The Consistency and Stability of School Effect in Colombian High School Education

Abstract

Consistency and stability are considered scientific properties of school effect. These properties are important in determining if school effect is constant along subjects and are perdurable during the time. The purpose of this research is to estimate continuity and stability in Colombian high school education during seven years over the past decade for the four main subjects in Colombia: mathematics, language, natural and social science. With this purpose in mind, a retrospective ex post facto study was conducted. The analysis was done for 7, 626 schools and multilevel models of three levels and longitudinal multilevel models were used. As adjusted variables, socioeconomic and sociocultural levels and gender of students were used. The school variable was the tuition. The results indicated that the correlation was over 0.39 for all the subjects; the higher correlations were found among language, natural and social science and the school effect showed change along the time for every subject and by the tuition. The Colombian educational system displays consistency within subjects, but its school effect is not stable and is dependent on the socioeconomic variable. The paper discusses the implications of these results for the Colombian educational system and the effect for quality and equity, and their relationship with the development of the country.