Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?
American Economic Review
vol. 110,
no. 5, May 2020
(pp. 1502-39)
Abstract
School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City's centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.Citation
Abdulkadiroğlu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, and Christopher R. Walters. 2020. "Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?" American Economic Review, 110 (5): 1502-39. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20172040Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D12 Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
- H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
- I21 Analysis of Education
- I26 Returns to Education
- I28 Education: Government Policy