把父母赶出家门：父母鼓励对学校选择和考试成绩的影响

11387 Nudging Parents out the Door The Impacts of Parental Encouragementon School Choice and Test Scores Guthrie Gray-LobeMichael KremerJoost de LaatOluchi MbonuCole Scanlon Development EconomicsDevelopment Research GroupMay 2026 A verified reproducibility package for this paper isavailable athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org,clickherefor direct access. Policy Research Working Paper11387 Abstract This study evaluates a large-scale text message (SMS) out-reach program to engage caregivers of students in privateprimary schools in Kenya. Using a two-stage randomiza-tion design, the study tested two types of weekly SMSmessages: growth-mindset encouragement and person-alized performance information. The findings show twomain effects. First, outreach improved test scores by 0.07standard deviations, with particularly strong gains amonginitially lower-performing students. This improvement gen-erates 12 learning-adjusted years of schooling per US$100spent—making it highly cost-effective relative to othereducation interventions. Second, outreach increased stu-dent exit rates by 4.7–5.0 percentage points, with effects concentrated among higher-achieving students (5.7 to6.6 percentage points). The study developed a theoreticalmodel of vertically differentiated schools where parentalengagement affects both learning production and schoolchoice. The model shows that when parents update theirunderstanding of education production through engage-ment programs, they become more sensitive to perceiveddifferences in school quality. This increased sensitivity canlead lower-quality schools to forgo implementing engage-ment programs—even when costless—as enhanced parentaldiscernment accelerates student exits. The findings suggesta role for third-party provision of parent engagement pro-grams in competitive education markets. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Nudging Parents out the Door:The Impacts of Parental Encouragement on SchoolChoice and Test Scores∗ Guthrie Gray-Lobe†Michael Kremer‡Joost de Laat§Oluchi Mbonu¶Cole Scanlon‖ Keywords:parental engagement, SMS outreach, school choice, growth mindset, educationmarkets 1Introduction The education of children is shaped by both home and school environments (Coleman et al.,1966; Desforges and Abouchaar, 2003). To maximize student outcomes, schools frequentlyattempt to activate parents to play a larger educational role, as research has shown thateven simple forms of outreach can meaningfully change parental behavior (Kraft and Rogers,2015; Mayer et al., 2019; Bettinger et al., 2020; Avvisati et al., 2014). However, schools facea strategic challenge in encouraging parental engagement: parents make decisions not onlyabout their involvement at home, but also about where to send their children to school.This dual role of parents—as both educational inputs and consumers of education—createsa dilemma for schools operating in competitive environments.While increased parentalengagement may improve student outcomes through greater involvement in activities likehomework help, it may also lead parents to become more discerning about school quality.When parents become more invested in their children’s education, they may be more likely totransfer their children to schools they perceive as higher quality (e.g. Attanasio, Boneva andRauh, 2022).This potential trade-off between improving student outcomes and retainingenrollment poses particular challenges for schools facing competitive pressures. To examine how schools’ efforts to engage parents interact with competitive pressures,we conducted a randomized evaluation of a program that delivered weekly SMS messagesto caregivers in Bridge Kenya schools, a chain of relatively low-cost private primary schools.This setting is particularly well-suited for studying this interaction, as Bridge Kenya operatesin a highly competitive educational marketplace, where it competes not only with other low-cost private schools but also with free public schools. The study implements a two-stage randomization design to evaluate different approachesto parent outreach while measuring potential spillover effects.The program delivered twotypes of content through SMS: some caregivers received general messages designed to encour-age parents to adopt a growth mindset—a view that intelligence can be improved with effort,a