School Choice and Educational Opportunities: the Upper-Secondary Student-Assignment Process in Mexico City
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School Choice and Educational Opportunities: The Upper-Secondary Student-Assignment Process in Mexico City The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Ortega Hesles, Maria Elena. 2015. School Choice and Educational Opportunities: The Upper-Secondary Student-Assignment Process in Mexico City. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:16461054 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA School Choice and Educational Opportunities: The Upper-Secondary Student-Assignment Process in Mexico City Maria Elena Ortega Hesles Richard J. Murnane Fernando Reimers Felipe Barrera-Osorio A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education 2015 © 2015 Maria Elena Ortega Hesles All Rights Reserved To Arturo To Elena and the baby on the way To my Parents and Brothers i Acknowledgements This dissertation is the result of a long and enriching journey. During this journey, I knocked many doors and crossed paths with people who have uniquely influenced my work. Each one gave me different tools, materials or guidance for the construction of this dissertation. I owe many people for the completion of this but I would need an entire chapter to express my deep appreciation to everyone. First of all, I would like to extend thanks to the members of my ad hoc committee for their constructive comments, generosity with their time, and efforts in helping me through this process. My deepest gratitude to my advisor and mentor Richard Murnane for his patience, constant support, and invaluable guidance throughout these years. The training I received from him –as a student, an advisee, and a teaching fellow– has shaped me as a person and scholar. I am indebted to Fernando Reimers for his trust, advice, and encouragement not only throughout this project but also over the course of my time at HGSE. It has been a real honor learning from him both inside and outside the classroom. I also want to thank Felipe Barrera-Osorio for his guidance and useful feedback during process. His comments have greatly enriched and improved these papers. Finally, this work would not have been the same without the statistical training, useful feedback, careful editing, and long hours of discussion with John Willett. This dissertation was possible thanks to the help of many people who listened to me at different stages of the project and who helped me knock the right doors. I want to thank Miguel Herrera, Daniel Hernandez, Carlos Mancera, Sofialeticia Morales, Reyes Tamez, Claudia Uribe, and Lorenzo Gomez Morin for listening to my ideas and guiding me through the system. I also extend my appreciation to all the people who trusted me and opened their doors. I am deeply grateful to all the members of the COMIPEMS' Technical Committee. I want to especially thank Ana Maria Aceves and Roberto Pena; their support was fundamental for the conception and completion of this project. Jose Guadalupe Fernandez Galarza also provided useful insights regarding the COMIPEMS database. This work would not have ii been completed without the collaboration of multiple upper-secondary institutions in Mexico and the support of their staff. I want to personally thank Isidro Avila and Ivonne Ramirez (UNAM), Yadira Davila and Emmanuel Vazquez (IPN), Jorge González and Alejandro Hernandez (COLBACH), Maria Elena Araiza (DGB), Alejandro Quintin and Jorge Angeles (DGETI), Catalina Gallardo (DGETA), and Salvador Alvarado, Miguel Angel Cruz and Juan Manuel Uribe (CONALEP). They opened me the doors, answered my never ending calls, emails or letters, and helped me to build this ambitious database. I am also deeply indebted to Matteo Bobba and Veronica Frisancho for their inspiring discussions and for sharing with me their survey data and focus groups recordings that I used as part of the first paper. I also thank Victor Perez who provided research assistance in the first paper. I appreciate financial support from the HGSE and the Fundacion Mexico en Harvard. In particular, I would like to thank Barbara Randolph for all her help since I first got accepted into the Master’s program. Also, I appreciate the resources provided by the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences (IQQS) at Harvard to conduct research for this dissertation. Also, I want to thank the IQSS and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) for their financial support to participate in different academic conferences. I am thankful to my incredible friends in Mexico, USA, Sweden, France, and other parts of the world. They believed in me and have supported me professionally, academically, and personally in the years of my doctoral program. Each one has taught me something valuable and helped me get to this stage of my academic journey. At Harvard, I crossed paths with wonderful people who accompanied me at different stages of this process. I want to thank my academic and emotional support group: Maria Cecilia Acevedo, Mylena Aguilar, Anjali Adukia, Robina Bhasin. Eliana Carranza, Gwedolyn Casazza, Annie Chu, Sergio Cardenas, Lorenza de Icaza, Shaun Dougherty, Qian Guo, Rebecca Holcombe, Claudia Ramirez, Santiago Rincon-Gallardo, Anna Rosefsky, Patricia Villarreal, just to mention a few. My last 3 years collecting data and writing this dissertation in Mexico would not have been the same without the encouragement, support, and mental breaks with Eugenia Garduno and Ingrid Garcia. Also, I would like to very specially thank Isabel and iii Hector for their friendship but most importantly for becoming my family in Cambridge during my constant visits during these last years. Needless to say, I would like to express my very profound gratitude to my parents, Maria Elena and Miguel, for teaching me the value of education and paving the road for me to get here. They provided me with unfailing support and love throughout all these years of study. I can finally tell them: I did it! I am finally done with school (although just starting with schools). I also want to thank my brothers, Miguel and Alejandro, who have taught me so many things and who always find a way to make me laugh. They listened and understood all my praises and complaints about life as a graduate student even at 3am. I also want to thank my extended family and family in-law; this accomplishment would not have been possible without their constant encouragement. To my grandfather Mario I need to say that I found out that there are places where the sun in winter does warm a little and others where it doesn’t; fortunately on those cold places there is the option of wearing a winter jacket and having heating. Most importantly, I would like to thank my husband Arturo. His useful feedback, unending support, constant encouragement, quiet patience, and unwavering love has made this possible. He has been by my side always, even during those long days when I hesitated to continue. He has been a crucial piece in this academic journey and my life, having the roles of friend, classmate, teacher, advisor, and partner. No words will suffice to describe how (statistically) significant he has been in all this. TAF. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to my daughters, Elena and the baby on the way. They have changed the meaning of my life and inspire me to continue improving education. Elena has been a great source of joy, love, and motivation throughout this process. iv Table of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………….. vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 1 The Role of Socio-economic Background and Information in the Upper-Secondary Admission Process in Mexico City……..……….……....…… 5 Just Making the Admission Cut-off: The Impact of the Offer of Admission to, and Enrollment in, a More Competitive School on the Graduation Outcomes of Upper-Secondary Applicants in εexico City……………………………. ……………………………………. 56 Vita………………………………………………………………………………. 126 v School Choice and Educational Opportunities: The Upper-Secondary Student-Assignment Process in Mexico City Abstract Many education systems around the world use a centralized admission process to assign students to schools. By definition, some applicants to oversubscribed schools are not offered admission to their most-preferred school. Thus, one naturally asks whether it makes a difference to applicants’ educational opportunities and outcomes which schools they apply to, are offered admission to, and eventually enroll in. Each year in Mexico City, about 300,000 teenagers apply for a seat at one of the nearly 650 public upper-secondary schools. In this centralized, merit-based admission process, applicants are assigned to a school based on entrance examination score and their ranked list of school choices, subject to school capacity constraints. In this dissertation, I include two papers assessing data from the upper-secondary application cohorts in Mexico City from 2005 to 2009. In the first paper, I find evidence of socio-economic stratification across schools. I also find dissimilarities in the application behavior of individuals according to their socio-economic background, even for those with high achievement levels. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from a small sample of applicants, I suggest that in addition to differences in economic resources, asymmetries in access to information might help to explain disparities in the application behavior of individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds. vi In the second paper, I capitalize on the natural experiment created at each oversubscribed public upper-secondary school in Mexico City by the imposition of exogenous admission cut-off scores. Using a regression-discontinuity design, I estimate that, on average, upper-secondary applicants who score just above the admission threshold for a more competitive school (i.e.