Leveraging Technology to Engage Parents at Scale: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial∗

While leveraging parents has the potential to increase student performance, programs that do so are often costly to implement or they target younger children. We partner text-messaging technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of information to parents at scale. In a field experiment across 22 middle and high schools, we used this technology to send automated text-message alerts to parents about their child’s missed assignments, grades and class absences. We pre-specified five primary outcomes. The intervention reduces course failures by 38% and increases class attendance by 17%. Students are more likely to be retained in the district. There are no effects on test scores however. The positive effects are particularly large for students with below-average GPA and students in high school. As in previous research, the intervention appears to change parents’ beliefs about their child’s performance and increases parent monitoring. Our results show that this type of automated technology can improve student effort relatively cheaply and at scale. JEL Codes: I20, I21, I24, I28. ∗This research is funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Teachers College Provost’s Investment fund and received approval from the Institutional Research Board at Teachers College, Columbia University. We thank Dr. Ron Duerring and Jon Duffy and Kanawha County Schools, as well as Spencer Kier, Alex Farivar, Jeremy Lupoli, Sam Elhag and Zach Posner. Bergman has previously received compensation from the learning management system company to design the technology tested in this study. †Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 W. 120th Street New York, New York 10027. Email addresses: [email protected] and [email protected]. Website: www.columbia.edu/~psb2101