Improving Latin America's school quality: Which special interventions work?

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 205-228

  Anderson, Joan B ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20744432899     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/428720     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2. Laurence Wolff, Ernesto Schiefelbein, and Jorge Valenzuela, "Improving the Quality of Primary Education in Latin America and the Caribbean toward the Twenty-first Century," World Bank Discussion Paper no. 257 (World Bank, Washington, DC, 1994), 2.
3. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, Panorama social de America Latina 1998 report (Santiago: United Nations, 1999).
4. For overviews of the theoretical foundations of compensatory programs and surveys of past research, see Marlaine E. Lockheed and Adrian M. Verspoor, Improving Primary Education in Developing Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991);
5. Bruce Fuller and Preme Clarke, "Raising School Effects While Ignoring Culture? Local Conditions and the Influence of Classroom Tools, Rules and Pedagogy," Review of Educational Research 64, no. 1 (1994): 119-57.
6. Santiago Cueto, Marjorie Chinen, Ivan Montes, Fernando Andrade, and María Staeheli, "Educational Impact of a School Breakfast Program in Rural Peru" (paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Conference, New Orleans, April 20-24, 2000).
7. Fernando Reimers, "Educational Opportunity and Policy in Latin America," in Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances, ed. Fernando Reimers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55-107.
8. Lockheed and Verspoor, Improving, 85-86.
9. Dean Jamison, Barbara Searle, Klaus Galda, and Stephen Heyneman, "Improving Elementary Mathematics Education in Nicaragua: An Experimental Study of the Impact of Textbooks and Radio on Achievement," Journal of Educational Psychology 73, no. 4 (1981): 556-57.
10. Lockheed and Verspoor, Improving, 57.
11. Fuller and Clarke, "Raising School Effects While Ignoring Culture?"
12. Donald Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean: Examples of Compensatory Education," in Reimers, Unequal Schools, 112-35.
13. Carlos Muñoz Izquierdo, Raquel Ahuja, Carmen Noriega, and Patricia Schurmann y Magda Campillo, "Valoración del impacto educativo de un programa compensatorio, orientado a abatir el rezago escolar en la educación primaria," Revista Latinoamericana de estudios educativos (Mexico) 25, no. 4 (1995): 11-58.
14. Margarita Gómez Palacio, "Prevention of School Failure in Basic Education in Mexico," in Schooling for Success: Preventing Repetition and Dropout in Latin American Primary Schools, ed. Laura Randall and Joan Anderson (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1999), 257-62.
15. Ralph Harbison and Eric Hanushek, Educational Performance of the Poor: Lessons from Rural Northeast Brazil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
16. Ernesto Schiefelbein and Paulina Schiefelbein, "Education and Poverty in Chile: Affirmative Action in the 1990's," in Reimers, Unequal Schools, 183-200.
17. Izquierdo et al., "Valoración del impacto educativo de un programa compensatorio."
18. T. Neville Postlethwaite and K, N. Ross, Effective Schools in Reading; Implications for Educational Planners (Hamburg: IEA, 1992).
19. Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean."
20. Izquierdo et al., "Valoración del impacto educativo de un programa compensatorio."
21. Schiefelbein and Schiefelbein, "Education and Poverty in Chile."
22. Emilio Tenti Fanfani, "Teachers' Training, Work Conditions, and Salary in Argentina," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 265-76.
23. George Psacharopoulos, Carlos Rojas, and Eduardo Velez, "Achievement Evaluation of Colombia's Escuela Nueva: Is Multigrade the Answer?" Comparative Education Review 37, no. 3 (1993): 263-76.
24. Juan Casassus, Sandra Cusato,Juan Enrique Froemel, and Juan Carlos Palafox, "Informe secundo, primer estudio international comparativo sobre lenguaje, matemática y factores asociados, para alumnos del tercer y cuarto grado de la educación básica" (report, UNESCO-Santiago, Andros, Santiago, 2000).
25. Juan Eduardo García-Huidobro, "Educational Policies and Equity in Chile," in Reimers, Unequal Schools, 161-78.
26. Reimers, "Educational Opportunity and Policy in Latin America."
27. García-Huidobro, "Educational Policies and Equity in Chile."
28. Reimers, "Educational Opportunity and Policy in Latin America";
29. Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean."
30. Correcting the original design of the program, the new PROGRESA chooses whole communities instead of singling out the poorest children in a community, which had been subjecting them to teasing. See Sylvia Schmelkes, "Policies against School Failure in Mexico: An Overview," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 163-75.
31. Inés Aguerrondo, "Can Education Measure Up to Poverty in Argentina?" in Reimers, Unequal Schools, 136-59.
32. Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean."
33. The Gini index measures income inequality. It has a value of zero in a case of perfect equality of distribution, and 100 is perfect inequality. For comparison, the Gini index for the United States is 40.7, based on the 1997 survey. The Gini indexes for the Latin American countries are based on 1998 surveys. Unfortunately the Gini index for Argentina is not available (World Bank, World Development Report [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003]).
34. Fanfani, "Teachers' Training, Work Conditions, and Salary in Argentina."
35. The data are from Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos (1994-95) and Ministerio de Cultura y Educacíon (1996), elaborated in Ruth Sautu and Ana Maria Eichelbaum de Babini, "Argentina: Elementary School Enrollment and Attainment," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 63-74.
36. Ernesto Schiefelbein and Paulina Schiefelbein, "Repetition and Quality of Education in Chile," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 90-102.
37. The latter schools, similar to charter schools in the United States, are administered privately but financed by the state in an attempt to improve efficiency by creating competition among schools and giving parents a choice (see Vargas Jaime S., "Educational Decentralization in Chile," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 201-10). The study reported here includes both types of publicly financed schools, and both are referred to here as public schools.
38. Nevertheless, when controlling for socioeconomic status (SES), there is no measurable difference in performance between students attending municipal and publicly funded private schools. See Schiefelbein and Schiefelbein, "Education and Poverty in Chile";
39. see also Martin Carnoy and Patrick McEwan, "The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Private Schools in Chile's Voucher System," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22 (2000): 213-39.
40. Schiefelbein and Schiefelbein, "Education and Poverty in Chile."
41. See Laura da Veiga and Maria Ligia Barbosa de Oliveira, "Programas para Melhoria da Aprendizagem no Brazi" (paper presented at the International Congress Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, September 2001);
42. Minas Gerais, "Educação capacita professores" (Governo do estado de Minas Gerais, 1999), http://www.iof.mg.gov.br/iodiario/comemorativo/15101999/Professores.htm.
43. Palacio, "Prevention of School Failure in Basic Education in Mexico."
44. María Celia Agudo de Corsico, "Argentina: Programs for the Prevention of Repetition and Dropout and Their Results," in Randall and Anderson, Schooling for Success, 131-41.
45. Schmelkes, "Policies against School Failure in Mexico."
46. See Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean";
47. Izquierdo et al., "Valoración del impacto educativo de un programa compensatorio."
48. UNESCO/ORELAC, Medicion de la calidad de la education: Instrumentos, vol. 2 (Santiago: ORELAC, 1994).
49. Since Mexico, being north of the equator, is on a different school calendar than the other three school systems, the UNESCO exams were administered in May 1999 in Leon and in November 1999 in the other three cities.
50. Kathy E. Green, Educational Testing: Issues and Applications (New York: Garland, 1991).
51. Fourth grade was chosen for two reasons. First, pedagogically it is the time when children transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Second, as a practical matter the UNESCO exams for math and language, which were used to get comparable cross-country results, are developed for the fourth grade.
52. The index is a standardized index composed of the family's reported income, the proportion of income expended on food, the quality of housing, the number of people in household per bedroom, the number of books in the household, and the average years of education of all household members over 15 years of age.
53. Since the quintiles are formed from this sample of children attending public schools, the upper quintile is very likely lower than that of the society as a whole; members of the upper quintile of the population in the countries sampled are not likely to send their children to public schools.
54. Winkler, "Educating the Poor in Latin America and the Caribbean."
55. For a detailed account of the hierarchical linear modeling used, see Anthony S. Bryk and Stephen W. Raudenbush, Hierarchical Linear Models (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992).
56. The child's gender is also included in the first-level language equations. Ninety-six first-level equations are estimated, one equation per school/classroom, so that 96 intercept terms and slope coefficients are generated. These become the dependent variables in the second-level estimates. The intercept term is the school average score, after accounting for the child's ability, SES, and (in the case of language) gender. In the equations with intercepts as the dependent variable, the coefficients of school variables are interpreted as the effects on school average scores after accounting for variations in the individual children's ability, family education, and gender. The average family education and the socioeconomic index calculated for each family in this study are highly correlated. The education proxy was preferred because it underlines the intergenerational effect of improved education. Educating children now is important not only for increasing the productivity of children when they grow up and enter the workforce but also for educating their children in the next generation.
57. All coefficients that are significant at the 1, 5, and 10 percent levels of significance using a two-tailed test are presented in the graph.
58. The appendix also includes a more technical description of the multilevel modeling technique, along with the estimated equations and definitions of the control variables.
59. See Fuller and Clarke, "Raising School Effects";
60. Lockheed and Verspoor, Improving. Both of these present surveys of previous empirical studies in developing countries.
61. Cueto et al., "Educational Impact of a School Breakfast Program in Rural Peru."
62. Ernesto Schiefelbein, Laurence Wolff, and Paulina Schiefelbein, Cost-Effectiveness of Education Policies in Latin America: A Survey of Expert Opinion (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998).
63. Henry Levin, Gene V. Glass, and Gail Meister, "Is CAI Cost-Effective?" in Cost Effectiveness of Four Educational Interventions (Stanford, CA: Institute for Research on Education Finance and Governance, 1984).