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Parents and communities
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Understanding the factors that influence student outcomes is crucial for both parents and schools when designing effective educational strategies. This paper explores the impact of peer age on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes using a randomized sample of middle school students. By analyzing how exogenous variations in peer age affect students' academic performance, self-expectations and confidence, health perceptions, behavioral traits, and social development, we highlight the important role that peer age plays in educational contexts. Our findings reveal that an increase in the average age of classmates results in negative effects on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of a student. We also identify significant heterogeneous effects based on student relative age and gender. We delve into potential mechanisms behind these effects and study inputs from the perspective of student themselves, parents, teachers, and the school within the framework of the education production function. The results suggest that students' persistence in their studies, the quality of friendships, and the school environment they are exposed to are the primary drivers of our main findings. These findings underscore the importance of addressing age disparities within classrooms to enhance students' cognitive and non-cognitive development.
Children spend most of their time at home in their early years, yet efforts to promote human capital at home in many low- and middle-income settings remain limited. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention which encourages parents and caregivers to foster human capital accumulation among their children between ages 3 and 5, with a focus on math and phonics skills. Children gain 0.52 and 0.51 standard deviations relative to the control group on math and phonics tests, respectively (p<0.001). A year later effects persist, but math gains dissipate to 0.15 (p=0.06) and phonics to 0.13 (p=0.12). Effects appear to be mediated largely through instructional support by parents and not other parent investment mechanisms, such as more positive parent-child interactions or additional time spent on education at home beyond the intervention. Our results show that parents can be effective conduits of educational instruction even in low-resource settings.
The immediate impacts of COVID-19 on K12 schooling are well known. Over nearly 18 months, students’ academic performance and mental health deteriorated dramatically. This study aims to identify if and how the pandemic led to longer-term changes in core aspects of schooling. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 31 teachers and administrators across 12 districts in two states, we find that schools today look quite different in several areas including the availability and use of instructional technology, instructional practice, parent-teacher communication, and the balance between academics and social-emotional well-being. We interpret these findings through the lens of institutional theory, and discuss implications of the changes for practitioners and policymakers.
This paper reports findings from a nationally representative survey of K-12 teachers in May 2023 that examines the potential long-term impacts of COVID-19 on public schooling. The findings suggest fundamental ways in which school operations, instructional practice and parent-teacher interaction have changed since the pandemic. Some changes seem promising; others suggest caution. While policymakers may not be able to directly influence some of the reported changes in the short run, monitoring the evolution of school practices (and their consequences for children) will position educational leaders to help teachers and students address the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic going forward.
A digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinized whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information– school quality data– and neighborhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles Times’ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxy– schools’ value-added effectiveness– for nearly all elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results suggest that although the information shock had no detectable effects on residential sorting or neighborhood racial segregation, it did exert modest effects on school sorting—particularly for Latino and Asian students— albeit not in ways that materially diminished school racial segregation because the racial compositions of high- and low value-added schools were broadly similar both before and after the information shock. We conclude that the urban stratification implications of digital information may be more nuanced than often appreciated, with effects shaped by racial heterogeneity in both constraints and preferences vis-à-vis specific types of information and operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation.
This paper presents causal evidence on the impact of parenting practices on early child development. We exploit exogenous changes in nurturing care induced by a parent training intervention to estimate the impact of nurturing parenting practices on child outcomes. We find a large and significant impact measured at age two; in contrast, at age four nurturing care has only a modest, and imprecisely estimated, impact on child outcomes. This is despite the fact that the intervention induced substantial changes in parenting practices at both ages. The differential relationship between child development and nurturing care at ages two and four explains the fade-out in treatment effects for the intervention as a whole: although parents continued to respond, their response no longer had the intended effect on child outcomes.
As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children—through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to better understand mothers’ and families’ constraints. We first show that mothers of children in full-day kindergarten spend significantly more time at work, less time with their children, less time performing household duties, and less time commuting with their children in the middle of the day relative to mothers with half-day kindergarteners. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time from 1992 through 2022, combined with the narrow age targeting of kindergarten, we document the impact of full-day kindergarten access on parental labor supply, family childcare costs, and children’s subsequent academic outcomes. Our estimates of the maternal employment effects imply that full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergarten-aged children in this time frame.
We develop a multi-agent model of the education production function where investments of students, parents, and teachers are linked to the presence of minorities in the classroom. We then test the key implications of this model using rich survey data and a mandate to randomly assign students to classrooms. Consistent with our model, we show that exposure to minority peers decreases student effort, parental investments, and teacher engagement and it results in lower student test scores. Observables correlated with minority status explain less than a third of the reduced-form test score effect while over a third can be descriptively attributed to endogenous responses of the agents.
Home-visitation programs have improved child development in low- and middle-income countries, but they are costly to scale due to their reliance on trained workers. We evaluated an inexpensive and low-tech alternative with 2,433 caregivers of children aged 6 to 30 months served by 250 public childcare centers in Uttarakhand, India: automated phone calls offering parenting advice. The intervention was implemented largely as intended, with more than two-thirds of caregivers completing at least 10 calls. Yet, counter to expectations, it had negative but statistically insignificant effects on caregivers’ knowledge and interactions with their children, reduced their self-efficacy (by 0.11 standard deviations), and increased their anxiety (by 0.10 standard deviations). Consistent with this pattern, it had precisely estimated null effects on children’s development and language. An analysis of program materials suggests four reasons why the program may not have had the desired effects.