Magnet Schools and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment in China∗
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper examines the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement using school admissions lotteries in China. Although lottery winners were more likely to attend magnet schools that appear better in many dimensions, including peer achievement, we find little evidence that winning a lottery improved students’performance on the High School Entrance Exam or their enrollment status at elite high schools three years later. Magnet school popularity, measured by either the competitiveness of the admission lottery or the take-up rate of lottery winners, is highly positively correlated with the average student achievement, but largely unrelated to the treatment effect on test scores that we estimate for each school. This evidence suggests that parents value peer quality beyond its effect on achievement gains, or confuse average student achievement with value added. The finding that magnet schools are sought mainly for their observed superiority in average student achievement rather than for their academic value added casts doubt on the potential of school choice to improve student achievement, at least in this context. JEL Classifications: I21 I28 J13 ∗I am grateful to Joshua Angrist, Esther Duflo, and Karen R. Polenske for their advice and support. I thank Abhijit Banerjee, Jim Berry, Cynthian Kinnam, Frank Levy, Weifeng Li, Benjamin Olken, Bill Wheaton, and seminar participants at the 2009 Northeastern Universities Development Consortium Conference, CUHK, Georgetown University, HKUST, MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and University of Toronto for helpful discussions and comments. I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the MIT Shultz Fund and the MIT Center for International Studies Summer Study Grant. All remaining errors are my own. †E-mail: [email protected]/ Address: Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong SAR.
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