An Evaluation of the Intensity and Impacts of Socioeconomic School Segregation in Argentina

Abstract

As in other Latin American countries, there is evidence in Argentina of significant progress over the past decades in terms of educational inclusion, especially concerning the dimension of access. However, the country is still far from being able to offer high quality and equal educational opportunities to all its citizens. National and international evaluations of academic performance have revealed that the skills acquired by Argentinian students are not only low on average, but they are also strongly associated with socioeconomic status. One of the many processes that help to explain this situation is the segregation of the student population. The poor integration of students from different backgrounds at school is intrinsically relevant, since it hinders the contribution of education to social cohesion. Furthermore, it tends to strengthen inequality of educational results. This chapter presents an overview of the problem of socioeconomic segregation in Argentina´s secondary school system. It analyses its magnitude, its main characteristics and explanatory factors, and its impact on inequality in student achievements. Following a review of the available literature in the country, the chapter estimates several segregation indices in order to evaluate the unevenness in the distribution of students from different socioeconomic origins across the public and private school sectors, as well as across schools within each sector. A relevant level of segregation implies that student profiles tend to be more homogeneous within schools and heterogeneous between them, so that schooling experiences develop almost exclusively between peers of similar social status. In such a context, if significant school compositional effects exist, they will reinforce the association between educational success and socioeconomic background, explaining an important proportion of the results variance. To assess this, a series of multilevel models are estimated, analyzing how the characteristics of a pupil`s peers may influence individual achievements. In line with previous studies, the findings suggest that the degree of socioeconomic segregation in Argentina is significantly lower than in other Latin American countries but much higher than in most OECD countries. Additionally, due to the existence of considerable compositional effects, the process of social segregation is contributing to the reproduction and reinforcement at school of existing patterns of social inequality. Thus, it should be considered a key educational policy factor.