Working Paper: NBER ID: w25342
Authors: Diether Beuermann; C. Kirabo Jackson; Laia Navarro-Sola; Francisco Pardo
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 labor-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 labor 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 (particularity for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly.
Keywords: school quality; test scores; parental preferences; non-academic outcomes; education policy
JEL Codes: I20; J01; J38
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Schools (I23) | high-stakes test scores (I24) |
| Schools (I23) | dropout rates (I21) |
| Schools (I23) | teen arrests (K40) |
| Schools (I23) | teen births (J13) |
| Schools (I23) | labor market participation (J29) |
| High-achieving children (I24) | Choice of schools with larger positive causal impacts on high-stakes exams (I21) |
| Low-achieving students (I24) | Choice influenced by schools' impacts on non-academic outcomes (I21) |
| High-stakes test scores (I24) | Broader adult well-being (I31) |