Disadvantaged Parents

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Review of “Can a Mandate for Inclusion Change School Choices for Disadvantaged Parents? Evidence from Urban India” submitted to Education Finance and Policy—EFP2019-068
This paper examines whether India’s 2010 Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) affected the types of schools to which disadvantaged families had access. Drawing on survey data from approximately 1,600 families in Ahmedabad and employing a difference-in-differences strategy, the authors conclude that winning an allotment under the RTE mandate resulted in students being more likely to attend private schools, schools that are further from students’ homes, and that have English as the medium of instruction. The paper addresses an important issue, is generally competently executed, and evidence from the Indian context would be a nice addition to the literature. However, I do have a number of comments and concerns about the paper.
Broad Comments
I don’t think the design is well-suited to answer the research question the authors lay out. The authors frame the paper as providing evidence on whether the RTE mandate has “expanded the choice set of schools for disadvantaged parents and enabled them to access different schools.” The design, however, provides a plausible estimate of the effect of winning an allotment under the RTE mandate on the characteristics of schools that students attend. This may be an interesting and relevant parameter, but it is very different from the one that the authors currently claim they are estimating. In light of this disconnect, the authors either need to change their empirical strategy or revise the paper to more accurate describe the parameter their current strategy actually estimates. That said, given the authors’ description of the sampling strategy, I am not sure they have the data necessary to estimate the effect of the mandate per se on access to different schooling options. Estimating that parameter would probably entail some sort of pre-post comparison across the full set of potentially-eligible households and, based on the description of the sampling approach, it doesn’t seem like the authors’ data is up to that task.
If the authors elect to maintain focus on estimating the effect of winning an allotment under the RTE mandate, they might consider altering their analytic strategy to exploit the lotteries that were conducted in cases of oversubscription. Such an approach would likely have fewer internal validity concerns, although the generalizability would be restricted to oversubscribed schools and it was not clear how many of those there are. At the very least, though, a lottery-based approach would be a nice complement to the current difference-in-differences strategy.
Laying aside the discussion about the parameter the authors estimate, I think the paper would benefit from a more comprehensive and systematic discussion of the reasons why the mandate may not increase access to private schools. I understand that governments mandates do not always play out as intended, but it would be useful to discuss in some detail how that might play out in the specific context of the RTE mandate. I recognize that the authors do touch on this topic in the 4th paragraph of the paper but, the paper would benefit from more attention to this issue.
It would be helpful for the authors to clarify early on what they mean by the terms application, allotment, admission, and attendance. In particular, are allotment and admission used synonymously? Similarly, it would be useful to provide more information about the allotment process to give the reader a better sense of how the RTE mandate played out on the ground.
The paper would benefit from a discussion of who the results generalize to. The sample is drawn from a set of Anganwadi Centers in urban Ahmedabad that invited households to a meeting in February 2015? How many of the invitees attended? How many of the potentially eligible households were invited? Were non-invitees eligible under the RTE mandate? Did the process play out differently in other cities? In general, it was difficult to know what to make of the results beyond the 1600 or so families included in the sample. Including a discussion of these sorts of issues could help the reader better interpret the estimates.
The authors perform an analysis where, for households that applied to schools under the RTE mandate but did not receive an allotment, they compare the characteristics of the schools they applied to with the characteristics of schools that attend. The authors don’t frame it as such, but could this be considered (with some assumptions) the effect of losing an allotment lottery? Given the authors’ description of the allotment process, it seems like families should receive an allotment to the school they applied to unless there is oversubscription. If this is true, a comparison of applicant schools to attended schools seems like it would be the effect of a lottery loss. It seems like this could be a nice complement to the existing analysis.
Given that allotments were supposed to be conducted by lottery, why are there differences between families allotted and not allotted a spot (Table 3)?
For readers unfamiliar with the Indian schooling context, it might be useful to briefly convey the motivation for specifying English language instruction and more than 15 minutes walk from home as outcomes. Also, given the sections that discuss admissions to elite private schools, the authors could consider specifying that as an outcome in their main models.
Minor comments
2nd paragraph of the paper- Replace principal with principle
What were the rules for the RTE mandate in non-entry grades? Do schools have to backfill?
Among those families that received no allotment, the authors characterize schools that families applied to as expressed preferences and schools that families applied to as revealed preferences. I’m not sure this is useful, as the luck of the draw is the only reason that attended schools differ from applicant schools for some non-negligible portion of families (perhaps even all of them).
The final 2 columns of Table 5 are cut off from a printed version of the paper.

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