Chapter 10: Social Capital Resources in Schools: Explaining Effective School Community

Many quantitative studies limit analyses of teachers’ influence on student learning to associations with teachers’ gender, race, ethnicity, teaching tenure/experience, and university prestige (Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004; Wayne & Youngs, 2003). If we subscribe to the idea that teachers and the school environments create student learning environments (Waller, 1932), we need to better understand how certain schools produce more effective learning environments than schools with otherwise similar human capital resources. Thus, this study uses teacher network data of the ego, alter, and organization to understand the social capital resources that differentiate aspects of school communities. It is important to understand how various social capital aspects compose school communities so that we can then think about how to create and sustain effective school communities for student learning.