Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

While an extensive literature studies the allocation of resources across schools, there is limited evidence on the causes and consequences of within-school resource allocation. This study leverages family information in administrative school records to infer the role of parents in the assignment of students to teachers. We investigate the frequency with which students are assigned to the teachers who taught their older siblings and find strong evidence for non-random sorting of students to their older sibling’s teachers after accounting for the number of teachers teaching in the grade, student demographic characteristics and school-grade-year fixed effects. We investigate how this allocation of students to their older sibling’s teacher varies with student, teacher and school characteristics. By analyzing the circumstances in which students are disproportionately assigned to their older sibling’s teacher, we provide indirect evidence regarding parental preferences for various teacher characteristics. Since previous evidence on parental preferences is scant and limited to survey questionnaires, our study has the advantage of measuring revealed rather than stated preferences over teacher attributes. We also document that the strength of the sorting varies significantly by family income and race which has important implications for efforts designed to close family income- and race-achievement gaps.