Heterogeneous Choice Treatment Effects on Academic Achievement
Evaluating public school choice via randomized lotteries often yields zero average treatment effects, masking critical underlying variation in student academic outcomes. Understanding why subgroup outcomes differ requires linking causal impacts directly to parental choice preferences and trade-offs.
Picture this
Winning a ticket to a preferred destination only improves academic health if the destination was picked for academic reasons. If a family selects a destination primarily for non-academic features like peer demographics, attending that destination may offer no academic boost or even lead to score drops.
What the evidence says
Average treatment effect of attending a first-choice school across all lottery applicants is -0.005 standard deviations. Interacting attendance with test-score weight yields a positive coefficient of 0.090 with p=0.007. Students at the 95th percentile of academic preference gain approximately 0.10 standard deviations in End of Grade test scores, while disadvantaged minority students prioritizing school racial composition experience test score declines.
- Who
- N = 3,065 human students in randomized marginal lottery priority groups within Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina (2,591 with complete baseline data).
- How
- Instrumental variables (IV) estimation using oversubscribed school lottery outcomes as instruments for attending first-choice schools, interacted with estimated parental weights on test scores.
What to do
Use posterior estimates of individual choice parameters as instrumental variable interactions in randomized trial evaluations to uncover hidden treatment heterogeneity.
From the source
"Using the exploded-mixed-logit model to estimate the weight that each parent placed on test scores when choosing a school, we find that students of parents with weights at the 95th percentile experienced significant rises in End of Grade test scores of approximately 0.1 student-level standard deviations, while students of parents placing little value on academics actually experienced declines in achievement."
Heterogeneous Preferences and the Efficacy of Public School Choice