The purpose of the Education Strategy Paper is to compare basic education outcomes and indicators in the four Central American countries, which will then be examined and explored in the subsequent chapters. At least five main dimensions of educational performance should be considered in any education sector diagnostic such as this one: (a) educational coverage, measured by enrollment rates; (b) internal efficiency, measured by student cohort survival rates and other indicators; (c) educational quality, measured by the acquisition of cognitive skills; (d) external efficiency, measured by private (and ideally, social) rates of return to schooling at the various levels; and (e) equity, measured by the distribution among urban-rural areas, socio-economic groups and ethnic groups of all the previous indicators. We will make the attempt below to compare the countries along these dimensions, using similar indicators, and, when applicable, triangulating indicators across multiple sources (official Ministry of Education sources and household surveys). When possible, we also provide longitudinal comparisons of these education indicators for each country. A key conclusion of the chapter will be that some urgent priorities remain in spite of several accomplishments undertaken in the past decades, in particular related to quality and learning, primary completion and secondary education coverage.
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