https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6628-1787
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ABSTRACT
This study estimates the effect of between-class ability grouping on Chilean secondary students’ academic achievement. We rely on a structural feature of the school system: A considerable number of students who complete primary school must change schools to start their secondary education. Cardinality matching was performed to account for confounding variables. Sensitivity analysis was performed to address the fact that differences in unobserved variables could bias our findings. Results show that attending a school that groups students by ability causes a reduction in the average scores obtained in 10th grade of 0.07 SD for reading and 0.08 SD for mathematics. Students matched by their observed covariates could differ in their odds of attending a school with or without ability grouping by 15% for mathematics and 10% for reading, without altering our conclusions. Disadvantaged students are the most affected, whereas best-performing students do not benefit from this policy either.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Ministry of Education and the Agencia de Calidad de la Educación from Chile for providing the data for this research. All the results of the study are the responsibility of the authors and in no way commit the Agency nor the Ministry of Education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Also known as private voucher schools, these schools in the Chilean educational system, akin to public schools, receive public funds based on the demand they attract. The funding model is tied to the number of enrolled students, as subsidies are allocated per student (voucher). See Villalobos and Quaresma (Citation2015), for a detailed overview of the Chilean school system.
2 Own estimations based on General Student Information System 2023 data provided by the Chilean Ministry of Education.
3 The total cohort in eighth grade was 250,559 students.
4 Those panels do not follow a specific cohort of students, but correspond to standardized tests carried out to all Chilean students in predetermined grades. The attrition is close to 25%. See Appendix 1 for a detailed table about attrition.
5 SIMCE is a national test which assesses academic achievement in reading and mathematics. It is applied every year to fourth-grade students and alternately to sixth-, eighth-, and 10th-grade students.
6 The period 2012–2014 is not available.
7 Additionally, the sample was limited to those schools that had 15 or more students who had taken the SIMCE test in 10th grade.
8 See Appendix 2 for a graphical example on how this methodology works.
9 Some descriptive statistics about grouping from this survey can be found in Appendix 3 and in Valenzuela (Citation2018).
10 As aforementioned, students from private schools were excluded from the analysis.
11 See Appendix 4 for kernel densities of SIMCE test scores for eighth grade and 10th grade before and after matching. Graphs also show the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test for equality of distributions.
12 Additionally, we estimate the results using a ranking system created with the GPA of students within each school and class. Results show a similar effect as that estimated for SIMCE scores. See Appendix 5 for a detailed explanation.
13 SIMCE scores have a mean of 250 points with a standard deviation of 50 points.
14 Appendix 7 shows our results by estimating the cardinality matching using specific subjects (mathematics, reading, science, and history) for eighth grade. Results do not differ greatly from those estimated with seventh- and eighth-grade GPA.
15 Other methodologies for estimating the causal effects of our interest under selection on observables include nearest neighbors (Abadie & Imbens, Citation2016) and matching with synthetic controls based on a bilevel optimization problem (Díaz et al., Citation2015, Citation2021).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Claudio Allende
Claudio Allende is a PhD(c) in Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and a PhD(c) in Educational Sciences from KU Leuven. He is a researcher of the Center for Advanced Research in Education at the Universidad de Chile. His main research areas are economics of education, and social inequality.
Juan D. Díaz
Juan D. Díaz is an assistant professor at the Department of Management Control and Information Systems at the University of Chile. He holds a PhD in Statistics, Harvard University, and a PhD in Economics, University of Chile. His main research areas are causal inference in experimental and observational studies, and applied econometrics.
Cristóbal Villalobos
Cristóbal Villalobos holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Universidad de Chile, an MsC in Applied Economics from Alberto Hurtado University, and a BA in Sociology from Pontificia Universidad Católica. Currently, he is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and deputy director of the Centro de Estudios de Políticas y Prácticas en Educación (CEPPE UC) of the same institution. His research interests are especially focused on educational policy, educational inequality and quality, civic and citizen training of children and youth, social movements in education, and equity in higher education.
Juan Pablo Valenzuela
Juan Pablo Valenzuela is a full professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education (IE) and director of the Centre for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE), at the Universidad de Chile. He has a master’s degree and a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has published several texts about school improvement in education, school leadership, and evaluation of public policies.
Ignacio Wyman
Ignacio Wyman is a postgraduate researcher at the Manchester Institute of Education (MIE), The University of Manchester. His doctoral research project focuses on understanding how schools relate to others and the opportunities for support and collaboration in contexts of school privatization, competition, and individual accountability. More broadly, Ignacio is interested in researching school education policies, interorganizational school networks, privatization, and inequalities in the Chilean school system. Ignacio holds an MSc in Research Methods with Education from The University of Manchester, and a BA in Sociology from Pontificia Universidad Católica.
Ernesto Treviño
Ernesto Treviño is Doctor and Master of Education from Harvard University. He is a full professor at the Faculty of Education of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, director of the Center UC for Educational Transformation (CENTRE UC), and principal researcher for the Center on Educational Justice (CJE). He has collaborated with the IEA, OES, OEI, UNESCO, and UNICEF, among other international organizations, and with different countries supporting the development of studies and policy recommendations. His research focuses on the intersection of education policies, school practices, and classroom interactions with a perspective on educational justice.