DONDENA Seminar - Christiaan Monden

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"Do Children Perform Better in Religious Schools? Evidence From Dutch Population Data”

SPEAKER: Christiaan Monden (University of Oxford) 

ABSTRACT:

Religious schools enjoy a high academic reputation among parents in many societies. Previous studies that assessed the effect of religious schools mostly focused on Catholic schools and were conducted in countries where religious schools are private or where they charge fees and set admission criteria. As a result, the effect of religious schooling could not be separated from the effect of private schooling. We contribute to the literature by studying the effect of six most prominent religious school denominations in the Netherlands, a country in which both public and religious schools are publicly funded already since 1917, schooling is free of charge and admission is independent of the child’s religious or ideological character. We use Dutch data that include the entire population of children born between 1999 and 2007. Combining postcode fixed effects models with treatment effect bounds, we find that children in religious schools outperform children in public schools on a high-stakes standardized test in primary education. The benefits of primary religious schooling were largest for children in Orthodox Protestant, Islamic and Hindu schools, which mostly attract children from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background. However, the influence of religious schooling fades out by the end of secondary education.

BIO:

Christiaan Monden is a Professor of Sociology and Demography at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. He focuses on sociological and demographic questions related to family, health and mortality, and social inequality. Broadly, he is interested in how societies differ in who lives with whom, who receives how much of the good and bad things in life, and how (mis)fortune in life relates to family background. Previous projects include FamSizeMatters, an ERC-funded project on the link between family size and composition and the (reproduction of) social inequalities, Global Family Change, and Critical Life Events and Dynamics of Inequality. Education serves as a major focal point in these projects. Current projects include a study of religious education and the partner choice of adult children from ethnically mixed marriages. Before joining Oxford, Christiaan worked at Tilburg University and obtained his undergraduate degree from Utrecht University and his PhD from Nijmegen University.