Education and Social Mobility in Latin America United States
Latin America has witnessed an important expansion in educational
coverage over the last two decades. On average, enrollment rates in
primary (net) and secondary education (gross) increased from 85.9
percent and 49.6 percent in 1980 to around 94.0 percent and 89.7 percent
in 2011, respectively. Many countries in the region are on track to
meet or have already attained the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in
this dimension. Furthermore, this increase in educational coverage has
been identified as an important driver of the observed reduction in
earning inequality in the region (López-Calva and Lustig 2010), at a
time when income inequality is rising within many developed and
developing countries all over the world (see OECD 2011a and 2011b).
Despite this important progress, many challenges remain. In this note, I
highlight two interrelated issues: 1) intergenerational mobility
continues to be low; and 2) the quality of education is low, with
significant differences across social classes in the opportunities of
accessing high-quality education. Next, I will briefly discuss the
empirical evidence relevant to each issue and outline some policies that
could address these challenges.
Low intergenerational Educational Mobility
Social mobility is a multidimensional concept. Economists (e.g., Solon
1992) have traditionally focused on intergenerational income mobility,
i.e., the link between a person’s permanent income level and that of his
or her parents, based on the stream of income a person or household
receives stripped of short-term fluctuations. Yet it is clear that other
dimensions such as social status, often related to type of job or level
of formal education, are also relevant. (For an interesting case study
of Chile,see Torche 2005.) In what follows, I focus on educational
mobility in terms of how parental education and family background affect
educational attainment and achievement. This focus has an
important practical advantage: relatively good-quality and comparable
data for these variables are available for a significant number
of countries in Latin America.
Several studies have addressed the issue of how family background
affects educational outcomes of the next generation in Latin America.
Behrman, Gaviria, and Székely (2001) present several alternative
measures of educational and social mobility in Latin America and find
that intergenerational mobility is much lower in Latin America compared
to the United States. This finding is also confirmed by Daude
(2011; 2012) and Gaviria (2007), considering the correlation between
parental and child education outcomes using alternative data sources.
Furthermore, in terms of correlation—that is, how much of the variation
in the child’s education is explained by the variation in parental
education—there are no significant changes over time (Daude 2011). In
addition, a
study of a large number of developing countries also shows that Latin
American countries rank poorly compared to other regions in terms of
these measures of intergenerational mobility in education (Hertz et al.
2007). However, other studies find a recent improvement in mobility
using alternative measures (Conconi et al. 2008). For example, they find
that the importance of family background in explaining the “schooling
gap”—defined as the difference between the years of education completed
and the hypothetical years the child should have completed in the
absence of repeating grades or dropping out—for children currently of
compulsory enrollment age has declined between the mid-1990s
and mid-2000s in several Latin American countries. In particular, they
rely on a Fields decomposition (1996, 2003) proposed by Andersen (2001)
that takes into account the household’s income per capita and the
highest level of education between the mother and the father. However,
these measures of mobility do not take into account differences in
the quality of education, which are large in Latin America.
Low Quality of Education
Considering education achievement measures such as the OECD’s Program
for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, Latin American
education systems tend to score poorly on two dimensions. First, the
average achievement in terms of testable knowledge is low. For example,
while on average within the OECD less than 20 percent of 14- to
15-year-old students do not reach a minimum level of reading
comprehension, in Latin America it is almost 50 percent. Second, the
relationship between performance and aocioeconomic background is much
stronger in Latin America than in the OECD (Figure 1). This shows that
external circumstances—such as the household’s income level, parental
education, gender, or geographical location—are key to student
performance (Brunori, Ferreira, and Peragine 2013). In part, the lower
levels of average achievement are due to a composition effect: as more
poor students
with lower performance reach higher levels of schooling and stay for
more time within the system (expanding coverage), in the short run
performance falls. Some countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have
shown significant improvements over the past decade in reducing the
importance of family background in educational achievement outcomes.
However, problems in terms of performance and inequality
of opportunities are still prevalent. (See also Ferreira et al. 2012
regarding the evolution of social mobility and inequality
of opportunities in Latin America.)Another interesting empirical fact
from the PISA surveys is related to the social mix within schools. If
one decomposes the variation in the index of socioeconomic status
indicator and separates variation between and within schools, some
OECD school systems (such as Finland) show that most of the variance
comes from within schools, while for Latin America most of the variance
is between schools. This means that schools in Latin America
are socioeconomically very omogeneous. The poor go to the same schools
asthe poor, while the rich gather only with the rich. Interestingly, the
aggregate evidence shows that there is no trade-off between
having socially mixed education systems and attaining high levels of
educational achievement (OECD 2010a). Thus, education systems in the
region continue to be an instrument for reproducing the current social
order rather than a way to facilitate social mobility and
opportunities for the poor
