| Abstrakt: |
This article is concerned with the academic achievement of indigenous children using data from Bolivia's SIMECAL assessment in 1997 and from Chile's SIMCE assessments in 1997 and 1999. It finds a consistent gap of 0.3 to 0.5 standard deviations, favoring nonindigenous students. For several reasons, their achievement is probably lower than that of nonindigenous children. First, indigenous parents typically have less formal schooling and lower earnings than other adults; Both are common measures of the quality of the educational environment in the home. Second, indigenous families are more likely to live in rural areas or poor urban areas, where public schools may have fewer and lower-quality instructional resources. Third, schools have usually ignored and occasionally punished the use of indigenous languages. |
