importance of such social conditions as poverty, urbanism, or levels of parental education. In short, parents in states with high levels of social capital are more engaged with their kids’ education, and students in states with high levels of social capital are more likely than students in less civic states to hit the books rather than to hit one another.13
A second reason why students perform better in states with high social capital may be that they spend less time watching TV. As figure 83 shows, the negative correlation between the average time that kids spend watching TV and the average level of adult civic engagement and social connectedness is quite powerful. (As always, we have checked to confirm that this relationship is not simply a spurious reflection of some other factor, such as poverty or race.) It seems likely that where community traditions of social involvement remain high, children are naturally drawn into more productive uses of leisure than where social connectedness and civic engagement among adults is limited.
This state-by-state analysis reconfirms decades of research showing that community involvement is crucial to schools’ success. These studies have found that student learning is influenced not only by what happens in school and at home, but also by social networks, norms, and trust in the school and in the wider community.14 Indeed, Parent-Teacher Associations were created to institutionalize social capital among parents, and between parents and teachers, so that schools could better meet their educational goals.
The decline in PTA membership over the past several decades reflects many parents’ disengagement from their children’s schooling. That decline is a shame, because research suggests that when parents and the wider community work with schools, students benefit in concrete and measurable ways. One of the earliest and most influential studies linking social capital to education was done by James Coleman, the late University of Chicago sociologist who laid the intellectual foundations for the study of social capital and its effects. Coleman was puzzled by the low dropout rates at Catholic and other religiously based high schools. Students in public high schools, for example, were three times as likely as Catholic high school students to drop out; students at non-Catholic private schools were more than twice as likely to drop out. In addition, Catholic schools were shown to be more effective in teaching mathematics and verbal skills to students. Coleman hypothesized that Catholic school success is due not to the particular characteristics of the individual students, but rather to the social structure enveloping the school: the students’ parents have multistranded relations with one another, both as fellow members of the local church and as parents of school chums. And these parent communities provide social resources to at-risk students and insulate the schools from pressures to water down their core curricula. In short, Coleman
Figure 83: Kids Watch Less TV in High-Social-Capital States
warned, we cannot understate “the importance of the embeddedness of young persons in the enclaves of adults most proximate to them, first and most prominently the family and second, a surrounding community of adults (exemplified in all these results by the religious community).”15 Unfortunately, the “functional communities” from which Catholic school students benefit have been eroding, because both the church and the family have lost strength and cohesion. This trend can be expected to harm kids of all socioeconomic groups, but especially the disadvantaged.
Educational researchers Anne Henderson and Nancy Berla have summarized a large number of studies tending to show that when parents are involved with their children’s education, children do better in school and the schools they attend are better. They conclude that “[t]he evidence is now beyond dispute. When schools work together with families to support learning, children tend to succeed not just in school, but throughout life…. When parents are involved in their children’s education at home, their children do better in school. When parents are involved at school, their children go further in school, and the schools they go to are better.”16
Moving from the community to the school level, ot
her research has found that social capital within the school walls has a plethora of benefits to students, teachers, and administrators. Studies going back at least thirty years have shown that smaller schools tend to outperform large schools in large part because smaller schools afford more opportunities and encouragement for students to engage with one another in face-to-face extracurricular activities and to take responsibility for school clubs and so forth.17
In large, multiyear studies of Chicago schools and of Catholic schools nationwide, Anthony S. Bryk and his colleagues have concluded that “communal” social capital and “relational trust” give some schools an enormous edge, even after accounting for differences in teacher backgrounds and student demographics. As communities of learning, Catholic schools differ in many ways from public high schools. Catholic schools are smaller, provide for more high-quality relationships between students and teachers in diverse settings, offer a wider range of interactive extracurricular programs, and are characterized by a high level of internal agreement about the school’s mission and values. According to Bryk and his colleagues, if an “average” public school adopted a “communal organization” similar to that of a demographically comparable Catholic school, the public school would see significant improvements in teacher and staff morale and in student interest in academics. The public school would also enjoy significant reductions in class cutting and classroom disorder.18 Like Coleman, Bryk and his colleagues conclude that Catholic schools do better than public schools not because the teachers or students are more qualified, but because “Catholic schools benefit from a network of social relations, characterized by trust, that constitute a form of ‘social capital.’ ”19