TY  - JOUR
AU  - Curto,Vilsa E.
AU  - Fryer,Roland G., Jr.
TI  - Estimating the Returns to Urban Boarding Schools: Evidence from SEED
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16746
PY  - 2011
Y2  - January 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16746
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16746.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Vilsa Curto
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
E-Mail: vcurto@stanford.edu

Roland G. Fryer, Jr
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center 208
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/495-9592
Fax: 617/495-8570
E-Mail: rfryer@fas.harvard.edu
AB  - 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 a student's environment through boarding is a cost-effective strategy to increase achievement among the poor. Using admission lotteries, we show that attending a SEED school increases achievement by 0.198 standard deviations in reading and 0.230 standard deviations in math, per year of attendance. Despite these relatively large impacts, the return on investment in SEED is less than five percent due to the substantial costs of boarding. Similar "No Excuses'' charter schools -- without a boarding option -- have a return on investment of over eighteen percent.
ER  -