Honduras has recorded impressive gains in expanding educational access in the 1990s, with the result that primary education is available to almost all children. With improved access the focus has shifted to quality and efficiency issues. Previous research suggests that academic achievement is still quite low while repetition and school desertion rates continue to remain high. An important cause of these outcomes appears to lie in patterns of school attendance. Low levels of school attendance may be responsible for low academic achievement, which in turn is linked to high repetition and desertion rates. Recognizing this probable chain of events, this paper focuses on the school attendance decision. We rely on recently collected data from a national sample of Honduran primary schools to specify and estimate a model of school attendance. We find that increases in the expected benefits of attending school exert a strong impact on the school attendance decision.

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We analyze the effectiveness of the Programa Hondureno de Educacion Comunitaria (PROHECO) community school program in rural Honduras. The data include standardized tests and extensive information on school, teacher, classroom and community features for 120 rural schools drawn from 15 states. Using academic achievement decompositions we find that PROHECO schools do a better job of maximizing teacher effort and involving parents in the school, both of which translate into higher levels of achievement. But these efficiency advantages are offset (to some degree) by lower levels of teacher experience, training, parental education, as well as a reliance on smaller class sizes. The results help extend the community school and school based management (SBM) literatures by identifying plausible mechanisms in the chain linking increased community involvement with better student outcomes, while also highlighting the importance of local capacity.School based management, school and teacher quality, academic achievement, decomposition analysis,

International assessments of academic achievement are common. They are usually accompanied by attempts to infer the determinants of cross-country achievement gaps, but these inferences have little empirical foundation. This paper applies the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to the problem of explaining why primary students in Cuban schools score than Mexican students, on average, 1.3 standard deviations higher. The results suggest that no more than 30% of the difference can be explained by differing endowments of family, peer, and school variables. Of these, peer-group variables and, to a lesser extent, family variables explain the largest portion of the gap.

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This article analyses student achievement and school quality in large samples of schools in Cambodia. Descriptive summaries of student proficiency levels in language and mathematics reveal large gaps between average performance in grades three and six. Given the near universal completion rates for grade three -and lower access to grade six -these differences highlight the inherent challenges of maintaining quality while expanding participation. We also model student achievement variation using hierarchical linear models (HLM), and identify significant predictors that are infrequently available to researchers. These include content taught by teachers, their specialised knowledge of teaching mathematics, and indicators of pedagogical processes. The results reinforce the importance of teachers' impact on student learning outcomes.Re´sume´-Re´sultats scolaires et politique e´ducative en pe´riode de croissance rapide du syste`me e´ducatif: les donne´es d'e´valuation du Cambodge -Cet article analyse les re´sultats scolaires et la qualite´de l'enseignement dans un large e´chantillon repre´sentatif des e´coles cambodgiennes. Des re´sume´s descriptifs des niveaux de compe´tence des e´le`ves en langue et en mathe´matiques re´ve`lent des e´carts importants entre les re´sultats moyens des niveaux trois et six. É tant donne´les taux de re´ussite avoisinant le taux universel au niveau trois, et un nombre infe´rieur de passages au niveau six, ces diffe´rences mettent en lumie`re les de´fis qui en re´sultent, a`savoir maintenir la qualite´tout en e´largissant la scolarisation. Nous avons en outre pre´sente´les e´carts des re´sultats scolaires a`l'aide des mode`les line´aires hie´rarchiques (MLH), et identifie´des indices significatifs dont disposent rarement les chercheurs, c'est-a`-dire : les contenus enseigne´s, les connaissances spe´cialise´es des enseignants dans l'enseignement des mathe´matiques, ainsi que des indicateurs sur les de´marches pe´dagogiques. Les re´sultats confirment l'importance de l'influence de l'enseignant sur les re´sultats d'apprentissage des e´le`ves.

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