Sending parents text messages to encourage school engagement actually causes more students to leave their current schools.
April 23, 2026
Original Paper
Nudging Parents out the Door: The Impacts of Parental Encouragement on School Choice and Test Scores
SSRN · 6610766
The Takeaway
SMS programs designed to help parents support their children's education lead to higher student exit rates. As parents become more involved, they become better at identifying the flaws in low-quality schools and move their children elsewhere. Most policymakers assume that engagement will stabilize schools by improving them from within. In reality, well-informed parents often choose to leave rather than stay and fix a failing system. This creates a paradox where helping families can actually destabilize the very institutions they are trying to improve.
From the abstract
This study evaluates a large-scale SMS outreach program to engage caregivers of students in private primary schools in Kenya. Using a two-stage randomization design, we tested two types of weekly SMS messages: growth-mindset encouragement and personalized performance information. We find two main effects: First, outreach improved test scores by 0.07 standard deviations, with particularly strong gains among initially lower-performing students. This improvement generates 12 learning-adjusted years