Strategic Review of the EDUCO Program - EQUIP123.net

Strategic Review of the EDUCO ProgramJuly 2010However, setting a pattern for outcomes that repeat in subsequent studies, they found that around someimportant “process” variables, such as teacher absences (and which presumably have some impact onachievement), EDUCO schools have a clear advantage. In this study, and again in common with manyother studies, the R-square statistic is low; that is, this is a context in which we do not have a clear explanationof why the children’s cognitive outcomes vary. It is possible that there are too few variablesbased on the “micro” characteristics of the teaching process, and that they are trying to model or explainoutcomes based only on socioeconomic or “input” variables and not a sufficient number of variables thatcharacterize the pedagogic process in the classroom.In another paper, Jiménez and Sawada (2003), from the World Bank, update their study and show thattaking into account and controlling for all the advantages and disadvantages, EDUCO children have alower dropout rate. In this study, they prove that if CDE schools were to have the same community participationlevel as EDUCO schools, the EDUCO advantage would disappear. Thus, this is specificallythe element of community participation that appears to achieve the “EDUCO effect.” It is necessary tonote that in this case the “outcome” variable of interest is the dropout rate, not cognitive achievement.However, in contrast to the case of cognitive achievement, the important substantive significance, notonly the statistical significance, is high (more than 20%).Another study that effectively controls, statistically, the ACE-CDE comparison at the middle schoollevel is Rodríguez (2005), commissioned by MINED. The advantage of this study is the wealth of datait produced, and, therefore, the variety of factors for control, or comparison, it uses. By including municipaldata, not just school data, it also makes use of hierarchical modeling to control for certain typesof errors. This study points out that, in general, ACE schools have results at least equal to CDE schools,and perhaps better in some areas, especially when controlling for outcomes based on other associatedfactors. However, just as in many other studies, it makes little mention of the substantive significance ofthese differences. It does offer data that alert readers can use to judge for themselves. For example, incases where the ACE outcomes are better (e.g. Table 11), the difference between ACE and CDE schools,although statistically significant, is around 1% or 2%, which is small in substantive terms.The last study to mention is Di Gropello (2006), from the World Bank, which shows, in a tabular multivariatecontext (not regression) that the difference in cognitive achievement between EDUCO andnon-EDUCO schools is small and favors EDUCO, even though EDUCO schools have socioeconomicdisadvantages.The conclusions from the specialized literature indicate that EDUCO has a positive and statisticallysignificant effect on a number of variables, including community participation and teacher attendance.These, in turn, have an impact on educational achievement, whether this is measured using variablessuch as dropout rate, or directly using cognitive achievements. However, the marginal impact, evencontrolling for EDUCO disadvantages (e.g. greater poverty in the areas where EDUCO has a greaterpresence), tends to not be substantively large. As will be seen below, the conclusion of our statisticalanalysis, which uses a multivariate analysis and statistical controls, is similar to the previous studies.16