Hope and commitment. Lessons from a randomized control trial in a shanty town

This paper documents the impact of an after-school program called Apoyo Escolar, sited in the most vulnerable neighborhood of a developing country. The outcomes of interest are academic achievement, behavior in the classroom and grade repetition. We designed a field experiment exploiting the existence of oversubscription to the program. We found a novel result that should guide policy design for vulnerable children: increasing time spent in safe, supervised settings does not guarantee academic success. The after-school program is effective in improving academic performance when children have committed parents. This finding is crucial for policy because it is not be enough to merely take children off of the streets, parents’ commitment is needed. Interestingly, results show that students’ performance at school is highly correlated with parents’ educational expectations. This correlation fosters future research that may be designed specifically to explore the causal impact of expectations on educational attainment among disadvantaged children.