Ainsworth et al (2023)

Question 1

school value-added

Answer 1

the change in a student’s outcomes due to attending a school

Question 2

setting

Answer 2

Romania middle & high schools

Question 3

Data

Answer 3

administrative data on 15 admissions cohorts & surveys at middle schools and ran an informational experiment

Question 4

how to calculate value added

Answer 4

Calculate multiple measures of track academic value added, all related to a track’s effect on a student’s performance on the exam

Question 5

outcome used in calculating value added

Answer 5

Main outcome is an indicator for whether a student passes the exam
Also the percentile rank of a student’s baccalaureate performance is the percent of student in the admissions cohort who perform worse than the student, with all students who do not pass assigned a value of 0
The imputed exam score is a version of the score that deals with missing scores using imputations

Question 6

what does the paper do

Answer 6

Conducted a survey at middle school info sessions and interviewed parents to obtain the school preference rankings they intended to submit & their valuations of high schools in their town along dimensions
Randomly selected treatment schools and distributed a ranking of the town’s HSs based on academic value added and obtained students’ official school assignments
Also an endline survey, interviewing parents by phone to gather their submitted school preference rankings and to again elicit their belief about schools value added

Question 7

Conclusions

Answer 7

1) households leave value added on the table
2) households have limited knowledge of value added
3) households respond to info on value added with heterogeneity
4) preferences for other schools traits limit households’ demand for value added

Question 8

implications

Answer 8

Suggests that both candidate explanations are relevant
Essentially all types of households make school choices that leave value added on the table
Distributing info can affect households’ school rankings, placements, and value added
Even correctional all info shortfalls would leave households far from maximizing school value added

Question 9

issues

Answer 9

One robust finding was that households attach great weight to their top schools choices and thus it is difficult to influence their decisions on these, which might generalize to other settings and reflect aspects related to costly attention
The effects of info on value added might be larger and of a greater eq nature if info can be delivered in greater doses and in a more sustained fashion than we did

Question 10

romanian institutional context

Answer 10

high school is bookended by high-stakes standardized exams and a serial assignment dictatorship

Question 11

why the romanian institutional context is advantageous to studying school choice

Answer 11

Allow us to calculate schools’ academic value-added
Observe the HS a student could attend and be confident that the one the student enrolls in is her most preferred
Administrative data allows for calculations on value-added and to set the results of household decision-making