A FIXED EFFECTS APPROACH TO THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE PROVISION OF EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES IN CHOOSING PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN LATIN AMERICA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XV Comparative Education World Congress; 2013

Facultad de Ciencias Económicas de la UBA

Latin America education systems have faced complex transformation processes in the last years, leading to the emergence of new voices. These voices are expressed in the growing capacity of parents to choose the type of school they consider best for their children. The preference of parents for schools with extracurricular activities is well established in the developed world (Massoni 2011). However, literature on the impact of these activities is less known in Latin America. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compare what is the role of extracurricular activities within the determinants of the decision of parents to send their children to privately run schools in Latin America. We estimate discrete choice models using country fixed effects for the eight Latin American countries participating in PISA2009. First results indicate that families prefer schools running extracurricular activities (mainly games, music, art and volunteer activities), and most of them are private. However, after controlling for selectivity it was observed that the effective choice of school by households is constrained: by the admission criteria used, by location and by performance. Additionally, the probability of choosing a privately run school is higher in Argentina than in any other Latin American country, except Chile.