ISSN 2045-6557 CEE DP 103 School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents’ Satisfaction Stephen Gibbons Olmo Silva January 2009 Published by Centre for the Economics of Education London School of Economics Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE © Stephen Gibbons and Olmo Silva, submitted October 2008 January 2009 The Centre for the Economics of Education is an independent research centre funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. The views expressed in this work are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the DCSF. All errors and omissions remain the authors. Executive Summary Researchers in economics of education conventionally assume that parents choose schools for their high academic performance. This view has some support from „revealed preference‟ evidence based on local house prices. However, anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that school quality is not one-dimensional and that parents and children are concerned about other school factors related to pupil happiness and enjoyment of their learning environment. Recently, broader considerations of pupil wellbeing have begun to take hold in the policy debate both in the UK and internationally. In England, the „Every Child Matters‟ (ECM) initiative has driven important changes in educational services in order to support five key outcomes for children and young people identified by the ECM initiative, namely to “be healthy”, to “stay safe”, to “enjoy and achieve”, to “make a positive contribution” and to “achieve economic wellbeing”. The question then arises as to whether these kinds of objectives can be met in the current school context, where policy makers and parents tend to evaluate schools‟ excellence on the basis of academic achievement and pupils‟ test scores. With these issues in mind, we consider whether parental perceptions of school quality are based on academic standards and aligned with the wellbeing of the children. We examine children‟s attitudes towards their school along three dimensions: general happiness, relationships with teachers and intellectual stimulation. In parallel, we consider parents‟ judgement of overall school quality, and their views on teachers‟ relationships with their child and the progress that their child is making at school. Our main goal is to answer two related research questions, that is: To what extent are attitudes and experiences, amongst pupils and their parents, linked to standard test-score based measures of academic performance? To what extent are parents‟ perceptions of school quality linked to their children‟s happiness and enjoyment of school? To do so, we use direct information on stated perceptions in the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE) matched to UK administrative records on pupil achievements. Our analysis reveals the following key findings: Parents‟ judgement of school quality is dominated by school average test scores, over and above other school characteristics. This is true for parents from different backgrounds and with children of all abilities. However, children‟ self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their learning environment is unrelated to average test results in their school: children are just as happy in schools where average test scores are low as in schools where average test scores are high. Parents‟ satisfaction and judgements of school quality are not strongly correlated with their children‟s‟ enjoyment of school. Any correspondence between the subjective views of parents and children is better explained by shared family characteristics, than by anything „objective‟ we can observe about schools. Schools which receive more favourable parent and child ratings tend to have higher local house prices, but not once we control for standard test-based measures of school performance (such as school value-added). This reinforces the evidence that school quality as measured by test scores tends to dominate parental perceptions of educational excellence. Some general conclusions emerge from our analysis and set the path for future research. On the one hand, we might be inclined to conclude that parents make the wrong choice, i.e. the one that does not maximize their pupils‟ wellbeing at school. On the other hand, however, parents might be more „forward looking‟ than their offspring, and more concerned about the future returns. In fact, pupil assessment of their school experiences might be distorted by myopia and „self-control‟ problems characterizing young people aged 14. At present, quantitative evidence on the determinants of pupil happiness is scant, and more investigation is needed. Finally, our findings show that pupil enjoyment at school is only very loosely related to school academic performance or its composition. This implies that policies that seek to address child wellbeing at school might have to be decoupled from policies that seek to raise academic standards. Hopes for a straight-forward link between schools‟ academic performance and pupils‟ wellbeing find little empirical support from our research. School Quality, Child Wellbeing and Parents’ Satisfaction Stephen Gibbons Olmo Silva 1. Introduction 1 2. Some Related Literature 3 3. Data and Methods 5 The data 5 Subjective measures of wellbeing and satisfaction 7 Modelling approach 9 4. Main Results and Discussion on Preferences and Test Scores 11 Descriptive analysis 11 Does school ‘quality’ boil down to good grades? 12 Some important robustness checks 16 Are parents and children’s views about schools aligned? 17 Do parents value school happiness? 20 Are parent perceptions revealed in local housing markets? 20 5. Additional Results on ‘Happiness and On the Role of School Choice 22 Background factors associated with child wellbeing and parent satisfaction 22 The role of school choice 23 6. Concluding Remarks 25 References 28 Tables 32 Appendices 37 Acknowledgments Stephen Gibbons is Research Director at the Spatial Economics Research Centre, a Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics (LSE), and a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE and at the Centre for the Economics of Education. Olmo Silva is a Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics (LSE), and Research Associate at the Spatial Economics Research Centre and the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE. The authors would like to thank participants at the MILLS Seminar Series (Catholic University, Milan), CEPR-EEEPE 2007 Conference (Madrid), Labour Market Workshop Series (CEP-LSE), IZA-SOLE Transatlantic 2008 Meeting, and Arnaud Chevalier, Andrew Clark, Rajeev Dehejia, Helena Holmlund, Robert Mac Culloch, Steve Machin, Guy Mayraz, Brendon McConnell, Andrew Oswald, Steve Pischke and Reyn Van Ewijk for insightful comments. Thanks also Martina Viarengo for expert research assistance. 1. Introduction People undoubtedly believe that schooling offers a highway to a brighter future, and abundant research evidence shows that more education is, indeed, closely linked to future success in the labour market (Heckman, 2000), better physical and mental health (Chevalier and Feinstein, 2006; Grossman 2005; Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004), and other „positive‟ adult-life outcomes. However, choosing a school that will benefit a child is a complex and daunting task, and parents and children often put considerable effort into this process. But what is it that parents and children value in schools, and how do parents weigh the benefits of academic excellence alongside other aspects of their child‟s wellbeing when judging school quality? Economists and other researchers have usually assumed (for reasons of simplicity or lack of alternatives) that schools are chosen on the basis of average test-score outcomes. This emphasis is tied in with the close attention paid to schools‟ academic performance in government and the media, the idea being that readily available standardized information about school performance facilitates choice and school accountability. However, the simplifying assumption that academic output in a narrow range of subjects provides a sufficient statistic for school „quality‟ is clearly open to question. In fact, there may be wider learning objectives and aspects of social, emotional and physical development that are at least as important as achievement in „high stakes‟ tests in determining future life chances. Moreover, whilst it is true that academic outcomes rank highly in survey responses on parents‟ reasons for choosing a school, these surveys also reveal that many other factors play an important role, particularly the child‟s wishes and potential wellbeing at school (e.g. Coldron and Boulton, 1991, 1996; Flatley et al., 2001)1. Recently, broader considerations of pupil wellbeing have begun to take hold in the policy debate in England through the „Every Child Matters‟ (ECM) initiative, which seeks to address child happiness and fulfilment more broadly. Issues of pupil wellbeing, health and safety at school also feature in the US policy debate, for example in the „No Child Left Behind‟ agenda (The White House, 2008) and in 1For example, The Observer newspaper, June 11 2006 reports: “Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: 'I once carried out a poll (…) of 1,000 parents and asked them what were the most important things to them in terms of their children's schools. The first thing was to be happy, the second was to be safe.' She reached number seven before grades became a priority.” 1 the Democratic presidential candidates‟ manifestos (see Clinton, 2008; and Obama, 2008). In England, this agenda has driven important changes in educational services in order to support five key outcomes for children and young people identified by the ECM initiative, namely to “be healthy”, to “stay safe”, to “enjoy and achieve”, to “make a positive contribution” and to “achieve economic wellbeing” (DCSF, 2004). The question then arises as to whether these kinds of objectives can be met in the current school context, where policy makers and parents tend to evaluate schools‟ excellence solely on the basis of academic achievement and pupils‟ test scores. While most research suggests that parents value school performance and effectiveness, this same research is silent about whether this is mirrored in higher levels of pupil enjoyment of their learning environment. With these issues in mind, in this paper we examine children‟s attitudes towards their school along three dimensions: general happiness, relationships with teachers and intellectual stimulation. In parallel, we consider parents‟ judgement of overall school quality, and their views on teachers‟ relationships with their child and the progress that their child is making at school. Our main goal is to consider two related research questions, that is: a) To what extent are attitudes and experiences, amongst pupils and their parents, linked to standard test-score based measures of academic performance? b) To what extent are parents‟ perceptions of school quality linked to their children‟s happiness and enjoyment of school? In addition, we contribute to the growing literature in „happiness‟ economics by providing the first study (to our knowledge) that specifically addresses the relation between child happiness and school „quality‟. To answer these questions we make use of a unique large-scale survey of England‟s secondary school pupils called the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE), which contains a very rich set of attitudinal responses and pupil background characteristics, and which we have matched to administrative records on pupil attainments and school average test scores. Our results suggest that academic achievement, as measured by school-mean test scores, tends to dominate other school characteristics in terms of parental perceptions of educational excellence. However, school quality along these dimensions is not associated with greater pupil wellbeing and enjoyment of the learning environment. Moreover, pupils‟ and parents‟ views do not seem to follow similar patterns in terms of their association with observable school characteristics more generally. In contrast, parents‟ and children‟s views of schools and teachers are strongly related to child and family characteristics that pre-date the time they entered the school, and follow similar patterns in this respect. To further substantiate our arguments, and for comparison with the existing „hedonics‟ literature that measures revealed preferences for school „quality‟ through housing prices, we link self-reported measures of 2 school enjoyment and satisfaction to house prices prevailing in school catchment areas, and study whether these measures are capitalized into house prices. Lastly, we look into the role that school choice plays in shaping parent and pupil expressions of satisfaction and wellbeing. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses related literature, then Section 3 describes our data and the information it contains on pupils‟ enjoyment of their school and parental satisfaction with it, and explains our modelling approach. Next, Section 4 presents our main findings on the links between satisfaction and school test scores, and on the comparison of the preferences of parents and children. Section 5 extends these results with a summary of the general determinants of pupils and parent attitudes, and with evidence on the links between these attitudes and school choice. Finally, Section 6 provides some concluding remarks. 2. Some Related Literature Researchers in education and the sociology of education have often used survey responses (usually from fairly small surveys) to elicit parental preferences for schools, but analysis of directly observable or stated ratings for school „quality‟ remains a relatively unexplored field in economics. In fact, most research in this field has addressed this question using a revealed preference approach and has looked for evidence of preferences for school „quality‟ revealed through the capitalisation of school characteristics into local housing prices – i.e. the „hedonic‟ valuation method. A fairly extensive international literature has considered whether house prices respond to schools‟ academic performance, usually measured in terms of average pupil test scores, and a survey of recent examples of the hedonic approach is given by Gibbons and Machin (2008), who report a consensus estimate of around 3-4% house price premium for one standard deviation increase in average test scores. Bayer et al. (2007) offer a structural modification based on discrete housing choices that provides a correction to the hedonic framework when preferences are heterogeneous, and come to similar conclusions. However, with only few exceptions (e.g. Clapp et al. 2007; Brasington and Haurin, 2006), the bulk of this research has focused on the effects of school average test-scores, thus partly by-passing the questions set out at the beginning of this research, namely what is school „quality‟, what aspects of school „quality‟ do parents value, and does school „quality‟ simply boil down to average test-scores? 3 Modelling discrete housing choices (residential location) offers an alternative to the hedonic framework discussed here above (Barrow, 2002). However, analysis of discrete schooling and teacher choices offers a more direct alternative to describe parental preferences for school attributes, and has been taken up by two recent papers. Hastings et al. (2005) use parental ranking of preferences for schools expressed in the US Mecklenburg County choice program to document that parents value schools that are close to home and schools with high average value test-scores, and that this second link is more pronounced for students with better-off family backgrounds (higher previous test scores and income). In a similar vein, Jacobs and Lefgren (2007) use parental requests for specific teachers to show that parents strongly prefer primary school teachers who are good at promoting student satisfaction, while they place relatively less value on a teacher‟s ability to raise standardized tests-scores. Finally, another way of analysing choices and preferences over schools is offered by Rothstein (2006), who notes that there will be greater sorting and stratification in schools when parents value peer group composition, rather than teaching effectiveness or other aspects of school „quality‟ (under assumptions of „single crossing‟ in preferences). His results indicate that parents do not value school effectiveness, but seem to exercise choice on the basis of schools‟ pupil composition. Is it worth noting here that while economists in the field of education have focussed on objective test- based measures of school „quality‟ and on preferences revealed by exercised choice, researchers in other fields have made more widespread use of self-reported assessments of quality and statements of wellbeing and preference. This difference is based partly on lack of alternative data in the economics of education, and partly because of a pervasive distrust of subjective judgements or stated measures of preference. This is understandable, and the validity of subjective measures has been scrutinized by economists with mixed results (see Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2001; and Krueger and Schakde, 2007). However, distrust might be partly misplaced and over-played in cases such as emotional wellbeing, happiness, satisfaction with relationships, which are inherently subjective and unobservable to anyone apart from the individual experiencing them. In fact, other branches of economics have made much greater use of subjective statements of well being. For example, health economics researchers have studied the link between objective and self-reported measures of health status, as well as satisfaction with medical infrastructures (e.g. Baker et al., 2004), and linked these to general practioners‟ effectiveness. More importantly, a growing literature has analyzed the determinants of individuals‟ happiness and wellbeing (see Layard, 2006 for an extensive review). Work in this field has studied numerous 4