Educational Opportunities and Learning Outcomes of Children in Peru: A Longitudinal Model

Abstract

The last few decades have seen an enormous increase in pre-school, primary, and secondary school enrolment in Latin America and other developing regions in the world, to the point where it is close to 100 per cent in many countries. This is aligned with international movements such as Education for All (see, for example, UNESCO 2007), which calls for universal primary enrolment by 2015. However, the assessment of achievement of students has often shown poor results. The issue has become not only whether children go to school, but also what and how much they learn there; an example of this is the recently issued strategy for education from the World Bank, called Learning for All (World Bank 2011). The tendency for measuring achievement has resulted in the creation of several national and international programmes in developing countries, such as the Latin American Laboratory for the Measurement of Educational Quality, sponsored by UNESCO (2010).¹ This programme has carried out two rounds of evaluations in over a dozen countries of the region, measuring achievement in language, mathematics, and science among primary school students. The most recent results show that low achievement is associated with several individual and family characteristics, such as living in a rural area, speaking an indigenous language, low parental education, and child work (UNESCO 2010).