School Composition Effects in Spain: Accounting for Interceptand Slope Effects

Abstract

SummaryDrawing on PISA 2012 data, in this paper we study the impact of school's socio-economic composition on the science test scores for Spanish lower-secondary education students. We adopt a semi-parametric methodology that enables spillovers to affect all the parameters in the educational production function. We also deal with the issue of endogenous students' sorting into schools with better socioeconomic composition. The positive effect of school's socio-economic composition is stronger when computed using the semi-parametric approach, suggesting the relevance of slope effects of school composition. However, the spillovers are substantially reduced when the endogenous sorting of students is controlled for.

A Discrete Choice Experiment Application to School Choice

“…the school-average socio-economic level of families) is widely considered in the literature as one of the most important factors of academic performance (Hanushek, 2008). In the case of Spain, this effect has also been confirmed by Di Paolo and Choi (2014) using PISA data from 2012.…”

The Effect of Weekly Instruction Time on Academic Achievement: The Spanish Case

“…Thus, the relationship between weekly instruction time and academic achievement may not be as obvious as it seems, probably because it may be affected by the characteristics of the country or region under study and the great difficulty to isolate the effect of instruction time from other characteristics which may be conditioning students' academic achievement as, e.g. the quality of the curriculum, skills obtained in early childhood education (Mancebón et al, 2018), teacher quality and knowledge of the subject, the funding and socio-economic composition of the school (Di Paolo and Choi, 2014;Vega-Bayo and Mariel, 2018) or school climate. Furthermore, instruction time may present non-linear effects on academic achievement due to decreasing attention of students during lessons (Bunce et al, 2010).…”