Parents who experience poverty and who want to provide their children with an escape route can be expected to encourage and support their progeny’s education. The evidence that Roma parents behave differently is unsettling. In this paper we test empirically an explanation for that behavior. The explanation is based on a theory (Stark et al. 2018) that can be “borrowed” to rationalize the enforcement of norms of little formal education in underprivileged communities. An analysis of survey data collected in Roma communities in four Central and Eastern European countries lends support to the explanation. The analysis reveals a strong negative correlation between the influence of the Roma community on an individual member’s life and the importance accorded by the individual to formal schooling for children. The correlation is robust to controlling for standard determinants of attitudes towards schooling, such as poverty, unemployment, labor market discrimination, and parents’ educational attainment. The analysis suggests that policy interventions aiming to increase the formal education of Roma children need to reckon with the influence of Roma community norms on individual choices.

遇到贫困并希望为子女提供逃生路线的父母可以鼓励和支持其后代的教育。罗姆人父母行为不同的证据令人不安。在本文中，我们通过经验测试了对该行为的解释。该解释基于一种理论（Stark等人，2018年），该理论可以“借用”以合理化贫困社区中很少接受正规教育的规范的实施。对中欧和东欧四个国家罗姆人社区收集的调查数据进行的分析为这一解释提供了支持。分析表明，罗姆人社区对个人成员生活的影响与个人对儿童正规教育的重视程度之间存在强烈的负相关性。这种关联对于控制诸如贫困，失业，劳动力市场歧视和父母的受教育程度等对上学态度的标准决定因素具有鲁棒性。分析表明，旨在增加罗姆儿童正规教育的政策干预措施，需要考虑到罗姆人社区规范对个人选择的影响。