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.

No abstract

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.

No abstract