“Why have so many of us parents, including me, paid a fortune for exclusive private schools or prepped our children strenuously for selective public school entrance exams? One reason is our belief that in a school that rejects most applicants, the competition and camaraderie of so many great students will ensure our kids too become top scholars. No slacker delinquents will lure them away from their Advanced Placement homework. Ivy League admission and big careers we can brag about will be assured. Or maybe not. A new study by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University suggests that students who qualify for some of the nation’s most selective public high schools do no better academically than similar kids who miss the entrance test cut-off. Joshua D. Angrist and Parag A. Pathak of MIT and Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke wrote the paper “The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools,” published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They compared students who just made the cut-off to those who just missed it. They examined the average scores of both samples on later tests that might reflect how much they learned in high school. This included state tests plus PSAT, SAT and Advanced Placement tests.”
By Jay Matthews