Parents Know Better Than Standardized Tests

August 28, 2019
The Wall Street Journal

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Stanford’s Eric Bettinger and his research team found that students who won a lottery for a voucher in Colombia were 17% more likely to complete high school on time than students who lost the lottery. The study, released in July, used a method of random assignment to compare apples to apples. So it isn’t because of selection bias that lottery winners earned 8% more than lottery losers by the time they turned 33. It’s because their parents were allowed to choose schools that were better fits for their children.
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Mentioned Publications

Eric Bettinger

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Michael Kremer

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Maurice Kugler

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Carlos Alberto Medina-Durango

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Christian Manuel Posso-Suárez

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Juan Esteban Saavedra

We provide evidence on the long-run impact of vouchers for private secondary schools, evidence collected twenty years after students applied for the vouchers. Prior to the voucher lottery, students applied to either an academic or vocational secondary school, an important mediating factor in the vouchers’ impacts. We find strong tertiary education and labor market effects for those students who applied to vocational schools with almost no impact on those who applied to academic schools. The labor market gains for vocational students are strongest at the top of the distribution and null at the bottom of the distribution. We find additional long-run impacts on consumption, and teen-age fertility. The expected net present value of benefits to participants and to taxpayers was large and positive implying that the program was welfare improving unless net externalities were large and negative.

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