School Quality, Family Background, and Student Achievement: The Case of Cebu

Yaraslau Zayats, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The paper investigates the effects of school quality characteristics on the achievement of Filipino adolescents. The rich data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) allows us to control for student’s ability, family background and community characteristics. The analysis of the sensitivity of the results to the omission of key exogenous variables reveals that ignoring either a measure of the child’s ability or community characteristics does not lead to statistically significant changes in the estimated coefficients. In contrast, omission of family background characteristics introduces a considerable bias. Bootstrap test statistics indicate that this bias is statistically significant. Even larger bias is introduced when one fails to control for both family background and student’s ability. Failure to control for family background characteristics inflates estimated effects of school quality and, as the result, spuriously improves statistical significance of the estimates making them significant at 5% or even 1% significance level.