Family Background, After-school Tutoring, and Student Achievement: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Rural China

The paramount importance of after-school tutoring has led some sociologists and educators to refer to it as the “shadow educational system,” which exists alongside the formal educational system with increasing relative size, particularly in some East Asian countries. A number of empirical studies in the literature of economics and sociology examine the impact of afterschool tutoring. However, most of these studies use non-experimental data, which often leads to problems of interpretation due to the issue of endogeneity. This paper conducts a theoretical and empirical investigation into the effect of after-school tutoring on the academic performances of some Chinese primary school students. Based on the data collected from a randomized controlled trial, our estimates show significant positive effect of after-school tutoring on the test score in mathematics. Moreover, this effect is significantly stronger for the children whose both parents are away from home, a phenomenon that is common in rural China.