Andrés Sandoval Hernández MPhil/PhD Transfer Paper

The equity of education in Mexico: A study of lower-

secondary schools from the school effectiveness approach.

Andrés Sandoval Hernández

Paper submitted for MPhil/PhD Transfer Seminar

December 2006

Supervisors: Hugh Lauder and Anthony Robinson

1. Introduction

This research is concerned to identify, theoretically justify and test in multi-level

models variables that have not previously been used in models of school
effectiveness in developing countries and in some cases developed countries. The
approach is one which sees developments in school effectiveness as having reached
a new stage (Lauder, and Brown, 2006) in which the earlier common sense
identification of variables used in statistical modelling has now given way to a more
theoretically informed approach to the variables used in school effectiveness models.

The unequal distribution of educational opportunities is, sadly, one of the salient
features of Mexico’s education system (Muñoz, 2005). Despite its long duration and
high priority among the most important issues besetting Mexico’s education policy, it
still remains unresolved. This problem has at least two dimensions: on the one hand,
unequal distribution of opportunities to access and stay in the education system; and,
on the other, unequal distribution of opportunities that would guarantee adequate
academic performance for all.

In order to address this problem, the Mexican Ministry of Public Education (SEP) has
sought to “…create conditions that guarantee access to a quality education for all the
population, regardless of the type and modality, or location where it may be
required.” (SEP. 2004). To this end, it has worked to increase the number of schools
in the national territory, and designed and implemented educational options for those
excluded.

According to Torres and Tenti (2000), the Mexican government has attempted to
break away from the logic of “homogeneous school offerings” by creating different
options and academic programs designed to cater to the various social and
educational needs of the population. Recently adopted academic alternatives such
as Community Education1, post-elementary education, and the different modalities of
indigenous education, reflect the significant efforts being made in this area.
Additionally, the Quality School Program and Telesecundaria (television-supported
lower secondary schools) have also been extended to reach the poorest and most
excluded sectors of the population.

1
Community Education is a program developed by the Mexican Government towards providing
educational services to the rural population.

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Data provided by the SEP, reveal that there has been considerable progress in the
solution of the first dimension of the problem (inequity in the distribution of
opportunities to access and stay in the education system). In fact, education
coverage in Mexico tends to show continuous growth, as increasingly more children
are completing compulsory education. For example, the rate of lower secondary
education coverage went from 66.1% in the 1991-1992 school year, to 87.5% in the
2003-2004 period.

However, despite these remarkable achievements, inequities within the educational

system seem to prevail. Sandoval and Muñoz (2004) have claimed that the
distribution of opportunities that would guarantee an adequate academic
performance for all the population still remains unequal – a trend that continues to
grow –. In other words, students coming from less favourable socio-economic
sectors do not perform as well. Other authors such as Noriega and Santos (2004),
Ahuja and Schmelkes (2004), Zorrilla and Romo (2004), and Muñoz, et al (2004)
among others, have also endorsed this observation.

In order to provide a sound basis for the design of a new generation of public policies
that may effectively help to narrow the disparities affecting educational opportunities
in Mexico, it is necessary to determine and compare the inequity patterns of the basic
education in Mexico. Special interest should be given to the differences between
schools regarding to their capacity to achieve equitable distributions of the
educational results among their students and to the inclusion of new sets of proxy
variables to model context characteristics that may have an influence in the schools
outcomes and that have not been used before in the school effectiveness research.

2. Reference framework

This section consists of four subsections, the first one draws on the structure and
governance of the Mexico’s Education System; next, the relevant literature
concerning the different effectiveness-related areas of educational research and
models of educational effectiveness is reviewed in the second part, whilst the third
subsection focuses on some recent studies in the field developed with Mexican data;
finally, the kind of variables proposed to be considered in this work and its theoretical
underpinnings are analysed.

A. Mexico’s Education System

Structure
According to the Article 10 of the General Law of Education, the Mexico’s Education
System is formed by students and teachers; educational authorities; plans, curricula,
methods and educational materials; state schools and their decentralized organisms;
private schools with authorization or recognition of official validity of studies; and the
Higher Education Institutions to which Law gives them autonomy.

Up to now, the whole educational system enrols 31.18 million students, which is
63.41% of the population aged between 3 and 25.

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The education system in Mexico has five main levels (the three first are form the
basic education): preschool, primary education, lower secondary education, upper
secondary education and higher education.

The school choice in the basic levels is up to parents, in this way they can choose
the school they think is better for their children.

The Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution states that basic education is compulsory
for all the population and must be free, non-religious and provided by the
Government.

Although the Government is only in charge of providing the basic education, it is also
involve at the other levels and provide different options of upper secondary and
higher education.

Preschool
Preschool provides early education for children between 3 and 5 years old, and
currently enrols about 4.5 millions students, which is about 73.87% of the population
in age to attend this educational level.

Recently, the Government has released a new law that make preschool part of the
compulsory education, trying with this to improve the coverage rates in this level.

Primary education
Primary education includes 6 grades to children between 6 and 12 years old, and
now it enrols 92.45% of the relevant age population.

Primary education is offered in three different modalities: the general modality, which
represents about 93.37% of the primary education, the community and the
indigenous modalities, which together represents 6.63% of the primary education.
The two last modalities are mostly offered in multi-grade schools, where a single
teacher is in charge of impart, at the same time, several grades. According to
Santibañez et al (2005), in the primary educational level one of each four schools are
multi-grade.

Lower secondary education

Lower secondary education includes 3 grades to children between 13 and 15 years
old and enrols 6 million students (SEP, 2005), which represents the 89.51% of the
population in this status of age.

Lower secondary is also offered in four different main modalities: the general
modality (50.33%), the technical modality (28.18%), the telesecundaria, also known
as distance learning modality (20.80%) and the secondary for workers (0.70%).

The secondary schools in the general modality are placed in rural and urban areas
and are characterised because they follow the traditional format where each subject
is given for specialised teachers.

The curriculum of the technical modality is focused on the technical issues that are
needed in each region and it could be focused on agricultural and livestock
production, fishing production, forest production or services. One of the principal
objectives of this modality is that at the end of their studies the students have the
skills and knowledge needed to incorporate themselves to a productive activity.

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The telesecundaria modality is designed to attend population from urban, suburban,

rural and marginalized areas, in which it has not been possible to establish general or
technical education modalities. One of the reasons of that is that in such areas there
are a reduced number of people who has finished the primary education. In this
education modality there is only one teacher per grade, who assists the students with
their schoolwork, answers questions and facilitates the lectures that are given
through satellite television.

Finally the secondary for workers mainly enrol people who are over 15 years old,
whom were not able to take the secondary education in the relevant age.

Upper secondary education

Upper secondary education is for people between 16 and 18 years old and includes
3 grades too. At present the rate of coverage of this level is 57.30%.

Many of the upper secondary schools are part of the large public universities, like the
National University (UNAM) or the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). This level is
also offered the general and technical modalities. The people who study in these
institutions obtain a high school diploma that allows them to study at the university.

There are other upper secondary schools in which the curriculum is more technical
and are focused in students who not necessarily want to study at the university.
These institutions, that are called Professional Technical Institutions, provide to their
students a technical preparation that allows them to start working immediately they
finish their studies.

In recent years appeared a reform that, trough taking additional lessons, allow
students from these institutions to get a high school diploma also and to continue
studying at the higher education level (Santibañez et al, 2005).

Higher education
There is not a specific age to study at the university, but most of the students who
are at this level are between 18 and 25 years old. At present the higher education
system enrols almost 2.5 million people and its rate of coverage is 23.80%.

Most of the students are enrolled in the large national universities, according to
Santibañez almost 55%. In addition to these large national universities, each of the
32 Mexican states has a public university and a teachers’ training college. The
students who enrol in this modality obtain a university diploma.

For the people who can not or do not want to spend four to five years in the higher
education, there is another option called Technical University. This option only last
two years and intend to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to
incorporate themselves in to the labour market in a higher level than the ones who
study the upper secondary technical modality. The people who study in these
institutions obtain a higher university technician diploma.

Finally, there is the possibility to continue studying at a postgraduate level. The

options are: a Certificate degree, which last one year, a Masters degree which last
two years and a Doctorate degree which last between three and seven years
depending on the programme.

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In all the levels and modalities there are also two options: public, which is the one
offered by Government and private, which has to be affiliated to the SEP in the basic
levels, it means to have recognition of official validity of the studies they impart. At
present, private education represents only the 14.93% of the whole education
system.

The next figures show, in a schematised way, the structure of the Mexico education
system and some general figures about it.

Structure of the Mexico education system

Relevant
3 to 5 6 to 12 13 to 15 16 to 18 19 to 23 22+
age

Lower Upper
Level Preschool Primary Higher Education
Secondary Secondary

Undergraduate Postgraduate

Years 3 6 3 3 3 to 5 variable

General General General University Certificate

Community Teachers
Technical Technical Masters
courses College
Modality
Technical Technical
Indigenous Telesec. Doctorate
Profesional * University *
For workers

* Terminal options

Mexico Education System Figures

Period 2005-2006e

Rate of
Students % Teachers % Schools %
coverage

By fund source
Federal 3.388.700 10,87% 191.478 11,84% 38.099 16,29%
State 23.318.300 74,78% 984.614 60,90% 164.507 70,33%
Private 4.265.800 13,68% 341.208 21,10% 34.911 14,93%
Autonomous 1.509.300 4,84% 136.156 8,42% 1.970 0,84%
By education level
Basic 25.024.200 80,25% 1.100.367 68,06% 216.176 92,42% 87,77%
Preschool 4.524.500 14,51% 197.065 12,19% 87.182 37,27% 73,87%
Primary 14.498.300 46,50% 557.001 34,45% 97.135 41,53% 92,45%
Lower secondary 6.001.400 19,25% 346.301 21,42% 31.859 13,62% 89,51%
Upper secondary 3.711.200 11,90% 256.252 15,85% 12.852 5,49% 57,30%
Higher education* 2.445.600 7,84% 260.152 16,09% 4.876 2,08% 23,80%
TOTAL 31.181.000 100% 1.616.771 100% 233.904 100% 63,41%
e
Estimated figures

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Governance
Looking to improve educational administration; in 1992 Mexico decentralized the
basic education system into their 32 states. The decentralization was supposed to
give states more control over educational budgets and greater influence on
educational policy. According to Santibañez et al (2005) the decentralization was
mostly administrative, because in most cases sates still receive the mayor part of
their budgets from the SEP in Mexico City and because most of decisions are still
made in the federal instances.

In the primary education, states authorities can no elect their own curriculum, but
they have to follow the national one, which has been design and approved by the
SEP in Mexico City. Besides, all primary schools in the country must use the
nationally-produced text books for primary education, which are provided for free.

For lower secondary schools, the SEP in Mexico City published a list of the approved
text books for each subject. Principals and state authorities can choose their
textbooks from this list (idem).

Decisions about hiring, firing, teachers’ salaries, curriculum contents, etc. are taken
in a centralized way, neither the parents nor principals are allowed to participate. As
it has been said, SEP in Mexico City set the majority of the lineaments for the basic
education system.

Regarding to the school calendar, at present it consists in 200 days per year,
beginning in August and ending in June. Primary education is offered in three shifts:
morning, afternoon and evening, all the shifts last four hours and the main subjects
given in this time are: Spanish, mathematics, natural sciences and social sciences.
There are other subjects that are commonly given as sports or physical education,
music or arts.

Lower secondary education meets for seven hours and is mainly offered in two shifts:
morning and afternoon, although some lower education schools offer the night shift
or a discontinuous one (idem).

Besides the SEP, the other main actor in Mexico education system is the SNTE
(National Union of Teachers). The SNTE is the only union of teachers in the country
and all the teachers and administrative personnel must belong to it. At present the
SNTE has over 1 million of members.

Even though the SNTE has factions in all states, its leadership is strongly centralized
and central SNTE negotiates directly with SEP in Mexico City all about teachers’
salary and salary increments. Other issues like hiring, placements of teachers and
what have to do with teachers colleges are often negotiated by the SNTE factions in
the states and local authorities (idem).

B. Literature review

The review presented here is based on the perspective of effective schools. Several
authors (Fernández, 2004; Goldstein, 2000; Muñoz, et al, 2004; Sammons, 2001)
coincide in that the formal birth of this school of thought can be traced to the late
sixties, and arose as a reaction against the political pessimism generated by the
publication of a celebrated report written by Coleman and his colleagues in 1966.

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From then to now, school effectiveness research has became one of the most
important and specialized fields of the sociology of education; mainly because of its
direct contribution to the central issues of the educational agenda: improvement of
quality and diminishment of inequalities in the distribution of opportunities that would
guarantee an adequate academic performance for all the population, independently
of the social class, ethnicity or gender (Fernandez, Banegas, et al, 2004).

In general, most of the studies in the school effectiveness field are focused on
estimating the magnitude of the school effects and the analysis of its scientific
properties, and / or in studying the classroom, school and context factors that
characterize an effective school (Murillo, 2004). Nevertheless, some authors have
proposed some more detailed classifications.

Effectiveness-related areas of educational research

According with their characteristics, objectives and methodologies, these studies
have been classified into different areas of research. The next table shows three of
the most cited proposals of classification.

Purkey and Smith, 1983 Scheerens and Bosker, Reynolds, Teddlie, et al,
1997 2000

• Outliers studies • Research on equality of • School effects research.

opportunities in Studies of the scientific
• Case studies education and the properties of school
significance of school in effects.
• Program evaluations this.
• Effective school
• Other studies • Economic studies on research. Research
education production concerned with the
functions. process of effective
schooling.
• The evaluation of
compensatory • School improvement
programs. research. Examining the
process whereby
• Studies on effective schools can be
schools and the changed.
evaluation of school
improvement programs.

• Studies on the
effectiveness of
teachers, classes and
instructional procedures.

Even when the three proposals shown are very different from each other, in all of
them can be found descriptive and evaluative studies; quantitative and qualitative;
and studies utilizing big and small samples. A deeper analysis of this table revels that
school effectiveness research has technically, if not theoretically changed, evolved

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and improved in the past 30 years. It has moved from the simple input – output
studies to the current research utilizing multilevel models; form case studies of outlier
schools to contemporary studies merging qualitative and qualitative techniques in the
simultaneous study of classrooms and schools; and from the simple application of
school effectiveness knowledge to sophisticated multiple lever models (Reynolds,
Teddlie, et al, 2000).

Models of educational effectiveness

For more than three decades, interest in identifying and determining the importance
of school-related factors that influence educational achievement has produced a
great number of publications showing a list of factors that characterize an effective
school. This approach may be seen as comprising the first phase in the development
of a more sophisticated approach to modelling school effectiveness.

The first phase models of educational effectiveness show the relations between the
factors and the role they play in the explanation of the school outcomes. Even though
in the School Effectiveness Research there are not one but several statistical
models, from the simple ones with five or six components to those which identify
more than a thousand (Fernandez, Banegas, et al, 2004). The next table shows a -
non-exhaustive - list of authors and their models of educational effectiveness.

Date Authors Name

1979 Edmonds Five-factor theory

1984 Walberg Educational productivity model
1985 Murphy, Hallinger and Mesa
School effectiveness model
1987 Slavin Quality of Appropriateness, Instruction,
Incentives, Time Model (QUAIT Model)
1990 Scheerens and Creemers Integrated model of school effectiveness
1992 Stater and Teddlie Dynamic theory of school effectiveness and
leadership
1992 Stringfield and Slavin Hierarchical longitudinal model for
elementary school effects
1993 Lee, Bryk and Smith Heuristic Model of the Organization of
Secondary Schools
1994 Stringfield Hierarchical model for elementary school
effects
1994 Creemers Model of School Learning
1994 Creemers and Scheerens Comprehensive Model of School
Effectiveness
1997 Sammons, Thomas and Model of Academic Effectiveness at the
Mortimore Secondary Level

These lists of school-related factors and models of educational effectiveness are

mainly result of literature reviews and represent the basis on which most of the
empirical research in the field is done. That is to say that empirical research in this
field has been developed mainly on inductive approaches and that there is an evident
lack of theory driven enquiry.

It is with the concerns raised by the lack of theory or rather an implicit

unacknowledged theory (Lauder, Jamieson and Wikeley, 1998) that forms the

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methodological starting point for this research. Pupil level variables such as socio-
economic status, prior achievement and ethnicity have been included as proxies for
far more complex social processes both within the family and the community. The
approach taken in including these variables is one of ‘common sense’ but there has
been little theoretical understanding or justification for their inclusion or for what they
represent in the results of multi-level models. However, more theoretically informed
studies of school effectiveness are being developed (Thrupp, Lauder, Robinson and
Goldstein, 2004). It is on the basis of this kind of work that the variables identified
below are discussed and will be included in the study.

C. Recent studies in the field developed with Mexican data

For the Mexican case, there are a growing number of studies that have been
developed recently enabling a list of the principal variables or factors than have been
used as part of statistical models to explain the variance in school outcomes.

The dependent variables in all the cases are defined as a measurement of cognitive
performance of the students in a standardized test, usually in the language or
mathematics areas.

The next table shows the independent variables that have been considered in recent
studies developed with data of the Mexico’s education system at the basic education
level and whether if they establish a positive or a negative correlation with school
outcomes. Due this studies applied the Multi-level Modeling (ML) technique to
analyse the data, the variables are grouped into student’s and school’s levels.

Variables Fuente +ó-

Independent variables at student’s level
Parent’s level of education (Cervini 2003a) +
Didactic material in the (Cervini 2003a); (Treviño and Treviño 2004)
+
household
Soicio-economic level (Cervini 2003a) +
Family global capital (Fernández 2003a) +
Educational practices (Cervini 2003a)
+
between the family
Gender (Cervini 2003a); (Treviño and Treviño 2004);
*
(Fernández 2003a)
Pre-school (Cervini 2003a); (Treviño and Treviño 2004) +
Repetition of an scholar year (Cervini 2003a) -
Age (Cervini 2003a) -
Family involvement in the (Treviño and Treviño 2004)
+
school activities
Expectations (Treviño and Treviño 2004); (Fernández
+
2003a)
Absenteeism for economical (Treviño and Treviño 2004)
-
rehaznos
Parent’s expectations (Treviño and Treviño 2004) +
School stability (Treviño and Treviño 2004) +

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Variables Fuente +ó-

Independet variables at school’s level
Socio-economic composition (Cervini 2003a);(Treviño and Treviño 2004) +
Socio-cultural contex (Fernández 2003a) +
School Climate (Cervini 2003a); (Treviño and Treviño 2004);
+
(Fernández 2003a)
School management (Cervini 2003a) +
Pedagogic practice (Cervini 2003a) +
Shift (Treviño and Treviño 2004) **
Indigenous language (Treviño and Treviño 2004) -
Teacher’s level of education (Treviño and Treviño 2004) +
School type (Treviño and Treviño 2004) ***
Repetition rate (Treviño and Treviño 2004) -
Mother’s level of education (Treviño and Treviño 2004) +
Teacher motivation towars (Treviño and Treviño 2004)
+
students
Indigenous school (Fernández 2003a) -
Marginalization indexlocalidad (Fernández 2003a) -

D. Proposed variables and its theoretical underpinnings

The following literature review identifies different approaches that can work as
theoretical underpinnings to explain the variability of the school outcomes. One way
to organize them is according to the level of analysis in which this approaches can be
applied: students, schools and states.

Student’s level
At the student’s level, three approaches are considered in this work: the cultural
reproduction theory, the rational choice theory and the social capital theory.

Reproduction theory has been commonly used to explain social inequality in

educational systems. This theory was originally developed by Pierre Bourdieu
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu, 1983). According to Bourdieu, the
differences in student’s attainment are the result of non-deliberated reproduction
processes of the class position hold by the families. From the vast theory developed
by Bourdieu, the types of capital are the concepts of interest for this work.

Bourdieu define capital as “… accumulated labour (in its materialised form or in its
incorporated, embodied form), which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive,
basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the
for of reified or living labour” (Bourdieu, 1983)

Given this definition, Bourdieu distinguishes between three types of capital: economic
capital, cultural capital and social capital.

Economic capital: command over economic resources. Even when the author does
not specify what is considered as resources, is common to find in the literature that

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the economic capital is commonly understood as exchange values, like income and
assets that can be easily transformed into cash. In this sense, variables referring to
the possession of comfort goods in the household will be used as a measurement of
the family’s economic capital.

Cultural capital: cultural products which are embedded in the human mind and body,
as well as in objects. Cultural capital thus can appear in three states. In its objectified
state, cultural capital consists of humanly created objects such as pictures, books,
didactic materials, instruments and machines such as a PC, or even the access to
internet. In its institutionalised state, cultural capital consists of educational
qualifications such as academic degrees hold by the family members. Finally, in its
embodied state, cultural capital consists of permanent dispositions in the individual
person, is both the acquired and inherited properties of a person from the family
through socialisation (Bourdieu, 1983), an example could be how much do the
students like to read and how much time do they spend reading for pleasure.

The data available for this work includes three sets of variables that have never been
used in the school effectiveness literature; the first one is related to the ways in which
cultural capital is transmitted within the family2. These variables include information
regarding to who the students speak with about what they have learned at school or
about what they would like to study in the future, how often the family is involved in
their homework and what kind of help related with school is obtained from the family.
These variables could help to give an explanation about how the different family
structures and the different characteristics of the family members (level of studies,
occupational status, age, gender) are related with the transmission of cultural capital
within the family.

Social capital: the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to
possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition (Bourdieu, 1983). Since the introduction of the
term in the sociological debate, multiple conceptualisations of social capital have
been developed by several authors. Nevertheless, the most common interpretations
are, in chronological order, linked to the developments of Bourdieu (1983), Coleman
(1988) and Putnam (1995). According to Haase (2000), whereas Bourdieu sees
social capital as a mean to reproduce individual’s and group’s interests, Coleman
and Putman focus on social capital as reciprocal obligations and expectations
between people to achieve social outcomes.

About the measurement of the social capital, Bourdieu does not specify what kind of
variables can be used to measure it. Coleman has characterized the effort put into
the children’s academic attainment and the number of moves (changes of school) as
proxy measurements for the social capital. In this sense, Putman proposes measures
regarding to the community organisational life, the engagement in public affairs, the
community volunteerism, the informal sociability and the social trust. For this study,
the variables that will be used regards to how many times the family has moved since
the student was in primary school, if the students are enrolled in extra-school
activities such as sports and if the family participate in school activities.

A general hypothesis for the different types of capital could be that the greater the
volume of economic, cultural and social capital in the family and community, the
greater the level of the student’s outcomes.

2
The second and the third ones are describe later in this section.

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There is another approach, originally created by Boudon (1974) and later developed
by Goldthorpe (1996), for explaining the persistent class differences in educational
attainment consistent in a rational choice model which is used by the families to
make educational decisions for their members based on the subjective probabilities
of academic success and the usefulness of the academic certificates to keep or
improve the class position. Related to this approach, variables regarding the
academic expectation of parents and student’s expectations about themselves can
be used to test whether there is a relationship between the social class of families
and students with higher academic expectations and academic outcomes or not.

To finish with the variables at the student’s level, as it has been said above, the
information available also includes a second set of variables never considered before
in the literature in the field. These variables are concerned with the non educational
activities of students, like if the student has a job outside the household (what kind of
job is it and if it is a paid job or not) or if he/she helps with the housework, if he/she
has free time to do whatever he/she likes to do, how much time is devoted to these
activities. These variables would enable this research to explain how the economic
structure of some kinds of Mexican households is related with the students’
attainment, as it is expected that professional middle class families will have a
different family economy to that of those in greater poverty. It may be that these
economic activities can also be related to social capital. Further analysis is needed in
this point in order to operationalise these variables into theoretical basis that can be
tested through statistical analysis.

The School level

At the school level, although there are no solid theories to explain the differences in
school outcomes, a systematized analysis of the available literature allows identifying
three main approaches (Fernandez, 2003d). The first one assumes that schools
adapt their structures and processes to the geographic, social or cultural environment
and thus, develop isomorphic structures and similar results. The school can be also
understood as a functional structure of different and specialized roles adopted by the
members. More recently, a third approach focused on the links between structures,
processes and environment has became stronger, and has identified, first through
qualitative and later using quantitative techniques, a group a key features that,
according to a literature review made by Posner (2004), characterizes efficient
schools such as: the presence of a strong and shared leadership (Gray, 1990); the
development of a shared vision and purposes (Lee, et. al., 1993); the development of
a positive learning environment (Mortimore, et. al., 1988); the adoption of an
approach that focuses on teaching and learning processes (Creemers, 1994); the
development of suitable teaching practices (Mortimore, 1993); the promotion of high
expectations in students’ performance (Tizard, et. al., 1988); the development of a
positive reinforcement culture (Wahlberg, 1984); the creation of a system for
supervising students’ progress (Levine and Lezotte, 1990); the empowerment of
students through greater responsibilities (Lipsitz, 1984); the development of a
suitable school-home association (Coleman, et al., 1993); and the definition of school
as a “learning organization” (Hopkins, 1994). In the data set available for this work,
variables to measure the existence of the most of these characteristics in schools
can be found.

Besides, the traditional variables, the information available contains a third set of
variables (never used before in the literature) regarding to the teacher’s and head
teacher’s economic, social and cultural capital, that can be also interpreted using the

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Bourdieu’s theory. Some examples are: availability of comfort goods in the

household, level of education, parent’s level of education, how many and what kind
of books have they read in the last year, mother tongue, if they have any other job
besides being a teacher, how many hours do they sped in that job and how many
children they have.

The State level

Finally, in the state’s level, the availability of theories is even scarcer, according to
Fernandez (2003d), the best settled approach is the one proposed by Heyneman and
Loxley (1982, 1983). The authors state that, in the one hand, the level of economic
development of a society is associated to the level of school attainment of its
students, and, in the other, that the size of the class reproduction processes over the
student’s attainment (social inequities of the educational system) depends on the
level of economic development as well. In line with this approach, information as the
Gross Domestic Product of states or even municipalities could be used to test the
Heyneman and Loxley’s theory in the Mexican context.

3. Objectives and key research questions

This study aims to determine and compare the inequity patterns of the lower-
secondary education in Mexico. Special interest is given to the differences between
schools regarding to their capacity to achieve equitable distributions of the
educational results among their students and to the inclusion of new sets of proxy
variables to model context characteristics that may have an important influence in the
schools outcomes and that have not been used before in the school effectiveness
research. Consequently, key research questions will include the following:

• What proportion of the variation in the school outcomes depends on i)

students, ii) schools and iii) states characteristics?

• Which other variables that have not been considered before in the literature
are likely to add to the explanatory power of the ML Models?

• Does the effect of each model on students’ outcomes vary for different
schools’ context characteristics? (school composition: family economic, social
and cultural capital, and school modality)

4. Methodology

Data

The data required for carrying out this work will be obtained from the databases
published yearly by the SEP about the results of the application of standardized
tests. The specific information will be taken from the test applied to a representative
sample of the students registered in the last year of the lower-secondary education in

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Mexico at the end of the academic year 2003-2004, and considers 37,973 students
and 1,119 schools. This information includes: i) the results of measuring academic
achievement of the National Standards Evaluation Program, ii) the results of
measuring school and socio-economic characteristics.

These instruments measure the basic skills that, according to the lower secondary
school curriculum, students should develop in the areas of Spanish and Mathematics
(among other subjects) and not the distance that each one has with respect to the
population mean. Test design was based on an analysis of the Spanish and
Mathematics curricula, which allowed the subsequent classification of the skills
required for developing reading comprehension and problem solving (Martínez and
Schmelkes, 1999).

The questionnaires on socio-educational characteristics provide information on the

various factors associated with schools and student’s families. In terms of the factors
regarding to the student’s families, information about the economic, social and
cultural context is included. School factors provide general information on the
infrastructure of school facilities and on aspects related to supervision, management
and teaching activities.

The analysis of information

The multi-level (ML) modelling technique will be used to analyse the information. This
technique involves variables measured at more than one level of a hierarchy. In this
work, hierarchy consists of students nested into schools, and schools nested into
states. Measurements will be obtained for student characteristics, school and states
characteristics.

The multi-level technique recognizes in a explicit way the clustering of students within
schools as well as the clustering of schools between states and allows simultaneous
consideration of the effects of the variables considered in the model, not only on
average school achievement but also on structural relationships within schools or
states. The ML technique permits a separation of within-school from between-school
phenomena, and allows the decomposition of students-level effects and
compositional or contextual effects (Goldstein, 1987 and 1995; Bryk and
Raudenbush, 1992; Raudenbush and Bryk 1986; Lee and Bryk 1989).

In addition, According to Bryk and Raudenbush (1992) the use of ML modelling

makes it possible to deal with the technical problems that arise when working with
data of multilevel nature: (i) aggregation biases, which result from variables that have
different meanings at the different levels at which the data are generated; (ii)
underestimated standard errors, which reflect the failure to take into account the
dependence among students responses within the same school; and (iii)
heterogeneity of regression, which occurs when the relationships between individual
characteristics and outcomes vary across schools.

***

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The results of a research with these characteristics will permit to make a contribution
towards:

- Providing a basis for building a theory applicable to school effectiveness

studies, through formulating and testing hypotheses, about different kinds of
household’s economic structures and the way in which cultural capital is
transmitted or not within the families. The theorisation and justification of the
inclusion of this kind of variables in the school effectiveness future works (if
the results show that) would certainly take the field forward.

- Providing a sound basis for the design of a new generation of public policies
that may help to narrow the disparities affecting educational opportunities in
Mexico.

More specifically, gaining insight on the factors that have greater incidence on
the academic performance of students, in each one of the three analysis
levels proposed, will help educational authorities to make better informed
decisions.

Moreover, the design of public policy programs could be adjusted according

to the specific context of the lower secondary schools (characteristics of
students and schools, socio-economic levels of the Mexican states in which
the schools

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 Andrés Sandoval Hernández MPhil/PhD Transfer Paper

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