Parental Preference, Heterogeneous Effects of School Choice on Student Outcomes, and Peer Effects under a Preference-based Randomization: Evidence from the Middle School Education Reform in Beijing’s Eastern City District

Fang Lai

Understanding the controversies surrounding school choice cannot be isolated from a thorough examination of parental preferences and abilities in school choice and important components of the effects of school choice such as peer effects resulting from school choice. Few existing datasets are adequate for such all-sided studies. The proposed project benefits from a unique natural experiment introduced by the education reform in Beijing, where students were randomly assigned to different middle schools conditioning on their school applications. Using a dataset containing unusually rich information of 7000 students and their friends entering middle schools in Beijing’s Eastern City District in 1999, this project examines patterns and heterogeneities of parental school choice and the resulting socioeconomic and academic stratification, identifies via random assignment both the net short-term and long-run effects of entering first-choice school on student academic and nonacademic outcomes and how these are distributed across different students. It also examines the net and distributional aspects of peer effects associated with school choice using students’ actual social peers and with careful examination of the peer group formation. Conclusions of this project will provide a more comprehensive and in-depth perspective of the consequences of school choice concerning the quality and equity of education.

About Fang Lai

Fang Lai is an assistant professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California at Berkeley. Lai developed her interests in educational research during her dissertation study, which exploited the preference-based random assignment of students to different middle schools in Beijing’s Eastern District to examine the effect of school and teacher quality on student performance. Her current research interests focus on school choice in Beijing, including heterogeneous parental preferences in school choice and the changes in student performance and social stratification brought about by school choice. Benefiting from the detailed information of social network in this data set, she can also analyze peer group formation among schoolmates and peer effects on student outcome. Lai’s other projects use the Chinese Census Data to assess the educational inequality across subgroups of populations, especially across subgroups of different family backgrounds, and subgroups residing in rural and urban area or different geographical regions. The evolution of this inequality over time is explored and related to policy shocks in the relevant years.