Effects of School Quality on Student Achievement: Discontinuity Evidence from Kenya

Adrienne Lucas and Isaac Mbiti

No 14-03, Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics

Abstract: The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of attending one of these elite public schools on student progression and test scores in secondary school. Despite their reputations, we find little evidence of positive impacts on learning outcomes for students who attended these schools, suggesting that their sterling reputations reflect the selection of students rather than their ability to generate value-added test-score gains.

Keywords: Education; Kenya; returns to secondary school (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (75)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECO ... 2014/UDWP2014-03.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2014/UDWP2014-03.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://lerner.udel.edu/sites/default/files/ECON/PDFs/RePEc/dlw/WorkingPapers/2014/UDWP2014-03.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Effects of School Quality on Student Achievement: Discontinuity Evidence from Kenya (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dlw:wpaper:14-03.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Delaware, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Saul Hoffman ().