The distributional impacts of a universal school reform on mathematical achievements: A natural experiment from Canada

摘要

We investigate the impact of an ambitious provincial school reform in Canada onstudents’ mathematical achievements. It is the first paper to exploit a universal schoolreform of this magnitude to identify the causal effect of a widely supported teachingapproach on students’ math scores. Our data set allows us to differentiate impactsaccording to the number of years of treatment and the timing of treatment. Using thechanges-in-changes model, we find that the reform had negative effects on students’scores at al points on the skills distribution and that the effects were larger the longer theexposure to the reform.