School-Based Parental Involvement: Community and Student Outcomes

Encouraging parents' involvement in school is a longstanding feature of U.S. education policy. Despite this, we know little about the potential school-wide effects of parental involvement. Community-oriented forms of involvement can direct parental resources broadly and may be a source of public goods with widespread benefits for schools. This study uses ECLS-K:2011 data to examine the association between schools' public-good parental involvement and school community outcomes, student behaviors, and student learning. To mitigate confounding, I control for a rich set of covariates including more private forms of parental involvement. I find that schools with higher levels of public-good parental involvement experience some school community benefits like larger parental networks, but involvement does not produce more learning or substantially improved behavior. These patterns suggest limited community-wide effects of parental involvement in school.