Article Trust and Parents’ Involvement in Schools of Choice Michal Strier and Hagai Katz Abstract 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. Keywords generalized trust, particularized trust, parental involvement, schools of choice, democratic schools Introduction Education researchers and policy makers have been focusing increasingly for the last few decades on parental involvement in schools, demonstrating that parental involvement has important influ- ences on school climate, on student achievement and teacher performance, as well as on other aspects of the school’s educational concept, functioning and quality (Epstein and Becker, 1982; Bronfenbrenner, 1986; Epstein 1990, 1995, 2001; Comer and Haynes, 1991; Chavkin, 1993; Fan and Chen, 2001). A link between trust and parental involvement in school was found in previous studies of parents’ involvement in education (Adams and Christenson, 2000; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005). However, these studies did not examine different directions and types of trust, such as trust by parents toward school staff and the school community. Likewise, no reference was made concerning potential negative implications of the programs that attempt to strengthen specific types of trust, with the aim of enhancing parental involvement in school. In this research we exam- ined how different types of trust within the school-of-choice setting affect active and passive Corresponding author: Michal Strier, Department of Public Policy and Administration, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, POB 653, Be’er-Sheva, 84105, Israel. Email: strier@kaye.ac.il Educational Management Administration & Leadership 1–17 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1741143214558569 emal.sagepub.com 1 at BEN GURION UNIV NEGEV on February 26, 2015 ema.sagepub.com Downloaded from