El Salvador’s EDUCO Program A First Report On Parents’ Participation in School-Based Management

This paper is a product of the research project, " Impact Evaluation of Education Projects Involving Decentralization and Privatization " (RPO 679-18) being carried out under the guidance of Elizabeth King by the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. The paper was written by the National Research and Evaluation Division, Ministry of Education, El Salvador, in collaboration with the World Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are the authors' own and should not be attributed to the World Bank, its Board of Directors, or any of its member countries. Comments are welcome and should be sent directly to the author(s). For copies, please send request to Selina Khan at [email protected] ii SUMMARY In 1991, El Salvador's Ministry of Education created a new model of school-based management to serve preschool and primary school students in the most rural and remote areas of the country that had suffered disproportionately in the country's civil war. The aim of the Community Managed Schools Program, better known by its Spanish-language acronym, EDUCO, was to decentralize the management of public education by increasing parents' involvement in and responsibility for the running of these schools. The philosophy behind the EDUCO program is that local people can run the schools in their communities more efficiently and effectively than can a centralized bureaucracy. The driving force behind the EDUCO school strategy is the Community Education Association, an elected parents' group responsible for the administration of the school. This report is the first in a series of studies being carried out by the Ministry of Education's National Research and Evaluation Division in collaboration with the World Bank aimed at evaluating the impact of EDUCO and other education reform programs. This study focuses on parents' participation in school management and its effects on schooling outcomes, including achievement, attendance, and repetition and dropout rates, all of which will be explored in greater depth in subsequent analyses. For this first study which was authored by the Ministry of Education based on analyses conducted in conjunction with the World Bank, we compared EDUCO schools and traditional public schools in rural areas, which are the most similar to EDUCO schools in terms of size, location, and student population. In the case of both EDUCO and traditional rural public schools, we examined associations between school and family characteristics and the outcomes observed in the school and then developed some hypotheses about how parents' participation …