Families, Schools, and Primary-School Learning: Evidence for Argentina and Colombia in an International Perspective

Abstract

This paper presents evidence on the associations between family background, school characteristics and student performance in primary school in Argentina, Colombia and several comparison countries. As a general pattern, educational performance is strongly related to family background, weakly to some institutional school features and hardly to schools’ resource endowments. In an international perspective, family-background effects are relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of performance differences between rural and urban areas. A specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant between-gender performance differences. Non-native students and students not speaking Spanish at home perform particularly weak in both countries. In Argentina, students perform better in schools with a centralized curriculum and ability-based class formation.