Schooling for citizenship?: Unpacking the relationship between education and voting

Public schools in the United States are charged with shaping their students into able citizens as well as productive workers. Recently, the former goal has fallen to the wayside (Labaree, 1997). Meanwhile, policy makers and the public have grown so concerned over perceptions that schools are failing to graduate productive workers that they have instituted a system of accountability that emphasizes student performance outcomes. While the current system of school accountability is not perfect with respect to measuring the production of future workers, it completely ignores the civic purposes of schooling.;Judging from the literature on voter turnout, we might be heartened to learn that schools seem to be living up to their civic goals. The ubiquitous positive association between education and turnout leads Converse (1972) to call education the "universal solvent". Indeed, the literature had come to take this relationship for granted until Brody (1978) noticed that the decrease in voter turnout since 1960 took place during a period of educational expansion and named this phenomenon the "puzzle of political participation". Based on this apparent contradiction, what should we conclude about our schools' ability to shape able citizens? Using the insights from political science and the sociology of education, the dissertation addresses this question by examining the following research questions. (1) Is the education-turnout relationship homogenous or does it vary across elections, cohorts and race-ethnicity? (2) How do schools influence future voting? (3) Is the association between education and voting causal?;Using data from the Current Population Survey, the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey, the analyses find (1) significant temporal and race-ethnic heterogeneity in the associations between education and both voter turnout and voluntary organization membership. The final two research questions are addressed with data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. These analyses find that (2) secondary schools and postsecondary schools shape voter behavior through the formal curriculum and opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities, net of school characteristics, social background, the home political environment and prior voting. Finally, (3) postsecondary enrollment and graduating with a four-year degree do have causal effects on voter turnout.