After independence in 1980, the new government of Zimbabwe implemented a substantial
reform to correct the racially-segregated educational system inherited from
colonialism. A key element of the reform was the elimination of restrictions to progress
from primary to secondary school. Primary school graduates in 1980 entered secondary
school at a rate 4 times higher than those in 1979. We exploit the fuzzy discontinuity
implicit in this natural experiment to test primarily for mother-to-child transmission
of education. We find that a one year increase in the mother’s education causes an
increase in the children’s education by about 5 percent of a standard deviation. We
show that our findings are unlikely to be driven by other confounding factors.