| Christopher Jepsen
University of Kentucky
Are Catholic primary schools more effective than public primary schools?
This study will assess the causal effects of Catholic primary schooling on student achievement and behavioral development using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study: Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). We will undertake a comprehensive analysis of the effects of Catholic primary schooling from kindergarten to eighth grade, focusing on the importance of selection bias caused by nonrandom sorting of students into Catholic primary schools. For example, although average achievement test scores among students in Catholic primary schools are substantially higher than among public school students, this discrepancy may be driven largely by systematic differences in cognitive ability between Catholic and public school students rather than by the effectiveness of Catholic schools.
In order to distinguish between the possible mechanisms underlying the relative performance of Catholic and public primary school students, we will evaluate several approaches for controlling for selection bias. Several of these approaches, such as instrumental variables, using selection on observed variables to quantify the importance of selection on unobserved variables, and value-added models using student fixed effects, are novel in the context of the Catholic primary schooling literature. We will compare the results from these techniques to those based on two techniques used previously in this literature: ordinary least squares regression and propensity score analysis.
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