Does attending a selective secondary school improve student performance? Evidence from the Bicentenario schools in Chile

ABSTRACT

We investigate the effect of attending selective secondary schools belonging to the Bicentenario schools program in Chile, a free education option that is intended to give vulnerable students everywhere in Chile a unique educational opportunity, in the period from 2011 to 2014. By using propensity score methods, we find that attending a Bicentenario school improves students’ performance by a range of 0.35 to 0.23 SD in language and 0.5 to 0.35 SD in math. Also, we show that a proportion of this effect is due to the outstanding performance of the new Bicentenario schools as opposed to the restructured version of the program. We prove the robustness of the previous results through falsification, changes-in-changes, and a more demanding control group. This paper adds new evidence to analyze the effect of selective schools in developing countries like Chile, where the quality of public education is low.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• selective schools
• effective schools
• public schools
• program evaluation

Acknowledgements

We thank Mauricio Bravo and Juan Pablo Couyoumdjian for their participation in the UDD Bicentenario interfaculty research project, and their comments and revisions of several drafts of this work. We also thank the Chilean Ministry of Education for facilitating us with the SIMCE data. This research is the sole responsibility of the research team and should not be interpreted as representative of the Ministry of Education’s view.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pablo Araya is currently advisor of the Undersecretary of Education of Chile. He was previously Director of Education at the Municipality of Melipilla, Chile. The focus of his research is the impact evaluation and the districts effectiveness in education. He holds a Master in Public Administration in Economics and Public Policy from The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Francisca Dussaillant is currently president of the Chilean Society for Public Policy. She was previously Head of Social Policy at the Chilean Ministry of Finance, Director of the Centrer for Public Policy at Universidad del Desarrollo, Counselor at the Chilean National Education Council, and UNDP consultant. She holds a PhD in Economics from Universidad Católica de Chile and an MA in Education from University of North Carolina, at Chapel-Hill.

Notes

1 A comuna is the smallest administrative division in the country, and its local authority is the mayor. The mayor is responsible for public education. A “region” is the largest administrative division.

2 Unlike Emblematic schools located in Santiago, the nation’s capital, the program was widespread in the country.

3 The main source of missing data arises from incomplete parents’ questionnaires. To check whether this is an issue, we compared, separately for treatment and control groups, the averages of several variables with and without missing data: GPA in fifth and sixth grades and math and language SIMCE test scores in fourth grade. We observed that missing observations for the control group display, on average, GPA and SIMCE scores that are equal or lower than the control group used for the analyses. This would suggest that our estimates could represent a lower bound to the real impact of the program. On the other hand, we did not observe significant differences when performing the tests for the treatment group. Detailed estimates are available upon request.

4 SIMCE scores are divided into three categories: Insufficient, Elementary, and Appropriate.

5 US$ 1 = 500 Chilean pesos in 2010.

6 We implemented the propensity score using the PSCORE command (Becker & Ichino, 2002). The advantage of using PSCORE is the balanced covariate obtained across treatment and non-treatment groups and within strata, and the resulting optimal balance (Garrido et al., 2014).