The authors use panel data from the kindergarten and 1st grade waves of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- Kindergarten Class to investigate whether increases in schooling inputs in the form of smaller classes ''crowd out'' parental inputs. They estimate child fixed-effect and fixed-effect-instrumental-variable models to identify the causal effects of class size on three types of parental involvement-parent-child interactions, parent-school interaction, and parent-financed activities for children. Our results suggest that increases in class size are associated with a decrease in parent-child interaction, no change in parent-school interaction, but an increase in parent-financed activities. The magnitude of these effects is between 3% and 7% of a standard deviation. Controlling for parental involvement in test score regressions does not change the achievement effects of class size, suggesting that the benefits of class size reduction are unlikely to be neutralized by adjustments in parental inputs, at least during the first 2 years in school.

This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.

Our mission to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis is enabled through our core values of quality and objectivity and our unwavering commitment to the highest level of integrity and ethical behavior. To help ensure our research and analysis are rigorous, objective, and nonpartisan, we subject our research publications to a robust and exacting quality-assurance process; avoid both the appearance and reality of financial and other conflicts of interest through staff training, project screening, and a policy of mandatory disclosure; and pursue transparency in our research engagements through our commitment to the open publication of our research findings and recommendations, disclosure of the source of funding of published research, and policies to ensure intellectual independence. For more information, visit www.rand.org/about/research-integrity.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

Do Reductions in Class Size Crowd Out Parental Investment in Education?