Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg and Christopher Walters

No 23912, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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.

JEL-codes: I21 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Published as Atila Abdulkadiroğlu & Parag A. Pathak & Jonathan Schellenberg & Christopher R. Walters, 2020. "Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?," American Economic Review, vol 110(5), pages 1502-1539.

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