New @nberpubs working paper w/ wonderful coauthors @felbarrera @paul_gertler @hpatrinos

Low-cost, group-based information intervention increases parental involvement in schools, changes parenting behavior at home, and reduces disciplinary action in schools.

A thread

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A problem: Schools can perpetuate social inequalities. For example, schools can systematically exclude lower-income, linguistically and/or culturally diverse parents from advocating for their kids’ needs.

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A possible policy solution: Parental involvement/family engagement programs offer ways to get caregivers involved in schools and support their children’s overall learning environment.

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Our paper: We study the effects of a parental involvement program in Mexico. The program gives parents (i) info to improve school-parent communication and (ii) grants to give them a bit of control over how to spend money in schools.

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This is a national program implemented by the govt. This is important bc results from smaller trials do not always replicate when implemented at scale. In this case, scaling up was possible by delivering through *groups* that exist in all public schools: parent associations.

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We analyze data from two RCT across 430 public schools and over 17,500 students. These schools have a large indigenous population. Parental involvement programs are important here bc indigenous people have faced a long history of discrimination & social exclusion.

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Three key takeaways:

1) Providing parent groups with information increased parental involvement in schools, changed parenting behavior at home, and reduced children’s disciplinary action in school. We see larger impacts for indigenous families.

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2) Providing parent associations with grants had limited effects on parenting behavior and null effects on children’s educational outcomes.

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3) Fostering trust between parents & teachers is important for promoting parental involvement in schools.

To explain the divergent results between info and grants, we measure how *trust* between parents & teachers evolve over the course of the intervention.

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The info intervention enhanced parents’ trust towards teachers. We argue that the info sessions gave parents the opportunity to receive repeated positive signals about teachers, which enhanced their trust for them.

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In contrast, the double grant reduced parents & teachers’ trust towards one another. We argue that grants created “an incomplete social contract” (Ostrom, 2000), whereby parents and teachers did not share common expectations about how these funds should be distributed.

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Lots more in the paper here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28040 

Parental involvement programs hold great promise but there are important design considerations to think about in order to ensure trust between parents & teachers.

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I’ll be presenting this paper at #NEUDC 2020 @ Dartmouth on Nov. 7.

The Education & Schools panel features amazing work by:
@aganimian (w/ @rafadehoyos, @Boutros08),
@christinalbrown (w/ @AndrabiTahir), and Yuheng Zhao.

The conference is virtual & registration is free! https://sites.google.com/dartmouth.edu/neudc2020/home?authuser=0