School Choice and Cognitive Achievement in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper presents new evidence on the
 impact of school characteristics on secondary student
 achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. The
 authors deal with a potentially important selectivity issue
 in the South Asian context: the non-random sorting of
 children into religious schools. The authors do so by
 employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental
 variable estimation techniques. Additionally, the authors
 use the variation between two classrooms of the same grade
 within individual schools to identify causal class-size
 effects. The empirical results do not reveal any difference
 in test scores between religious and secular schools when
 selection into religious school is taken into account. Net
 of school fixed-effects, the authors do not find evidence in
 support of smaller class size. However, they document
 significant learning deficit by gender and primary school
 type: girls and graduates of primary madrasas have a lower
 test score even after controlling for school and
 classroom-specific unobservable correlates of learning.