Citation:
Fryer RG, Curto VE. The Potential of Urban Boarding Schools for the Poor: Evidence from SEED. Journal of Labor Economics (2014). 2014;32 (1) :65-93.
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Abstract:
The SEED schools, which combine a “No Excuses” charter model with a five-day-a-week boarding program, are America’s only urban public boarding schools for the poor. We provide the first causal estimate of the impact of attending SEED schools on academic achievement, with the goal of understanding whether changing both a student’s social and educational en- vironment through boarding is an effective strategy to increase achievement among the poor. Using admission lotteries, we show that attending a SEED school increases achievement by 0.211 standard deviations in reading and 0.229 standard deviations in math, per year of attendance. We argue that the large impacts on reading are consistent with dialectical theories of language development.