Evaluating the Impact of Mexico's Quality Schools Program : The Pitfalls of Using Nonexperimental Data
The authors evaluate whether increasing school resources and decentralizing management decisions at the school level improves learning in a developing country. Mexico's Quality Schools Program (PEC), following many other countries and U.S. states, offers US$15,000 grants for public schools to i...
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2006/10/7126808/evaluating-impact-mexicos-quality-schools-program-pitfalls-using-nonexperimental-data http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9010 |
| Summary: | The authors evaluate whether increasing school resources and decentralizing management decisions at the school level improves learning in a developing country. Mexico's Quality Schools Program (PEC), following many other countries and U.S. states, offers US$15,000 grants for public schools to implement five-year improvement plans that the school's staff and community design. 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. The results suggest that a combination of increased resources and local management can produce small improvements in school outcomes, though perhaps not in the most troubled school systems. |
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