Equal Access to Education: An Evaluation of the Roma Teaching Assistant Program in Serbia

Abstract

Summary. -This paper investigates the effects of a remedial education program-the Roma Teaching Assistant Program-targeting the socially excluded Roma minority in Serbia. By using first-hand collected data, we find evidence that children exposed to the program went more to school. We do not find an effect on dropouts or marks for all grades. An examination of heterogeneous effects suggests that children in the first grade benefited more from the program as compared to their older peers through lower dropouts and better marks. Overall, our results suggest that well-targeted remedial education programs can boost outcomes of low performers.

No student left behind? Evidence from the Programme for School Guidance in Spain

“…To do so, we use external evaluations of the schools: the PISA 2012 exams. 4 Our main results suggest that the PAE had a substantial positive e¤ect on students' academic achievement. It reduced the probability of falling behind into the bottom part of the reading score distribution by approximately 5% (nearly 10% of one standard deviation).…”

The curse of low expectations

“…In the RTA programme, the schools selected in the first year are not different from the schools selected later in terms of their observable characteristics. The same holds for the assistants (Battaglia and Lebedinski, ).…”

“…In fact, the relevance of having a teacher with the same background has been found to be significant in improving the achievement gap for minorities (Dee, ). Our paper, together with its companion paper (Battaglia and Lebedinski, ), adds evidence on the short‐term effects of remedial education programmes targeting minority groups. It provides replicable examples in contexts where minorities suffer low attainment rates and social exclusion, suggesting the role of targeted programmes can be instrumental in increasing their educational attainment.…”

“…Furthermore, school quality is not different between Early and Late Enrollees schools. Average marks, absences and dropout rates of previous years in Early Enrollees schools do not suggest they are better schools (Battaglia and Lebedinski, )…”

“… We also studied the impact of the programme on schooling outcomes in its first year of implementation in a companion study Battaglia and Lebedinski (). In that study, we found that the programme had a positive effect.…”