Primary School Attendance in Honduras

Honduras has recorded impressive gains in expanding educational access in the 1990s, with the result that primary education is available to almost all children. With improved access the focus has shifted to quality and efficiency issues. Previous research suggests that academic achievement is still quite low while repetition and school desertion rates continue to remain high. An important cause of these outcomes appears to lie in patterns of school attendance. Low levels of school attendance may be responsible for low academic achievement, which in turn is linked to high repetition and desertion rates. Recognizing this probable chain of events, this paper focuses on the school attendance decision. We rely on recently collected data from a national sample of Honduran primary schools to specify and estimate a model of school attendance. We find that increases in the expected benefits of attending school exert a strong impact on the school attendance decision.