Designing for Equity, Delivering on Achievement? The Impact of Admission and Administrative Reforms on Student Outcomes
Designing for Equity, Delivering on Achievement? The Impact of Admission and Administrative Reforms on Student Outcomes
Journal: TBD
First Draft: June 2025
Link to Paper: TBD
Abstract
What is the impact of establishing new admission rules and changing school management? I study the effect on student human capital and achievement of shifts in school regulations and administrative institutions. In 2015 and 2017, the government of Chile implemented two major reforms aimed to improve the efficiency and equity of the Chilean K-12 educational system. By improving school admission processes and transferring the administration of public schools from municipal to State management, these policies seek to eliminate copayments in publicly funded schools, prohibit profiting in subsidized private institutions, address governance failures, improve school management, and standardize quality across districts. Although these policies were conceived to improve the educational landscape in Chile, their actual effects remain an open empirical question.
Using administrative data on over 200,000 students of their educational trajectories, containing information on student standardized test scores on math and language skills at 4th through 10th grade and measures of human capital at different stages of their education, I rely on differences-in-differences and instrumental variable designs to estimate the effect of each policy on student achievement and human capital. Furthermore, I provide a novel method to account for overlapping effects of multiple-consecutive policies, which theorizes that a share of the policies’ effects are a complementary impact of the superposition of both.
Results show both reforms improve student achievement and key human capital outcomes. LIE-15 and LD-17 reduce school mobility and dropout rates, strengthening and homogenizing school management through a notable increase on academic performance. However, the reforms generate complementary effects—the positive effect on student achievement remains clear, but loses magnitude when analyzing the overlapping phenomena. Finally, positive impacts are stronger in areas where schools are in the vicinity of high-performing districts, shedding light on how institutional capacity and localization shapes the success of large-scale education reforms.