kitchen table math, the sequel: single-sex schools

Friday, May 10, 2013

single-sex schools

Ed was talking this morning with a neighbor who also sent her son to Hogwarts. He's been accepted by a very selective (and terrific) college, and she said he would never have gotten in if he'd stayed in the public schools here. (Per pupil spending: $28,517

I'm sure she's right.
Abstract
Despite the voluminous literature on the potentials of single-sex schools, there is no consensus on the effects of single-sex schools because of student selection of school types. We exploit a unique feature of schooling in Seoul—the random assignment of students into single-sex versus coeducational high schools—to assess causal effects of single-sex schools on college entrance exam scores and college attendance. Our validation of the random assignment shows comparable socio- economic backgrounds and prior academic achievement of students attending single-sex schools and coeducational schools, which increases the credibility of our causal estimates of single-sex school effects. The three-level hierarchical model shows that attending all-boys schools or all-girls schools, rather than coeducational schools, is significantly associated with higher average scores on Korean and English test scores. Applying the school district fixed-effects models, we find that single-sex schools produce a higher percentage of graduates who attended four-year colleges and a lower percentage of graduates who attended two-year junior colleges than do coeducational schools. The positive effects of single-sex schools remain substantial, even after we take into account various school-level variables, such as teacher quality, the student-teacher ratio, the proportion of students receiving lunch support, and whether the schools are public or private.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Families who send their children to single sex schools are interested in education. I'm guessing that this is the biggest factor in their producing more 4-year college attendees.

Shannon Severance said...

@Anonymous,

"We exploit a unique feature of schooling in Seoul—the random assignment of students into single-sex versus coeducational high schools..."

Whether the parents want a single sex school was not taken into account during school assignment for the population, according to the quoted abstract.

I don't know anything about school assignment in Seoul. If you have some specific knowledge about schooling is Seoul, that differs from what is written here, I would appreciate you telling us.

-- Shannon Severance