Led by Felipe Barrera-Osorio at Vanderbilt University and co-directed by Andrew Dustan at William & Mary, this project aims to test whether informational frictions limit low-income families’ demand for Bogotá’s Schools in Administration (SA) charter schools, and whether removing those frictions increases applications

Students in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have low and unequally distributed learning outcomes, with particularly low test scores among low-income students. Conventional tools for improving learning — more spending, direct provision, teacher training and allocation, and investments in infrastructure and technology — have had mixed results.

A set of reforms instead changes school governance and increases the role of private providers in publicly funded education, aiming to strengthen quality and expand options for families poorly served by the existing system. The success of such innovations as pro-poor policies hinges, in part, on families being informed about their options.

In Bogotá, the SA program supports 35 tuition-free charter schools run by private providers in low-income areas. These schools are oversubscribed and effective, producing higher cognitive and socioemotional skills for students offered seats. Yet only about 30% of entry-grade students living near an SA apply through the city’s centralized process, and applicants are less poor than non-applicants. Information appears central: 44% of non-applicants were unaware of their closest SA school.

The research asks whether solving the information problem is sufficient to increase SA application rates among the poorest households and how improved information changes who applies and who is admitted.

To isolate the causal role of information, the team will run randomized surveys and information treatments that vary content and delivery channels, and link results to administrative data on applications, offers, and attendance. Experimental findings will feed an economic model of school demand to estimate how information shifts applicant composition and how to target interventions cost-effectively, informing policymakers designing school choice systems in LMICs and beyond.