Education for All: Compensating for Disadvantage in Mexico. Education Notes

Overview & Synopsis

This note series is intended to summarize lessons learned and key policy findings on the World Bank's work in education.Education for all means learning for all. It means closing the "advantage" gap--making sure that the children of the poor and disadvantaged achieve the same levels of learning as all other children. This is one of the great challenges any country can face. It is a particular challenge in a diverse country such as Mexico, where many children do not speak Spanish, live in villages inaccessible by roads and cannot afford such basic expenditures as school uniforms. Mexico began as early as 1971 to address the challenge of including its most disadvantaged children by creating the National Council of Education Promotion (CONAFE). In the 1990s, the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) created the compensatory education program (CP) to support the most disadvantaged schools and nearly all indigenous schools. CONAFE implements the CPs, which support more than three million students in pre-primary and primary education, including about one million indigenous primary school students. The CP also supports about one million students in telesecundaria education (secondary education delivered via satellite television to remote communities). Nearly every indigenous school and every telesecundaria school receives support from these programs. CONAFE selects other schools for support based on the average income of the school's community, the school's isolation and access to public infrastructure, the school's education indicators and other indicators of poverty. Compensatory programs do work. If they are well designed and properly targeted, compensatory programs can significantly reduce the "advantage" gap. (Contains 3 graphs.) [This report was produced by the World Bank's Education Advisory Service.]