Query: parental schooling choises

title: Causal Effect of Parental Schooling on Early Childhood Undernutrition: Quasi Experimental Evidence From Zimbabwe
abstract: An estimated 3.1 million children die each year because of undernutrition. Although cross sectional and longitudinal studies have found a protective association between greater parental education and undernutrition in their children, no randomized trial has identified a causal effect, to our knowledge. Using the 1980 education reform in Zimbabwe as a natural experiment, we estimated the causal effect of additional parental schooling on the probability of anthropometric failure in their children under 5 years of age (ages 3 through 59 months) Analyzing data on 8,243 children from the 1988, 1999, 2005 2006, and 2010 2011 Demographic and Health Surveys, we found no effect of parental schooling on early childhood undernutrition at the national level in Zimbabwe. Among households in the urban and high wealth index subsamples, each additional year of maternal schooling led to absolute reductions in the probability of a child's being wasted of 5.2 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI) 9.3, 1.2) and 3.6 percentage points (95% CI: 6.9, 0.4) respectively. In the subsample of children between the ages of 3 and 23 months, each additional year of paternal schooling increased the probability of a child's being stunted by 9.6 percentage points (95% CI: 1.4, 17.9) Secondary schooling alone may not be enough to improve early childhood nutrition in low resource settings.

title: Paid Parental Leave and Children's Schooling Outcomes
abstract: This article investigates whether schooling outcomes at age 15 are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. the time mothers spend at home with their new born before returning to work. We exploit an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for births as of 1 July, 1990. Using PISA data from the cohorts 1990 and 1987, we find no significant overall impact of the parental leave extension on standardised test scores. However, subgroup analyses reveal strong heterogeneity by maternal education and child gender.

title: Disparities in children's vocabulary and height in relation to household wealth and parental schooling: A longitudinal study in four low and middle income countries
abstract: Children from low socio economic status (SES) households often demonstrate worse growth and developmental outcomes than wealthier children, in part because poor children face a broader range of risk factors. It is difficult to characterize the trajectories of SES disparities in low and middle income countries because longitudinal data are infrequently available. We analyze measures of children's linear growth (height) at ages 1, 5, 8 and 12y and receptive language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) at ages 5, 8 and 12y in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam in relation to household SES, measured by parental schooling or household assets. We calculate children's percentile ranks within the distributions of height for age z scores and of age and language standardized receptive vocabulary scores. We find that children in the top quartile of household SES are taller and have better language performance than children in the bottom quartile; differences in vocabulary scores between children with high and low SES are larger than differences in the height measure. For height, disparities in SES are present by age 1y and persist as children age. For vocabulary, SES disparities also emerge early in life, but patterns are not consistent across age; for example, SES disparities are constant over time in India, widen between 5 and 12y in Ethiopia, and narrow in this age range in Vietnam and Peru. Household characteristics (such as mother's height, age, and ethnicity) and community fixed effects explain most of the disparities in height and around half of the disparities in vocabulary. We also find evidence that SES disparities in height and language development may not be fixed over time, suggesting opportunities for policy and programs to address these gaps early in life.

title: "That's Why I Say Stay in School" Black Mothers' Parental Involvement, Cultural Wealth, and Exclusion in Their Son's Schooling
abstract: This study examines parental involvement practices, the cultural wealth, and school experiences of poor and working class mothers of Black boys. Drawing upon data from an ethnographic study, we examine qualitative interviews with four Black mothers. Using critical race theory and cultural wealth frameworks, we explore the mothers' approaches to supporting their sons' education. We also describe how the mothers and their sons experienced exclusion from the school, and how this exclusion limited the mothers' involvement. We highlight their agency in making use of particular forms of cultural wealth in responding to the school's failure of their sons.

title: Connect Text: Leveraging Text Message Communication to Mitigate Chronic Absenteeism and Improve Parental Engagement in the Earliest Years of Schooling
abstract: Poor school attendance in the early grades is predictive of poor subsequent educational outcomes. We report on a pilot intervention aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. We designed and implemented a two way, text based parent school communication system to encourage daily attendance, provide parents with personalized feedback on their child's attendance, and provide support to mitigate challenges that threatened parents' ability to get their child to school regularly. The program was well received, with nearly all families registering for participation, and three quarters of those receiving outreach responding and engaging with school personnel via text. The pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate was substantially lower in the intervention year relative to prior trends. Further, in the intervention year, the pilot school's kindergarten chronic absenteeism rate (13% was substantially lower than for that of a synthetically constructed comparison school (24% We discuss implications for sustainability and scaling of an effort such as this.

title: The effect of parental education on child health: Quasi experimental evidence from a reduction in the length of primary schooling in Egypt
abstract: This paper examines the impact of parental education on child health using a reduction in the length of primary schooling in Egypt. We use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to compare the health outcomes of children whose parents were exposed to different schooling requirements because they were born either side of a threshold date. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey (1992 2014) we find no effect of maternal education on child mortality or nutritional status. There is some evidence, although not entirely robust, that father's education reduces the likelihood of child stunting. We find, however, that father's education has no impact on child mortality or other measures of nutritional status. We provide suggestive evidence that, given the low levels of parental education in Egypt accompanied with the inferior quality of primary schooling, education has little effect on intermediate outcomes literacy and utilization of antenatal care that may improve the health of offspring.

title: Schools as Surveilling Institutions? Paternal Incarceration, System Avoidance, and Parental Involvement in Schooling
abstract: Parents play important roles in their children's lives, and parental involvement in elementary school in particular is meaningful for a range of child outcomes. Given the increasing number of school aged children with incarcerated parents, this study explores the ways paternal incarceration is associated with mothers' and fathers' reports of home and school based involvement in schooling. Using Fragile Families Study data, we find that a father's incarceration inhibits his school and home based involvement in schooling, but associations for maternal involvement are weaker. Results are robust to alternative specifications of incarceration that address concerns about selection and unobserved heterogeneity. Findings also hold across levels of father child contact. We also conducted a test of the system avoidance mechanism and results suggest it partially explains reductions in school involvement for fathers following incarceration. Given the reoccurring interest in the interconnection between families and schools and how this translates into success, this study suggests that paternal incarceration is associated with lower parental involvement in schooling and highlights the role of system avoidance in this association. Attachment to social institutions like schools is quite consequential, and this work highlights another way mass incarceration influences social life in the United States.

title: Narrowing the achievement gap::Parental engagement with children's learning; creating a learning centred schooling system
abstract: Narrowing the Achievement Gap proposes a radical change to our conception of learning, education and schooling, arguing that parental engagement is the best lever we have for school improvement and closing the achievement gap. Unique in its focus on original research linking underachievement and parental engagement, this book uses a range of international case studies to demonstrate that achievement isn't only reliant on what happens in school and that what happens out of school is equally important. Each chapter explores how schools can actively engage with parents and communities to reinstate education in the home, and to generate support to combat issues out of their control, including poverty, deprivation, and a lack of social capital. Although schools have an integral part to play in this process, it argues that parents and society must reconsider their own educational responsibility, regardless of background, and offers a solid research base and practical suggestions to help do so. Consisting of an in depth and contemporary study of this significant issue in educational achievement and written by an expert in the field, this text will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of education, schooling, sociology of education, school effectiveness and improvement, school policy and school leadership.

title: Offspring schooling associated with increased parental survival in rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
abstract: Investing in offspring's human capital has been suggested as an effective strategy for parents to improve their living conditions at older ages. A few studies have assessed the role of children's schooling in parental survival in high income countries, but none have considered lower resource settings with limited public wealth transfers and high adult mortality.  We followed 17,789 parents between January 2003 and August 2015 in a large population based open cohort in rural KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. We used Cox proportional hazards models to investigate the association between offspring's schooling and time to parental death. We assessed the association separately by parental sex and for four cause of death groups.  A one year increase in offspring's schooling attainment was associated with a 5% decline in the hazard of maternal death (adjusted Hazard Ratio [aHR] 0.95, 95%CI: 0.94 0.97) and a 6% decline in the hazard of paternal death (aHR: 0.94, 95%CI: 0.92 0.96) adjusting for a wide range of demographic and socio economic variables of the parent and their children. Among mothers, the association was strongest for communicable, maternal, perinatal and nutritional conditions (aHR: 0.87, 95%CI: 0.82 0.92) and AIDS and tuberculosis (aHR: 0.92, 95%CI: 0.89 0.96) and weakest for injuries. Among fathers, the association was strongest for injuries (aHR: 0.87, 95%CI: 0.79 0.95) and AIDS and tuberculosis (aHR: 0.92, 95%CI: 0.89 0.96) and weakest for non communicable diseases.  Higher levels of schooling in offspring are associated with increased parental survival in rural South Africa, particularly for mothers at risk of communicable disease mortality and fathers at risk of injury mortality. Offspring's human capital may be an important factor for health disparities, particularly in lower resource settings.

title: Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty and Inequality: Parental Resources and Schooling Attainment and Children's Human Capital in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam
abstract: Academic and policy literatures on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality suggest that improving schooling attainment and income for parents in poor households will lessen poverty and inequality in their children's generation through increased human capital accumulated by their children. However, magnitudes of such effects are unknown. We use data on children born in the twenty first century in four developing countries to simulate how changes in parents' schooling attainment and consumption would affect poverty and inequality in both the parents' and their children's generations. We find that increasing minimum schooling or income substantially reduces poverty and inequality in the parents' generation but does not carry over to reducing poverty and inequality substantially in the children's generation. Therefore, while reductions in poverty and inequality in the parents' generation are desirable in themselves to improve welfare among current adults, they are not likely to have large impacts in reducing poverty and particularly in reducing inequality in human capital in the next generation.