From legislation to practice: extended mandatory education policy in Argentina

Berlin

Seminario; Research Seminar in Economics; 2024

Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft

One of the main challenges facing Latin America, particularly Argentina, is the high rate of school dropout. In secondary education, according to information from the World Bank (2023) and the Ministry of Education of the Nation (2021), between 75%-78% of students complete secondary school. The scenario becomes even more concerning when considering the significant regional differences in the effective completion rate of secondary education, ranging from 51.69% to 90.36% across different provinces.Argentina has undergone significant transformations in its educational system driven by two legislative reforms: in 1993, compulsory education was extended from 7 to 9 years, and educational management was delegated to the provinces. In 2006, compulsory schooling was further extended to the completion of secondary education, increasing the mandatory years from 9 to 13. Despite the aim of both reforms to increase the years of education and the completion of secondary level studies, compliance with the regulations was not adequately monitored. As a result, high levels of school dropout persist even though the law mandates the completion of secondary education.The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the increase in the mandatory years of schooling, focusing on analyzing the disparities between the situation before the implementation of the latest law and the subsequent situation after the law was adopted. To address the analysis we estimated the average treatment effect using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) technique, which allows comparing individuals who are similar in probability based on the matching of their observable characteristics.As a robustness test for the results obtained through PSM, we conducted the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. This analytical tool enables us to disentangle the difference in means of a variable into two components: the portion that can be elucidated by the coefficients of the estimators and the part that is ascribed to other unexplained factors, often denoted in the literature as the "discriminatory effect." Employing this approach facilitates an understanding of the discriminatory effect associated with early treatment receipt, namely, the obligation to attend secondary school.To evaluate the effect of the extension of mandatory education, we leveraged the early implementation by the City of Buenos Aires and the asynchronous implementation in the rest of the provinces of Argentina. This setup lends itself to a quasi-experimental approach, with the City of Buenos Aires serving as the treatment unit, and three comparable clusters acting as control units, sharing similar economic and social structures. This way, we explain the difference in the mean years of education attained by individuals at three points in time: 2003 before the extension by Buenos Aires, in 2007 when the extension was fully implemented in the city, and in 2010 when one of the control clusters had already implemented it.Preliminary findings reveal a statistically significant difference favoring the implementation of the law, but with an effect of only about half a year more than the provinces that implemented it in subsequent years.