Publication: Education for All : Compensating for Disadvantage in Mexico
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2004-05
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2012-08-13
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Education for all means learning for all. It means closing the advantage gap-making sure that the children of the poor and disadvantaged achieve the same levels of learning as all other children. This is one of the great challenges any country can face. It is a particular challenge in a diverse country such as Mexico, where many children do not speak Spanish, live in villages inaccessible by roads and cannot afford such basic expenditures as school uniforms.
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“Shapiro, Joseph; Patrinos, Harry Anthony; Trevino Moreno, Jorge. 2004. Education for All : Compensating for Disadvantage in Mexico. Education Notes. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/10357 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Secondary education delivered by way of television to remote communities and bilingual education for indigenous students are both shown to improve student achievement. CONAFE also lowers primary school repetition and failure rates. The authors conclude that this compensatory education program can effectively improve short-term learning results for disadvantaged students, but that improvement varies by the subject of instruction and the demographics of students taught.Publication Quality of Schooling and Quality of Schools for Indigenous Students in Guatemala, Mexico and Peru(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-08)A substantial gap in test scores exists between indigenous and non-indigenous students in Latin America. Using test score data for 3rd and 4th year primary school pupils in Guatemala and Peru, and 5th grade pupils in Mexico, the authors assess the magnitude of the indigenous and non-indigenous test score gap and identify the main family and school inputs contributing to the gap. 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Using a three-year panel of 74,700 schools, the authors estimate the impact of the PEC on dropout, repetition, and failure using two common nonexperimental methods-regression analysis and propensity score matching. The methods provide similar but nonidentical results. The preferred estimator, difference-in-differences with matching, reveals that participation in the PEC decreases dropout by 0.24 percentage points, failure by 0.24 percentage points, and repetition by 0.31 percentage points-an economically small but statistically significant impact. The PEC lacks measurable impact on outcomes in indigenous schools. 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