What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the Multidimensionality of School Output
Review of Economic Studies · 2022 · Diether Beuermann、C. Kirabo Jackson、Laia Navarro-Sola、Francisco Pardo Fabregat
中文摘要
为探究学校对考试成绩的因果影响能否衡量其对学生的总体影响，我们利用具有合理外生性的学校分配以及特立尼达和多巴哥的数据，估计各所学校对多项结果的因果影响。学校对高风险考试成绩的影响，与其对被捕、辍学、少女生育和正规劳动力市场参与等重要结果的影响仅存在较弱关联。为考察家长的学校偏好是否与这些因果影响相关，我们将这些影响与家长对学校的排序名单相匹配，并采用离散选择模型推断其学校偏好。即使在控制同伴质量和平均结果之后，家长仍会选择能够提高高风险考试成绩的学校。家长也会选择能够减少犯罪和少女生育并提高劳动力市场参与率的学校。低成就学生家长的择校选择与学校对非考试成绩结果的影响相对更为密切，而高成就学生家长的情况则相反。这些结果表明，仅依据考试成绩进行评价，可能会对择校的益处（尤其是对低成就学生而言）以及更广泛的教育干预产生误导性判断。
Abstract
Abstract To explore whether schools’ causal impacts on test scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes such as arrests, dropout, teen motherhood, and formal labour market participation. To examine if parents’ school preferences are related to these causal impacts, we link them to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete-choice models to infer preferences for schools. Parents choose schools that improve high-stakes tests even conditional on peer quality and average outcomes. Parents also choose schools that reduce criminality and teen motherhood and increase labour market participation. School choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools’ impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students. These results suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be misleading about the benefits of school choice (particularly for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly.