“Soft skills” and the ballot box
Our findings show that charter schools promote academic achievement and civic engagement. The question then arises: How? What aspects of education contribute to students' likelihood of voting as adults?
We consider five possible explanations for why education increases voting: cognitive skill development, civic skills, social networks, the degree to which charter attendance politicizes students, and non-cognitive skills. is. The finding of gender gaps in voting allows us to identify proxies for these mechanisms and test their respective effects. If the gender gap found in voting also exists in proxy indicators, that mechanism most likely explains the increased civic engagement of female charter school graduates.
For example, to assess whether improvements in cognitive skills help explain why better-educated citizens are more likely to vote, we tested reading and math tests for men and women in our sample. Compare the impact of charter attendance on average scores. Mathematics scores increased significantly for both men and women alike, but the positive impact on reading was slightly larger for men. These effects do not reflect the women-only effect of attending a charter school on voting, so the development of cognitive skills does not appear to affect civic participation. More knowledge doesn't necessarily mean more votes.
We conducted similar proxy analyzes for four other mechanisms and found evidence that could explain Charter voting effects in one area: noncognitive skills. Although our data do not include direct measures of non-cognitive skills, such as survey-based measures of self-control and grit, they are related to persistence and persistence and are therefore correlated with high school attendance. I'm using his SAT as a proxy. Through. This approach builds on prior research and captures some of the attitudes and behaviors that students elicit to vote, as voting in the United States often involves navigating the registration process, planning ahead, and executing. I am.
Overall, students in charter schools attend an additional 12 days of instruction in grades 9 through 12 compared to students in non-charter schools. However, this effect is completely caused by girls. Charter female students attend school 22 more days than non-charter female students, but charter male students do not attend school more regularly than non-charter female students. We found similar, but not statistically significant, differences in SAT taking. Charter women are 8 percentage points more likely to take the SAT than non-charter women, whereas the effect of charter attendance on men is only 2 percentage points higher.
This evidence cannot prove that stronger non-cognitive skills increase turnout. But taken together, we find that the Charter appears to shift noncognitive skills toward girls more than boys, and that these differences are consistent with the patterns observed in vote share. Furthermore, the gender differences in noncognitive skill improvement that we observed are consistent with previous research. Research shows that girls enter kindergarten with better non-cognitive skills than boys, maintain that advantage through elementary school, and have better self-discipline than boys in eighth grade. It has been. Other research has found that these differences explain 40% of the gender gap in college admissions. Some research also shows that educational interventions can help girls acquire more non-cognitive skills, and that conscientiousness and emotional stability increase voter turnout among women, but not men. Therefore, perhaps due to socialization, girls are more likely to translate improvements in noncognitive skills into voting.
Although our study found that the main beneficiaries of civic benefits are young women, the contribution of education to voting need not operate only through girls. Interventions that improve boys' non-cognitive skills may have similar effects, but these have not been observed in this context. Schools in the United States, especially charter schools, may also be set up to specifically develop the skills of girls rather than boys. Previous research has primarily focused on the overall impact of non-cognitive skill development through social and emotional learning programs and documenting long-standing gender disparities in this area. Interventions that promote the development of noncognitive skills and other lagging outcomes in boys (see Spring 2023 review, “Getting Boys an Extra Year of School”), or school curricula that specifically target civic engagement. (See Civic Life Lessons, Summer Research) 2019) is an area ripe for further research.