Trust and parents’ involvement in schools of choice

Education researchers and policymakers have been focusing for the last three decades on increasing parental involvement in schools. Their work focused on the positive effects that parental involvement has on varied aspects of school quality and functioning. In this study we examined ‘trust’, a known predictor of parental involvement in schools. Specifically we examined how generalized trust and different types of particularized trust affect parental active and passive participation in schools of choice, through multivariate logistic regression analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) of data from a survey of 404 parents in 12 Israeli Democratic Schools. Our findings show that different types of trust have diverse direct, indirect and sometimes paradoxical effects on parent participation in schools of choice. Following these findings we suggest that educators and policymakers should consider the positive and negative implications of our findings when planning programs of parental involvement.