Strategic Review of the EDUCO Program - EQUIP123.net

Strategic Review of the EDUCO ProgramJuly 2010Summary of Historic Literature Using Statistical MethodsThe research team summarized the existing literature, focusing on studies that use statistical methodsthat control or adjust for advantages or disadvantages that ACE schools might have in comparison toCDE schools. This was not meant to be an exhaustive literature review, but rather an overview of themost prominent work that has been done and that which has attempted to most carefully control foradvantages and disadvantages, using statistical methods. For reasons beyond the team’s knowledge, agreater number of rigorous comparative studies were done during the program’s first decade and fewstudies have been completed recently. Therefore, this review has a certain inevitable bias toward olderdata.The analysis of the specialized literature revealed that most of the studies found the same results. Thefirst study in this line is that of the El Salvador Evaluation Team (1995) of the World Bank. Despite notconducting a multivariate statistical analysis, it concluded that EDUCO, for that year, achieved resultsonly a little worse in its schools despite most of the schools having much less favorable conditions, asign of good value added (results only a little worse when conditions are considerably worse).The first evaluation of EDUCO outcomes that meets the condition of controlling for other variables ina multivariate context is the evaluation done by Jiménez and Sawada (1998) of the World Bank. Thatstudy used the scores from a cognitive assessment of third grade children as an evaluation variable. Theresults revealed that the EDUCO schools with socioeconomic and institutional disadvantages (less educatedparents, deficient facilities) had slightly worse results than the rest of the schools. It is importantto note that this refers to the situation over 10 years ago.Interestingly, and consistent with the situation more than a decade later, is that both the difference inadvantages and the cognitive difference were slight. For example, in the difference in advantages, thepercentage of mothers who had been through basic education in non-EDUCO schools was 56%, while itwas 51% in EDUCO schools. With regard to the cognitive difference, EDUCO was at a 0.18 point disadvantage,based on a 3.66 average, which is relatively little. As has been found, for some advantages,the differences give the advantage to EDUCO, but not in other cases. For example, EDUCO teachersseem to have more years of education, but less experience (which is logical if they are younger).In this same study, Jiménez and Sawada use a sophisticated correction to compare EDUCO and non-EDUCO schools. When controlling or correcting for socioeconomic and infrastructure disadvantages,the authors ask: if EDUCO seems to have better cognitive outcomes, is it because EDUCO parents aresimply more involved; that is, are they different, and therefore is what is observed and put forward asgreater efficiency in EDUCO only a selection effect? After these corrections (for the correlation withother advantages or disadvantages, and those for selection bias), Jiménez and Sawada conclude thatthere is no significant difference in cognitive achievement between EDUCO and non-EDUCO schools. 11 Not only are the outcomes not statistically significant, but if they were, they would not be substantially significant, since we are talking about an “EDUCOeffect” equal to no more than 3% of the base score in the test used.15