Parent-School Communication based on text messages (SMS)

High rates of absenteeism, grade repetition and poor grades continue to undermine educational investments for children from lower income families in Chile. As a result, despite massive increases in access to high school and post-secondary education in the last two decades, there is still tremendous educational inequality in this country. One problem is that although attendance and performance in lower grades is highly predictive of grade repetition and drop out in later grades, parents may not always be aware of this link. Moreover, we have seen in prior work that parents may not always have the correct information about child behaviors in school. This project targets two aspects of parental involvement with the school system: information and skills. We designed an experiment to randomly provide parents with regular information about children’s activities and behavior at school, using text messages. After some time using this SMS program, we treat a subset of these parents with a complementary investment that informs them how to use these markers (attendance, grades, behavior) to monitor and guide their children towards improved investments in school.