Effects of School Quality on Student Achievement: Discontinuity Evidence from Kenya

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lucas, Adrienne M.; Mbiti, Isaac M.
• 署名单位: University of Delaware; Southern Methodist University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-APPLIED ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7782
• DOI: 10.1257/app.6.3.234
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 234-263
• 关键词: choice; IMPACT; RULE

摘要

The most desirable Kenyan secondary schools are elite government schools that admit the best students from across the country. We exploit the random variation generated by the centralized school admissions process in a regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates of the effects of attending one of these elite public schools on student progression and test scores in secondary school. Despite their reputations, we find little evidence of positive impacts on learning outcomes for students who attended these schools, suggesting that their sterling reputations reflect the selection of students rather than their ability to generate value-added test score gains.