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La pandemia del COVID-19 llevó a la población española a un confinamiento obligatorio entre los meses de marzo y mayo de 2020. Ello supuso cerrar los centros educativos y continuar el resto del curso 2019-2020 sin presencialidad. Este trabajo analiza cómo se desarrolló el proceso educativo durante el confinamiento y estima el impacto que la interacción entre la educación telemática y la situación laboral de los progenitores tuvo sobre la competencia de pensamiento crítico del alumnado. Para ello, utilizamos datos recogidos al principio y al final del curso 2019-2020 sobre el pensamiento crítico del alumnado de 3º ESO de 15 centros educativos de la Comunidad de Madrid. En primer lugar, concluimos que los centros públicos tuvieron mayores dificultades que los centros concertados para continuar con el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Para seguir las clases telemáticas, el 70% del alumnado en centros concertados disponían de un ordenador de sobremesa o portátil, frente a solo un 40% del alumnado en centros públicos. Además, mientras que el 73% del alumnado de centros concertados destinaron más de 4 horas en total a clases y tareas online, esta cifra solo superó ligeramente el 50% en el alumnado de centros públicos. En segundo lugar, y con carácter general, las diferentes situaciones laborales de padres y madres no tuvieron efectos significativos sobre el pensamiento crítico del alumnado. Sin embargo, encontramos que, para el alumnado con resultados académicos por debajo de la media a principio de curso, el hecho de que la madre teletrabajara durante el cierre escolar tuvo un impacto positivo y significativo sobre sus resultados. Ello sugiere que el teletrabajo permitió a las madres brindar mayor apoyo y supervisión a sus hijos e hijas con bajo rendimiento previo.

During the global economic crisis, unemployment rates increased dramatically across Europe, especially among the least educated population groups. The picture in Spain in 2012, with unemployment rates running at over 20% and youth employment close to 45%, was discouraging. In face of this situation, the Spanish autonomous government of Extremadura launched a programme specifically aimed at motivating unemployed individuals without a school degree to return to education and earn the compulsory secondary education diploma. This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme using administrative data. The results show that the programme did not increase the likelihood of earning the lower secondary education diploma. This finding is a caveat emptor for governments considering similar policies, and remarks again the importance of testing innovations before generalization.

One of the most important issues accompanying the publication of the main results of the well-known Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the classification of countries according to student attainment. However, this ranking does not take into account some highly relevant factors, such as the different resource endowments of each education system or the heterogeneous context in which schools operate. This study aims to provide a fuller picture of education system operation worldwide by assessing the managerial efficiency of secondary schools in a cross-country framework. To do this, we use data from OECD countries participating in PISA 2015 and apply a robust nonparametric approach that accounts for the fact that schools were operating under heterogeneous conditions before the efficiency measures of performance were estimated. Our results suggest that the consideration of both school resources and environmental factors significantly modifies the country ranking based solely on student results.

The present study proposes an international comparison of education production efficiency using cross-country data on secondary schools from different countries participating in PISA 2015. Given that the context in which schools are operating might be heterogeneous, we need to account for those divergences in the environmental conditions when estimating the efficiency measures of school performance. In this way, each school can be benchmarked with units with similar characteristics regardless of the country they belong to. For this purpose, we use a robust nonparametric approach that allows us to clean the effect of contextual factors previously to the estimation of efficiency measures. Since this approach needs smoothing in the conditional variables in the middle of the sample and not at the frontier (where the number of units is smaller), it seems to be a better option than other nonparametric alternatives previously developed in the literature to deal with the effect of external factors. Likewise, by using this novel approach, we will also be able to explore how those contextual factors might affect both the attainable production set and the distribution of the efficiencies.

Analyzing the efficiency of educational systems is one of the main focuses of the policy debate to promote national competitiveness and future economic growth. In this paper, we assess the performance of secondary schools from 36 countries (26 OECD countries and 10 partners) participating in PISA 2012. For this purpose, we apply a robust conditional nonparametric approach that allows us to incorporate the effect of contextual factors at both school and country level in the estimation of efficiency measures. Our results suggest that there is a greater heterogeneity across countries than across schools. Particularly, we find that differences in efficiency estimates are mainly explained by economic indicators and cultural values. In contrast, some factors previously identified as potential determinants of student achievement, like the existence of tracking or central examinations, do not seem to significantly affect the efficiency of secondary schools.

In France and Spain, children born in the same calendar year start school together, regardless of maturity differences due to their birth month. This paper analyses the educational impact of birth month on the probability of grade retention controlling by other covariates. Using the PISA 2009 database for both countries, we do identify a great impact on grade retention since students born in the last months of the year are between 70% and 80% more likely to repeat a grade than children born in the first months of the same year. We conclude that policy interventions are required in those countries to ensure that individuals are not unfairly penalized by their birth month.

This research analyzes the pedagogical practice of a group of teachers of initial education for the institution educational technique Industrial Don Bosco of the municipality of Arjona-Bolivar, and the exercise of reflection on the processes of teaching and learning, in order to understand the actions of the subjects that make up the school community, in relation to the conditions of personal and social life. The pedagogical practice in this research was seen as a responsible and creative space to take education as a social and intersubjective process where knowledge is produced and intends to transform kids, vulnerable. The investigative process was conducted through research participatory action (IAP), which established the relationship between pedagogical trends prevailing in the educational institution and the teaching practice of teachers facing the teaching processes. La presente investigación analiza la práctica pedagógica de un grupo de maestros de la educación inicial de la Institución Educativa Técnica Industrial Don Bosco del municipio de Arjona - Bolívar, y el ejercicio de reflexión sobre los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje, con el propósito de comprender el accionar de los sujetos que constituyen la comunidad escolar, en relación a las condiciones de vida personal y social de los mismos. La práctica pedagógica en esta investigación fue considerada como un espacio creativo y responsable, al asumir la educación como un proceso social e intersubjetivo en donde se produce conocimiento y se intenta transformar a los niños, en situación de vulnerabilidad. El proceso investigativo, se llevó a cabo mediante la investigación acción participativa (IAP), desde la cual se estableció la relación entre las tendencias pedagógicas que prevalecen en la Institución Educativa y la práctica pedagógica de los maestros frente a los procesos de enseñanza.

This download contains two sets of documents: 1. Details of the supplementary robustness tests we have conducted 2. The Stata do-files used in the analysis

Since the late 1990s, Spain has played host to a sizeable flow of immigrants who have been absorbed into the compulsory stage of the education system. In this paper, our aim is to assess the impact of that exogenous increase in the number of immigrant students from 2003 to 2009 on grade retention using Spanish data from PISA 2003 and 2009. For this purpose, we use the difference-in-differences method (DiD), capable of detecting whether the immigrant concentration has had a significant effect on student performance. Within this framework, the control group will be the schools without sampled immigrants from 2003 to 2009 and the treatment group will be schools with immigrant students that experienced a significant increase of immigrants throughout this period. As the percentage of immigrants is different across schools, the DiD methodology is adapted to deal with a dose treatment. What we are looking for then is not simply the average effect of there being or not being foreign students at the school, but the effect of their concentration. In this way, the effect of immigrants joining schools can be isolated and estimated through a DiD dose estimator controlling by other educational variables that also influence school performance. Our results evidenced that their arrival does not on average decrease school promotion rates with respect to 2003 and is even beneficial to native students. Although the concentration of immigrant students at the same school does have a negative impact on immigrant students generating more grade retention, native students are unaffected until concentrations of immigrant students are higher.

La publicación de los resultados de la cuarta oleada del Informe PISA ha vuelto a poner de relieve la distancia que sigue existiendo entre nuestro país y nuestros principales competidores. El evidente interés por reducir esa distancia ha dado lugar en los últimos años a la proliferación de estudios empíricos que, tomando como base la información proporcionada por esta base de datos, han tratado de indagar acerca de cuáles son los principales determinantes del rendimiento educativo en nuestro país. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en la revisión sistemática de estas investigaciones con el propósito de clasificarlos, ordenarlos y extraer sus principales conclusiones, cuyo interés para el desarrollo de medidas de política educativa resulta evidente.