James S. Coleman, the University of Chicago sociologist, has new research showing that the high school
dropout rate in Roman Catholic schools is much lower than in other private schools or in public schools.
And Dr. Coleman thinks he knows why.
Re-examining data gathered from 1,015 schools across the country for a study of public and private high
schools published in 1982, Dr. Coleman and his co-author, Thomas Hoffer, found that 14 percent of the
sophomores in public schools had left school without graduating. Among non-Catholic private schools, 12
percent had left, and in the Catholic schools only 3 percent dropped out.
''We concluded that the community surrounding the Catholic school, in effect this church-and-schoolcommunity with its social networks and its norms about what teen-agers should or should not do and its
attention to and interest in children and youth, constituted 'social capital' beyond the family that aided both
family and school in the education of the family's children,'' Dr. Coleman told a group of private school
officials recently. A Close, Supportive Community
Bolstering his conclusion about the key importance of this kind of social community was the finding that in
public schools, children from single-parent households were more likely to drop out than those from twoparent households. But in Catholic schools there was no difference in the two groups' dropout rates.
Dr. Coleman said that was because the Catholic school children were often from a close, supportive
community, where parents knew each other and participated in activities together.
Dr. Coleman made his remarks at the annual conference of the National Association of Independent
Schools, which was held in New York in late February. He said his research showed the kind of
homogeneous group he was describing did not exist for most other kinds of schools.
He also said that even though parents often shared the same values in those schools, they often did not
know each other and seldom shared a sense of community. Minimal Social Benefits
The social benefits available to children in independent schools is often minimal, he said, because
children enter as individuals and there is no community of parents who shape the norms of behavior
outside school. There are usually many extracurricular activities available at independent schools, he
added, and these create a community that provide a certain amount of ''social capital.''
Where public schools were situated in a close-knit homogeneous community, Dr. Coleman did find the
dropout rate was considerably lower than in public schools in general.
The findings have been published by Basic Books in ''Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of
Community.'' It is a follow-up to ''High School Achievement,'' the study by the two authors and Sally
Kilgore that caused a furor when it was published in 1982. It contended that private school students
achieved higher mathematics and verbal skills than students from comparable social and economic
backgrounds who went to public schools.
Dr. Coleman also caused a stir in 1975 when he reversed an earlier position concluding that courtordered busing was a failure and that schools could do little to overcome the negative effects of poverty.
Erosion of Support Seen
Dr. Coleman is bothered by what he sees as the erosion of communities like the ones from which
Catholic schools draw heavily. He said this had hurt the social benefits for children in the United States
and other Western countries.
For example, he said, mothers who work outside the home have less time for the kind of groups that
provide direct social benefits to their children, such as Parent Teacher Associations or scouting
organizations.
The cost of this will be borne by future generations, Dr. Coleman said, particularly by children with the
weakest family support.
''The world has changed,'' he said. ''Those of us who live in the West live in an individualist world, each
narcissistically concerned with his or her own self-development, with little left over for children and
certainly not for others' children.''
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/30/us/education-low-dropout-rate-at-catholic-schools-linked-to-socialties.html