Introduction Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 928.full

The Effectiveness of Catholic Primary Schooling Christopher Jepsen a b s t r a c t Although extensive research has compared Catholic and public high schools, little is known about Catholic primary schools. Using unique data for two cohorts of primary school students, I Žnd that Catholic schooling does not have a signiŽcant effect on mathematics and reading test scores. These Žndings do not change when school level test scores from the Žrst-grade cohort are used to account for selection bias in the fourth-grade cohort. In fourth grade, Catholic schooling is associated with marginally fewer student absences than is public schooling.

I. Introduction

Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore 1982 sparked a hotly contested, on- going debate by reporting that Catholic high school attendance is associated with higher test scores. Much of this debate focuses on the ability to control for the non- random selection of students into Catholic high schools. Researchers usually use instruments based on detailed location and religion variables under the assumption that these variables affect the availability of Catholic schooling but have no direct effect on achievement or attainment. Using these instruments, recent research gener- Christopher Jepsen is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, 500 Washington Street, Suite 800, San Francisco, CA 94111, jepsenppic.org. He is grateful to the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER for Žnancial support and to Abt Associates for the use of Prospects data. He would like to thank Joseph Altonji, Erik Beecroft, Rebecca Blank, Todd Elder, David Figlio, Lisa Jepsen, Jens Ludwig, Bruce Meyer, Derek Neal, Steven Rivkin, Paulo Santiago, Jon Sonstelie, Christopher Taber and two anonymous referees— as well as seminar participants at the 1999 Fall APPAM Conference, Northwestern University, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and PPIC—for useful comments. He claims responsibility for all errors and all opinions. These do not reect those of NBER or PPIC. Scholars who wish access to the data used in this paper may contact the U.S. Department of Education. [Submitted June 2001; accepted June 2002] ISSN 022-166X Ó 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System T H E J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R E S O U R C E S • X X X V I I I • 4 ally Žnds positive effects of Catholic schooling on educational attainment and student achievement. 1 However, Ludwig 1997 Žnds that many of these instruments are not exogenous, and Altonji, Elder, and Taber 1999 Žnd that functional form assump- tions, rather than instruments, provide much of the explanatory power in these models. The small literature on Catholic primary schooling suffers from similar problems with selection bias. Sander 1996 Žnds a positive and signiŽcant effect of eight years of Catholic primary school attendance on tenth-grade test scores. However, he does not control for Catholic high schooling in these regressions, so it is impossible to determine whether Catholic grade school attendance or Catholic high school atten- dance drives these effects. 2 It is also unclear whether identiŽcation in his selection bias models comes from the instruments or the functional form assumptions. National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP data include Catholic primary schools but contain little student and school demographic data. Therefore, Lee and Stewart 1989 and Jones 1997 are only able to control for a few student characteristics and are unable to control for selection bias or prior achievement. Nonetheless, both papers Žnd that Catholic primary school students outperform public primary school students in NAEP tests. In this paper, I utilize a unique microdata set, the Prospects study of the Title 1 program, in order to analyze the effect of Catholic primary schools on test scores, classroom behavior, and attendance. Because each Prospects school includes test score data for students in Žrst and fourth grade, I use the test scores from the students in the Žrst-grade cohort as controls for selection bias for the students in the fourth- grade cohort under the assumption that ability and out-of-school factors have more inuence than in-school factors in test scores for Žrst-grade students. Using a value-added speciŽcation, I Žnd insigniŽcant but generally positive effects of Catholic schooling on 1993 mathematics and reading test scores for students in either cohort. Catholic schooling has no effect on classroom behavior. For the fourth- grade cohort, Catholic schooling is associated with a modest decrease in student absences of less than one day per year. At the same time, Catholic school teachers are more likely than public school teachers to report that excessive absenteeism is a problem.

II. Data