The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools' effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices, thereby affecting schools' market outcomes. To explore these issues, this paper considers Chile's SNED program, which seeks to identify effective schools, selecting them from within "homogeneous groups" of arguably comparable institutions. Its results are widely disseminated, and the information it generates is quite different from that conveyed by a simple test-based ranking of schools (which in Chile, turns out to largely resemble a ranking based on socioeconomic status). We rely on a sharp regression discontinuity to estimate the effect that being identified as a SNED winner has on schools' enrollment, tuition levels, and socioeconomic composition. Through five applications of the program, we find no consistent evidence that winning a SNED award affects these outcomes. This suggests that information on school effectiveness --at least as it is calculated and delivered by the SNED --might not much affect school markets.
Artículo de publicación ISIWe examine whether the expectations of pre-service elementary school teachers about students' achievement, and their beliefs regarding student need for academic support, are influenced by future teachers' mathematics anxiety or by student gender and socioeconomic status. We found that mathematics anxiety can negatively influence pre-service teachers' expectations about students, and that future mathematics teachers' expectations of mathematics achievement are lower for girls than for boys. These effects are independent, as we did not find significant interaction effects between pre-service teacher's mathematics anxiety and student gender. Our results also suggest that mathematics anxiety could affect the capacity of pre-service teachers to develop inclusive learning environments in their classrooms.Fondecyt
1140834
PIA-Conicyt Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project
BF0003
Fondef
D09-I1023
Basal project CMM U. de Chile
UMI
2807 CNR
This paper calculates a time series of simple, standard measures of schools' relative performance. These are drawn from a 1997-2004 panel of Chilean schools, using individual-level information on test scores and student characteristics for each year. The results suggest there is a stark tradeoff in the extent to which rankings generated using these measures: i) can be shown to be very similar to rankings based purely on students' socioeconomic status, and ii) are very volatile from year to year. At least in Chile, therefore, producing a meaningful ranking of schools that may inform parents and policymakers may be harder than is commonly assumed.
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