an Eldis Resource
Student achievement conditioned upon school selection: religious and secular secondary school quality in Bangladesh
Education, gender and religion in Bangladesh
Authors:
M. N. Asadullah; N. Chaudhury; A. Dar
Publisher:
Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House), University of Oxford, 2006
This paper presents new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on secondary student achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. Specifically, it examines the non-random sorting of children into madrasas (Islamic faith schools), by employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation techniques.
Several important findings emanate from this study on learning outcomes in rural secondary schools in Bangladesh:
- girls have a lower test score compared to boys, all else equal
- school type matters - pupils who attend secondary religious schools are worse off compared to their secular schooled peers
- once the decision to attend a religious school is treated as endogenous, no difference in test score prevails between religious and secular school students
- madrasa attendance for primary education, however, exerts a (marginally) significant negative effect on test score even after accounting for school-specific unobservable determinants of learning.
