Effective Families or Effective Schools? Experimental Evidence on Fostering Children's Numeracy

Abstract

This paper studies if high-quality primary education can serve as an equalizer for children exposed to diverse rearing practices at home in Colombia. Building on well-established literatures demonstrating that parental engagement and teacher professional development programs can effectively support children's learning, we randomly allocate children to a mutually exclusive treatment to foster their numeracy skills: only parental engagement, only teacher development, combined interventions, or no intervention. The two treatments, both individually and together, have a similar effect on children's standardized math scores in grades 1 and 2, with an impact of 0.20 standard deviations compared to receiving no interventions. We find no complementarities between the two interventions, suggesting that effective schools can compensate for inequalities in family rearing practices.