“Full-Time Schools and Educational Trajectories: Evidence from High-Stakes Exams”, 2023-10 ():
This paper estimates the effects of extending the school day during elementary school on students’ educational outcomes later in life.
The analysis takes place in the context of a large-scale program introduced in 2007 that extended the school day 4.5–8 h in Mexico City’s metropolitan area. The identification strategy leverages cohort-by-cohort variation in full-time enrollment in elementary schools.
The results indicate that full-time elementary schools have positive and long-lasting effects on students’ performance, increasing high-stakes high school admission test scores by 4.8% of a standard deviation [d = 0.04]. The effects are larger for females than for males.
The difference in the effects between males and females of 2.1% of a standard deviation represents 16% of the gender gap in the high school admission exam. Moreover, full-time schooling decreases the probability of delays in schooling completion.
Twitter: Scalability, and potential diminishing effects across time are challenges that often plague education interventions. Full-Time Schools (FTS) programmes have quickly spread in the region, yet little is know about their effects on long-term student’s outcomes.
We study a large-scale program extending the school day in elementary schools in Mexico. Using rich individual-level data and high-stakes exams’ results, we measure FTS impact on high school admission, on-time graduation, non-cognitive outcomes and student preferences.
We find that being enrolled in an FTS for all 6 years of elementary school education increases high school placement test scores by 5.1–13.8% of an SD. Full-time schooling increases the probability that students attend more selective high schools.
The effects are larger for females representing 16% of the gender gap in the high school admission exam. Exposure to FTS also improved girls’ oral communication abilities, among other non-cognitive skills, that might explain the larger effects for girls’ test scores.
We also find that FTS increases students’ probability of taking a high school admission exam and on-time graduation from middle school, reducing potential delays in educational completion. Effects of on-time graduation are similar across poorer and richer children and by sex.
Finally, while noisily estimated, our results on students’ preferences weakly suggest that they are more likely to choose “top ten” high schools. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that 13⁄100 students in FTSs are placed in higher-ranked high schools.