Does full-day schooling reduce educational inequality in Vietnam ?

2015

Ouvrage

Tran Ngo Thi Minh Tam, Pasquier-Doumer Laure

Budapest : Open Society Foundations, 2015, 62 p. (PERI ESP Working Paper Series ; 72).

Privatization of education sector has recently been observed in many low and middle income countries. Yet public debate remains, specifi cally on educational inequality associated with the alternatives (non-state) providers. This paper contributes an empirical evidence to the ongoing discourses by looking into the full-day schooling and educational inequality in Vietnam. Full-day schooling is implemented initially to deal with the current defi ciency in primary instructional time in Vietnam. Moreover, as a semi- or purely public schooling, the policy to some extent targets the equality of opportunity in education. Learning outcomes are often high for full-day schooling students, but whether the outcome gap between children of different social background is not yet known. This paper therefore examines whether full-day schooling decreases the educational inequality using the data from the School Survey 2011 under the Young Lives Project in Vietnam. Specifi cally we conduct descriptive analysis to examine how the transition from private extra classes to full-day schooling and accompanied school resources affect the gap in learning achievement between children with different social background. Then we investigate how full-day schooling relates to student learning achievement applying the Value-added model estimated by Ordinary Least-square with interaction terms of full-day schooling and social background. The estimation of the Quantile Regression is also employed to study the heterogeneity in the extent to which full-day schooling correlates to learning progress across quantile of student learning progress. Analysis results show that full-day schooling improves student learning progress. However full-day schooling does not narrow the inequality in education, and appears to associate with the rising gap in learning progress. Among students that attend full-day schooling, the high social background children have more instructional, better resources and obtain higher learning progress in comparison with the low social background. Higher extent of attendance in full-day schooling magnifi es the effect of social background on learning progress. Regarding the heterogeneity of full-day schooling’s effect on across quintiles of learning progress, the negative effect is stronger at higher quintile. Meanwhile the positive effect of full-day schooling on learning progress in Vietnamese, and positive effect of better school resources in Math magnifi es across the progress distribution.

Société, développement social [106]

Fonds IRD [F B010069642]

fdi:010069642