Evaluating the Impact of Mexico's Quality Schools Program : The Pitfalls of Using Nonexperimental Data

Skoufias, Emmanuel ; Shapiro, Joseph

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO SANITATION;    ADULTS;    ADVANCED EDUCATION;    CLASS SIZE;    CLASSROOM;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4036
RP-ID  :  WPS4036

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

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.