Getting Parents Involved: A Field Experiment in Deprived Schools
通过法国贫困教育区的实验，发现学校邀请家长参与教育项目能改善学生行为（如减少逃课和纪律处分），但对考试成绩无显著影响，且家长参与的效果在班级层面被同伴互动放大。
This article provides evidence that schools can influence parents' involvement in education, and this has causal effects on pupils' behaviour. Furthermore, it shows how the impact of more involved parents on their children is amplified at the class level by peer group interaction. We build on a large-scale controlled experiment run in a French deprived educational district, where parents of middle-school children were invited to participate in a simple program of parent--school meetings on how to get better involved in their children's education. At the end of the school year, we find that treated families have increased their school-and home-based involvement activities. In turn, pupils of treatment classes have developed more positive behaviour and attitudes in school, notably in terms of truancy and disciplinary sanctions (with effects-size around 15% of a standard deviation). However, test scores did not improve under the intervention. Our results suggest that parents are an input for schooling policies and it is possible to influence important aspects of the schooling process at low cost. Copyright 2014, Oxford University Press.