No abstract

A persistent fear regarding school choice is that it will lead to more racially distinctive schools. A growing number of studies compares choosing households to non-choosing households, but few have examined the possibility that choosers sort themselves out based upon school preferences that are correlated with race and ethnicity. This report addresses this issue by analyzing the responses of 1,006 charter school households in Texas. It first examines the expressed preferences of choosing households, then compares expressed preferences with behavior. A comparison of the characteristics of the traditional public schools that choosers leave with the characteristics of the charter schools they choose indicates that race is a good predictor of the choices that choosing households make. Whites, African Americans, and Latinos transfer into charter schools where their groups comprise between 11 and 14 percentage points more of the student body than the traditional public schools they are leaving. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.A common assumption made by students of socialization is that the family is the major source of cultural transmission in society. The child is said to mirror his parents on a wide variety of social and political values. Ernest Campbell, writing in the 1969 edition of the Handbook of Socialization, claims that "we would be exceedingly surprised were we to discover, in research on any factor whatsoever, that a knowledge of the parents' position or score on a factor did not predict positively to the score of the adolescent."2 This general conception is reflected in works concerned specifically with political socialization. Roberta Sigel asserts, "The similarity of views between parents and children on such issues as foreign affairs, civil rights, economics and many other vital topics of the day is truly phenomenal."3 Herbert Hyman, in a general review of the empirical research related to the transmission of political attitudes (pre-1960), finds this research to ". . . establish very clearly a family correspondence in views that are relevant to matters of political orientation. Over a great many such correlations from different studies, the median value approximates .50."4 Recently, however, the effectiveness of the family, notably the parents, in the transmission of certain political values has been called into question. R. W. Connell, referring explicitly to Hyman's review, asserts that almost all investigations which report high correlation coefficients between parent-child attitudes have a "self-selec-tion" bias in their sampling procedure. This bias, he argues, artificially inflates relationships, leading to an overestimate of the influence parents have on the political attitudes of their children.5 Post-1960 empirical evidence lends support to this contention. Based on the University of Chicago socialization study, Robert Hess and Judith Torney assert that the family has little, if any ability to transmit idiosyncratic attitudes. Rather, its influence is limited to partisanship and to reinforcing those attitudes consensually held.6 The same inference can be drawn from the family socialization project carried out by the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center. In the currently most influential intergenerational study, "The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child," M. Kent Jennings and Richard Niemi report relatively low correlations between attitudes held by parents and those held by their adolescent children. Over a range of issues, excluding party identification, the highest coefficient of association was found to be .34, and most coefficients were considerably lower.7But even in this critical light, it is apparent that parents do influence the attitudes of...

Using a sample of 628 white, black, and Hispanic voters in a large urban school district, we test a series of hypotheses about voting in a school bond election. We find that there is a core of similar results across racial/ethnic groups. All three groups show strong, directly measured, self‐interest effects. We also find some distinct group differences. Symbolic values played a limited role for white voters, but a stronger role for minorities. In addition, for white voters we find a substantial drop in support for the bond across age cohorts, but no such drop among black and Hispanic voters.

The manifestations of party polarization in America are well known: legislative gridlock, harsh elite rhetoric, and at the level of the electorate, increasing hostility across the partisan divide. We investigate the ramifications of polarization for processes of family socialization. Using the classic 1965 Youth-Parent Political Socialization Panel data as a baseline, we employ original national surveys of spouses and offspring conducted in 2015 supplemented by the 2014 and 2016 TargetSmart national voter files to demonstrate that political correspondence between married couples and parentoffspring agreement have both increased substantially in the polarized era. We further demonstrate that the principal reason for increased spousal correspondence is mate selection based on politics. Spousal agreement, in turn, creates an "echo chamber" that facilitates intergenerational continuity. Overall, our results suggest a vicious cycle by which socialization exacerbates party polarization.