Abstract
Parental involvement programs aim to strengthen school-home relations with the goal of improving children’s educational outcomes. We examine the effects of a parental involvement program in Mexico, which provides parent associations with grants and information. We separately estimate the effect of the grants from the effect of the information using data from two randomized controlled trials conducted by the government during the rollout of the program. Grants to parent associations did not improve educational outcomes. Information to parent associations reduced disciplinary actions in schools, mainly by increasing parental involvement in schools and changing parenting behavior at home. The divergent results from grants and information are partly explained by significant changes in perceptions of trust between parents and teachers. Our results suggest that parental involvement interventions may not achieve their intended goal if institutional rules are unclear about the expectations of parents and teachers as parents increase their involvement in schools.
Highlights
Parents play an important role in their children’s educational experiences and outcomes (Cunha, Heckman, Lochner, & Masterov, 2006; Houtenville & Conway, 2008; Todd & Wolpin, 2007)
Parent associations gained a moderate increase in financial resources
We address multiple hypothesis testing by controlling for the familywise error rate (FWER) using the stepdown procedure proposed by Westfall, Young, and Wright (1993)
Summary
Parents play an important role in their children’s educational experiences and outcomes (Cunha, Heckman, Lochner, & Masterov, 2006; Houtenville & Conway, 2008; Todd & Wolpin, 2007). Parents can hold inaccurate beliefs about the returns to education (Attanasio & Kaufmann, 2014; Jensen, 2010; Nguyen, 2008) and about their own children’s academic performance and behaviors (Banerjee, Banerji, Duflo, Glennerster, & Khemani, 2010; Dizon-Ross, 2019). These biased beliefs can lead to misallocation of educational investments. Parent associations can decide how to use these funds for school infrastructure, supplies, and activities These funds are not permitted to be used towards increasing teacher or principal salaries.. The information component of AGE provides parents with guidance on how to become more involved in their children’s schools and ways to support their children’s education. The information component of AGE is extremely low-cost with a per-student cost of approximately U.S.D 0.98.3
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