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Caste is a unique marker of social stratification in India. There are significant eco- nomic inequalities and considerable disparities in educational achievements between historically disadvantaged caste groups and Others. Unequal investments in their chil- dren's human capital by caste can perpetuate income inequalities and reproduce class differences between caste groups. This paper analyses caste-based disparities in house- hold expenditure on children's school education using nationally representative social expenditure data on education from 2007–08 and 2017–18 in India. The paper uses a recentered influence function (RIF) based decomposition analysis to pinpoint the key factors underpinning the disparity in private educational expenditure between disadvantaged caste groups and Others. Further, to overcome the problem of heterogeneity of data the study also employs propensity score matching (PSM) as robustness check for the decomposition analysis. The findings from decomposition and matching approaches reveal that differences in endowments, specifically income differences, between caste groups explain most of the caste-based gap in children's human capital investments. The study has implications for public policy to address educational and economic disparities between disadvantaged caste groups (ST, SC and OBC) and Others in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper quantifies learning losses related to delaying the return to in presence school activities after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, for children of low socioeconomic background in Mexico by exploiting a unique data set constructed for such purpose. Data on math and reading comprehension learning outcomes for a panel of children aged 10–15 were collected between April and December 2021 in two geographically adjacent and similar states in the southern region of the country, with significant between and within state variability in the school reopening and school return process. We use alternative estimation techniques to measure changes in learning outcomes in relation to the exposure to in-presence education during a 6-month period and find that children that returned to school earlier had higher achievement scores of at least 0.27 standard deviations, and these were greater for older children. These findings highlight the potential learning losses associated with remote education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some 16 years after the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland is most clearly evident in the delivery of key public services. The focus of this paper is the highly segregated and unequal system of education provision and the attempts made to tackle these problems at the post-primary level. First, in terms of performance, post-primary educational outcomes are hugely variable: this is the problem of performance inequality . Second, pupils from deprived backgrounds – pupils entitled to free school meals and those with special educational needs are grossly under-represented in Northern Ireland's top-performing (grammar) schools: this is the problem of access inequality . Third, as a corollary of two separate systems of education – Protestant and Catholic – there is ‘segregation’ of pupils by school type: Catholic pupils attend maintained schools and Protestant pupils attend controlled schools and, in consequence, rarely have the opportunity to meet and interact in a school setting. In the face of these problems, this paper proposes a novel approach entitled shared education . Under this scheme, schools of different religious backgrounds will enter into ‘partnerships for excellence’ to promote good educational outcomes through a sharing of resources and pooling of expertise and, by doing so, help to dismantle the boundaries which separate Northern Ireland's pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper examines the effects of sibship composition and birth order on the school enrolment and educational attainment of children, using data from the Vietnam Population and Housing Census 2009. • We find that sibship size has a significant, negative effect on child education and having an additional boy lowers children's average educational attainment for both girls and boys. • We establish that birth order has a significant, negative effect on child education attainment, although that effect seems to vanish with the youngest sibling. • The findings imply that the result of family planning policy during the 1990s and 2000s may contribute to its remarkable educational achievements. • As parents disproportionately allocate more resources for boys and earlier born children, government-targeted programs should tackle those issues to provide equal school opportunities for all children. This paper examines the effects of sibship composition and birth order on the school enrolment and educational attainment of children, using data from the Vietnam Population and Housing Census 2009. Utilizing an instrumental variable estimation method to address the endogeneity of sibship size, we find that it has a significant, negative effect on child education. Examining the impact of sibling sex composition, we find that having an additional boy lowers children's average educational attainment for both girls and boys. We establish that birth order has a significant, negative effect on child educational attainment, although that effect seems to vanish with the youngest sibling. Our findings have several policy implications. First, the negative effect of sibship size on education implies that Vietnam's lower fertility rate, the result of family planning policy during the 1990s and 2000s, may contribute to its remarkable educational achievements. Second, we find that birth order and sibling sex composition are more important than sibship size in children's educational outcomes. As parents disproportionately allocate more resources for boys and earlier born children, government-targeted programs should tackle those issues to provide equal school opportunities for all children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper endeavours to shed light on the effect of private tutoring for Mathematics, Chinese and English in various kinds of class-size on students’ performances in the National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) in China. To achieve this, it draws upon a dataset collected by a specifically designed questionnaire on private tutoring of grade 12 students in Jinan, China. With the consideration of nested alternative structure of choices among private tutoring in different class-size and self-selection problem, the study employed a nested logit model to investigate the factors underlying students’ choice of private tutoring and has fitted OLS model to examine the effects of different class-size tutoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how competition impacts the technical efficiency of schools. We model competition between schools using Geographical Information System (GIS) tools in order to develop a Herfindahl–Hirschman market concentration index (HHI) and then follow a stochastic frontier analysis with alternative specifications that enable us to obtain the best unbiased efficient estimators. We find three important results. First, a higher degree of competition from public and private schools significantly increases elementary school efficiency in Mexico, as measured by the outcomes in a nationwide standardized test. Second, we find a positive, though small, association between expenditure on education and school outputs. Third, private schools perform significantly better due to the differential incentives they face in terms of competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on how accurate teachers may or may not be in gauging their class’academic abilities. We use a sample of classrooms in three Russian regions to identify sources of mathematics and Russian teachers’ inaccuracies in predicting their high school classes’ scores on Russian and mathematics high stakes college entrance tests (the Unified State Exam, or USE). We test the hypothesis that teachers’ perceptions of their relationship with their classes are good predictors of such inaccuracies. This is important because teachers often focus on their relationship with the class as an end in itself or as a means to engaging students. Good teacher–student relations may indeed result in more students’ learning, but perhaps not nearly as much as teachers’ believe. We find that both Russian and mathematics teachers make inaccurate predictions of their class’ high stakes examination results based on how they perceive their relationship with their class. Teachers who believe they have a very good relationship with the class significantly overestimate their class’ performance on the USE, and those who perceive a poor relationship, underestimate their class’ performance, although this underestimate is generally not statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the practice of automatic promotion in primary schools of Ethiopia. It uses interview and survey data to examine teachers’ practices and parents’ views and synthesise its implications on quality of education. In light of the international literature and the education and training policy (ETP), the study investigated whether the Ethiopian school context promotes the basic premises of automatic promotion—providing universal primary education and maintaining the value of education through improving its quality. The study reveals that tutoring is the major type of teachers’ support to improve academic performance of students. Although some parents and teachers appreciate the importance of promoting students, automatically promoted students face difficulty to meet the standards required in the next grade level, which in turn decrease their interest and motivation to learning. The absence of a systematic and consistent implementation guideline on automatic promotion produced inconsistent practices among teachers and schools. The study also uncovers that the practice of automatic promotion may have contributed to educational wastage when its undesired spillover effect (low interest, low effort, and poor attendance) has spread to students who could have attended classes regularly and demonstrated better learning outcomes. It is concluded that promoting low achieving students in the absence of appropriate support system results in low interest to attend classes and poor learning which eventually leads to drop out from schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between an early Islamic education and academic achievement in Afghanistan. Fears of political indoctrination have dominated discussions of Islamic schooling among many Westerners, making some policy-makers hesitant to support the kind of education to which most children in Afghanistan have access. In addition, misunderstandings of Islamic education as well as assumptions about the lack of educational benefits from pre-primary or primary Islamic schools have helped sideline them in policy discussions. But mosque schools may play an important role in preparing children for academic success. Children who attend mosque schools score better on tests of literacy than those who do not. This is particularly significant in countries like Afghanistan where many children do not have access to formal education. These findings suggest that mosque schools merit more careful attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper goes further in the discussion on the determinants of school attainment in developing countries. To properly estimate the effects of school resources on academic achievement, we need to take into account the large geographical inequalities in the distribution of school resources and the supply constraints faced by students living in poor areas. We do so by implementing a two-step correction that accounts for the constraints in school choice. Our findings suggest that failing to account for these constraints leads to an underestimation of the effect of school resources on school achievement of about 100%. This underestimation is particularly important for girls and in Math. Additionally, the contribution of school resources in explaining the gap in test scores between rich and poor students is doubled once we account for the constrained choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The study examines the role of after-class learning time in educational performance. • GPSM method is used to explore the causal effect of learning time on academic performance. • There is a relatively stable "inverted U" relation between after-class learning time and academic performance. • This paper determines the optimal learning time to maximize academic achievement. • We discuss the mechanism of how after-class learning time affects academic performance. This paper examines the role of after-class learning time in educational performance. In the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015, Chinese students spent the longest time on study out of school compared with OECD countries but ranked only 10th in mathematics, reading and science. It is doubtful that the longer students study after school, the better their academic performance will be. Based on a representative survey of middle school students in China, we draw on generalized propensity score matching to explore the causal effect between after-class learning time and academic performance, find that the two have a relatively stable "inverted U" relation, and determine that the best academic performance can be achieved when after-class learning time is kept at 3 h per day on weekdays and 8 h per day on weekends. More than these optimal times will hinder academic performance. We further find that the effect of after-class study time on academic performance varies among different groups. There is evidence that after-class learning time influences academic performance through two channels: students' perceived learning difficulty and self-efficacy. This paper concludes that in addition to the appropriate homework assigned by teachers, parents should keep extracurricular tutoring for their children within a reasonable amount of time to maximize students' academic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is widely considered as the most important path to social mobility in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), yet there are very few studies of the extent to which it fulfills this promise. In this paper we use survey data from eight MENA countries to understand the relationship between schooling attainment of youth and the circumstances into which they are born, namely gender, parental education, parental household's position in the per capita expenditure distribution and urban/rural location. We consider various attainment levels from the chance of entering any kind of schooling to attending upper secondary schooling and address the fact that many children are still in school by using a censored ordered probit model. We find high degrees of inequality of opportunity in school attainment, especially with respect to attending secondary school. The most opportunity unequal countries in this respect are Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Jordan, Palestine and Tunisia are the least opportunity unequal in this respect. This paper builds on a previous study of inequality of opportunity in educational achievement, which showed that in most MENA countries, learning opportunities are not equal. In this study, we find that - even in attending and staying in school- the playing field is not level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous empirical studies tend to attribute the impact of school fees to improvements in schooling access or quality. First, in this study, we argue that the implementation of school fee abolition programs varies widely across countries; therefore, its success or failure is unique. Second, evaluation of fee elimination programs should not be viewed as the results of eliminating fees per se but as part of a comprehensive program package since they are usually combined with other interventions. This paper attempts to quantify the impact of the primary school fee abolition program in Mozambique implemented over 2004 and 2005. The country took a unique approach. The government pilot-tested the program, planned it years ahead, and put other interventions in place to prepare for shocks associated with enrollment surge. Using the relevant age cohort to determine a child's exposure to the program, we found that from 2005 through 2008, the enrollment probability of the official primary school age (6−12) children was statistically and significantly higher by 11.6% points. When treatment intensity was allowed to vary across age, we found that age 9 benefitted the most, and there were potential positive spillover effects on secondary school enrollment as enrollment probability increased significantly across all ages up to age 18. The impact is also widespread across urban, rural areas and both genders, but it particularly has much larger effects on the more vulnerable group of children, the poor in rural areas and girls. Our analysis also highlights an ample number of late entrants in Mozambique as in most developing countries. The results show that the program, reducing the cost of education, has successfully raised enrollment rates among younger official school-age children. • We review different approaches to the implementation of school fee abolition programs across countries. • Fee elimination programs should be evaluated as a comprehensive intervention program rather than fees per se. • We attempt to quantify the impact of the 2004–2005 primary school fee abolition program in Mozambique. • The country was one of the few that implemented a "Gradualist" approach to fee elimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper analyzes the socioeconomic stratification of achievement in the Chilean voucher system using a census of 4th and 8th graders, a multilevel methodology, and accounting for unobserved selectivity into school sector. Findings indicate that the association between the school''s aggregate family socioeconomic status (SES) and test scores is much greater in the private-voucher sector than in the public one, resulting in marked socioeconomic stratification of test scores in the Chilean voucher system. We also find that the amount of tuition fees paid by parents in private-voucher schools has no bearing on test scores, after controlling for the socioeconomic makeup of the school. Implications of these findings for educational inequality in the context of a universal voucher system are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Attendance at cram schools is an experience that the majority of Taiwanese have while growing up. However, the incidence and impact of cram schooling are still understudied and have yet received much attention. In this paper, I first illustrate the development of cram schools in Taiwan, and demonstrate the important changes on institutional factors and legitimacy of cram schools. Then I use data collected by Taiwan Education Panel Survey to investigate the net effect of cram schooling on students’ academic performance, and to test whether the opportunity of cram school participation reflects specific patterns of stratification. Empirical results indicate that cram schooling does matter: attending cram schools has a significantly positive effect on a student''s analytical ability and mathematical performance. However, cram school participation does not reflect specific patterns of social stratification: the opportunity of going to a cram school for a male student is not significantly different from that of a female; the effects of family background on students’ cram school participation are not as critical as they were in the past. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]