When Change Matters: Identifying Score Gains School Determinants in Mexico, an intra-cohort value-added approach

Educational quality in Mexico is a recurrent topic in the country’s public agenda. For this reason, better information about its determinants is required to guide policy makers. This discussion is particularly relevant within the context of the educational reform proposed by the federal government. Existing research for Mexican students is limited because it does not take into account the change in scores, or it is constrained by regional analysis. The aim of the present research is to fill this gap in the literature by using longitudinal data to study the impact of school characteristics on educational achievement, building a model that takes into account changes in educational achievement through time. Because existing data does not allow the tracking of students through time or their linkage to individual teachers, this article uses intra-cohort data for students that participated in the national standardized test ENLACE for primary and secondary schools between 2007 and 2010. This paper addresses endogeneity problems using fixed effects models, HLM models and spatial techniques to associate school location with census data at the neighborhood level. This research provides elements to guide public policies focused on increasing student achievement. Results show that teachers’ attendance and punctuality, evaluation of teachers’ knowledge of curriculum and constant evaluation of student performance have a positive relationship to student achievement growth. Additionally, there is a persistent effect of the quality of school infrastructure, teaching materials and socioeconomic level of students. These results could be useful to provide more information for the current debate on educational reform.