Exploratory Behavior Scale (EBS)
Category: Student Learning
Local civic infrastructures—the networks of organizations, relations, and community resources supporting schools—can shape education policy and practice, yet evidence of their relationship to student outcomes remains limited. We examine this relationship using a novel panel dataset of US education nonprofits from 2010 to 2019, geocoded and linked to over 10,000 school districts. Grassroots nonprofits like parent-teacher groups and fundraising organizations are consistently associated with higher test scores, whereas professional nonprofits like research/advocacy and school support organizations are not. These patterns hold across measures of nonprofit presence and density but vary systematically across specific contexts: the associations are concentrated in high- and middle-SES districts, and in rural districts, both grassroots and professional nonprofits are positively associated with test score gains. Fixed-effects models attenuate these relationships, suggesting that associations operate less through short-term organizational addition and more through durable differences in local civic infrastructures. Our study provides the first national evidence on how nonprofits relate to student achievement, theorizes the role of civic infrastructures on educational opportunities/inequalities, and establishes a foundation for future quantitative investigations.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/pj77-qb13
