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attending private schools, especially Catholic schools. Several of these studies focus on
organizational differences between Catholic schools and public schools to explain these
differences in achievement. In this paper, we focus on Coleman and Hoffer’s (1987)
argument that students at Catholic schools perform better because of the existence of both
a values and functional community. One way to assess the impact of values community
is to examine the performance of magnet schools. These schools often form around a
specific curriculum, so they are likely to represent schools with a shared set of values.
We also operationalize values community by creating an index with five variables asking
teachers and an administrator about the school environment. These include asking both
the reading and math teacher whether they believe the staff has school spirit and whether
there is agreement on the school’s mission among teachers and administrators. We also
include a variable asking an administrator if there is consensus on expectations between
teachers and the administration. These five variables all capture the idea of consensus on
educational values. The Cronbach’s alpha for this variable is .72
We operatonalize a functional community using questions asked of both reading
and math teachers and an administrator about parental participation in school, and
misbehavior among students (asked of both teachers). Coleman and Hoffer (1987)
defined a functional community as one where there was closure between adults and
children, and adult, rather than peer group, norms were enforced. We would expect that
if a functional community exists, then parents would be involved in the school
community and misbehavior would not be a problem at the school. The Cronbach’s
alpha for this measure is .74
Convention