Engaging Parents with Preschools: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Parental engagement with schools is an important part of child development. Yet, parent engagement with preschools tends to be low. To increase parental attendance at school-sponsored family engagement events, we conducted a 4-month RCT with 319 parents across six preschools in Chicago. We designed an intervention using a combination of financial incentives and two tools from behavioural economics: loss-framing and reminder messages. The treatment parents were given a $25 per event incentive to attend 8 events sponsored by their preschools, as well as weekly text message reminders about the events. The financial incentive was framed using loss aversion: parents were initially given $200 in a virtual account and lost $25 for each missed event. We find no extensive margin treatment effect: the intervention did not increase the fraction of parents who attended at least one event. However, there is a statistically significant 32% (7% points) intensive margin treatment effect. We also found that treated parents were also more likely to attend unincentivized events after the intervention.