حفظ هویت دینی از طریق آموزش و پرورش: تجزیه و تحلیل اقتصادی و شواهد از ایالات متحده

This paper models the decision of religious parents to send their children to private religious schools as reflecting their desire to shield their children from external influences and thus preserve their religious identity. It follows that when the share of the minority in the local population grows—and outside influences become less threatening—the demand for separate religious schooling among the members of the religious group decreases. This pattern implies concavity in the relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population. We present empirical evidence from United States county data on Catholic and private school enrollment that strongly supports our theory. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the demand for religious education.

Religious and ethnic minority groups try to preserve their religious values and their group identity through different channels, such as marrying within the group, wearing traditional clothing and congregating in segregated communities. This paper considers the role of private religious education in this light. Recognizing that the vast majority of private school (K-12) pupils in the United States attend religious schools, and that a large majority of these children attendschools affiliated with their own denominations, we contend that many religious households send their children to these schools in an effort to preserve the religious identity of their children.1 As such, we extend previous studies of school choice that ignore the religious motive in private education and model the demand for private schooling as motivated only by differences in desired school quality.2 We address this issue directly by extending existing models of school choice to a model that explicitly incorporates the specific role of education in preserving religious identity. Our model recognizes two types of households: religious and non-religious, and three types of schools: public, private-secular and private-religious.3 In the model, religious parents send their children to private religious schools to shelter them from outside influences and preserve their religious identity. 4 Consequently, when the share of the religious group in the local population is larger, outside influences are less threatening, and so their need for private religious education decreases. Thus, the share of the religious group in the population has two opposite effects on the demand for religious schooling. On the one hand, holding constant the proportion of parents from the religious group who send their children to religious schooling, there is a positive linear relationship between the demand for religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the general population. On the other, as the share of the religious group in the population grows, a smaller share of parents from the religious group chooses religious schooling. This pattern implies a concave relationship between enrollment in private and religious schooling and the share of the religious group in the population.5 Many studies on education attest to the importance of a religious or a cultural motive in school choice. Tyack [63], describing the organizational revolution that took place in American schooling in the nineteenth century, notes that “[o]ften at stake in the pluralistic politics of urban education were issues that were more cultural than economic. Many citizens who sought to influence school policies were not interested in jobs or contracts or favorable tax assessments but rather in an imposition of their values on others or in freedom to affirm their subculture in their own school” (p. 104). Tyack goes on to describe the struggle between the Protestant majority and Catholic and Jewish immigrant groups on the place of religion in public schools; and the efforts that Germans exercised in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other places, to promote bilingualism in local public schools. Similarly, Paley [48] describes the tradeoff that African-Americansin Chicago faced between sending their children to low quality black public schools or exposing them to the undesired “white culture” of integrated schools. Numerous studies claim that the emergence of Catholic schooling in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century occurred as a response to an anti-Catholic bias in a public education system that strongly promoted Protestant values (La Belle and Ward [38], Sander [53], Walch [73], Youniss and Convey [76]). According to McDonald [44] “the growth and development of American Catholic schools in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries was rooted in a clear sense of purpose and identity. Defense of the faith, enculturation, and escape from religious and ethnic prejudice were significant factors in the creation of these schools” (p. 211). Our basic assumption that parents use education to preserve the religious identity of their children is grounded in the extensive literature on religious choice, which shows that religion-specific capital formation plays a key role in determining adherence to a particular religious group, and that people with greater amounts of religion-specific human capital are more capable of appreciating and producing religious commodities of that specific group (Greeley [23], Iannaccone [30,31,33], Chiswick [7], Durkin and Greeley [12]). Furthermore, since most religious capital is group-specific (denominations differ from one another), adults generally adopt the religious values of the denomination to which they were exposed in their childhood (Iannaccone [33]). This phenomenon motivates parents to use religious schooling as a tool to preserve the religious identity of their children. Our theoretical result that an individual’s religious motive for private religious education diminishes with the size of his religious group in the local population accords with several empirical findings showing that religious activities of a denomination are more intensive when its share in the local population is smaller. For example, Iannaccone [32] finds that among seventeen Western countries, religious commitment decreased as the Protestant share in the population increased. Similarly, Stark and McCann [62] bring evidence that Catholic commitment is inversely related to the proportion of Catholics in the population, and Stark [61] shows that among fortyfive traditionally Christian countries, the Catholic share varies inversely with the ratio of priests to parishioners. Zalenski and Zech [77] find that both Catholic and mainline Protestants have higher rates of financial giving in areas where they are a small proportion of the population. Perl and Olson [49] obtain similar results for five denominations. Last, from an economic perspective, by estimating the structural parameters of a model of marriage and child socialization in the United States, Bisin et al. [3] found that “as a group grows towards being a majority, marriage segregation and socialization efforts become decreasing in the group’s population share” (p. 618). However, this rule is not without its exceptions. Phillips [50] shows that Mormon church activity is greater where Mormons are a larger percentage of the population, and Gruber [24] finds that the share of a religious group in the local population has a significant positive effect on the level of religious participation in that group. We apply our model to the case of Catholic schooling in the United States by first estimating the ratio of Catholic enrollment to Catholic members as a function of the share of Catholics in the population and then by estimating the relationship between local private and Catholic school enrollment rates and the share of Catholics in the local population across almost all United States counties. Our empirical analysis contributes to the existing school-choice literature (Clotfelter [8], Sonstelie [60], James [34], Hamilton and Macauley [26], Chiswick and Koutroumanes [6], Hofernning and Chiswick [29], among many others) in two main dimensions: First, it is the first study to estimate the determinants of local Catholic enrollment rates (as distinct from private enrollment). Second, it presents an explicit formal model that explains the observed strongconcave effect that the share of Catholics in the local population has on the demand for Catholic schooling. The results reveal that the ratio of Catholic enrollment to Catholic members is a decreasing function of the share of Catholic in the local population. They also show that the relationship between both the Catholic and private enrollment rates and the share of Catholics in the population is strongly concave, which implies that there is a stage at which both enrollment rates stop to increase, if not slightly decrease, in the share of Catholics in the local population. These findings are robust to several econometric specifications. Taken together, the empirical estimation strongly supports our theoretical results, and sheds new light on the demand for private religious education in the United States. Obviously, there may also be other mechanisms that can explain the strong concave relationship between the local Catholic enrollment rate and the share of Catholics in the local population. However, our mechanism rests on an extensive sociological literature, and is supported by studies that deal with the history of Catholic schooling in America. Finke and Stark [16], for example, conclude that “American Catholics, though repeatedly denied any public funding or relief from public school taxes, set out to create a separate school system. The official aim was to provide a school in every parish. Many parishes found that they didn’t really need to maintain a parochial school, however, because their community (or their neighborhood) was so overwhelmingly Catholic that the public school sufficed” (p. 147, italics are mine). The negative effect that the share of Catholics in the population has on the ratio of Catholic enrollment to Catholic members, and the concave effect that it has on local private and Catholic school enrollment rates implies that in localities where registration in public schools is dominated by co-religionists, parents are less inclined to opt for private education. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the structure of demand for religious schooling. In addition, they also contribute to the ongoing debate among sociologists of religion whether religious market share (the share of a religious group in the local population) has a positive or a negative effect on religious participation. According to the traditional paradigm, religions gain their power from universality. Therefore, a larger share of a specific religious group in the population is expected to generate a higher level of participation among the members of this group (Berger [1]). On the other hand, the new paradigm claims that competition and pluralism enhance religious participation (Iannaccone [32], Finke and Stark [17], Stark and McCann [62], among many others). In this case, as the share of a specific religious group increases, the level of competition it faces from other religious groups weakens, which in turn decreases the rate of participation among the members of the group. For example, Finke and Stark [16] point to the fact that “the great majority of people in ‘Catholic’ nations are not very good Catholics, in that they seldom attend mass, rarely participate in the sacraments, and do not contribute money to the church (Martin [42], Stark [61]). Ironically, it is only where the Catholic Church is in the minority and is somewhat embattled that it can generate the vigorous participation we have come to associate with American Catholicism (Stark and McCann [62]). In the United States, the Roman Catholic church became an extremely effective and competitive religious firm when forced to confront a free market religious economy” (p. 117, italics are mine). Our finding that as the share of Catholics in the population increases a lower share of Catholics sends their children to Catholic schools provides evidence in support of the new paradigm. The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, we describe the model and derive analytical results. Section 3 considers the data and empirical results, and Section 4 concludes with a brief summary.

This paper shows that in localities where registration in public schools is dominated by coreligionists parents are less inclined to opt for private religious education. According to our model,the reason for this finding is that parents want to preserve the religious identity of their children and religious identity is very much influenced by the identity of the other pupils in the school. In this case, a public school full of coreligionists can substitute somewhat for a religious private school.23 This finding contributes to a better understanding of the demand for private religious education, and can also help to achieve better predictions of private and Catholic enrollment rates as a function of local demographic variables. From a policy perspective, our findings also have implications for analyzing the impact of voucher programs on the demand for different type of schools, especially in light of the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, where the US Supreme Court ruled that publicly funded voucher programs including religious schools do not necessarily violate the constitutional separation of church and state. According to our results, the propensity of a Catholic parent to use vouchers to switch from public to Catholic schooling diminishes as the share of Catholics in the population increases. Thus, other things being equal, in localities where the share of Catholics is smaller, a higher share of Catholic parents are likely to use vouchers.