Guatemala

The benefits of compensatory bilingual education for a disadvantaged, poor indigenous population as an investment in human capital is significant. Students of bili... Show More + ngual schools in Guatemala have higher attendance and promotion rates and lower repetition and dropout rates. A very important finding is that bilingual students receive higher scores on all subject matters, including mastery of Spanish. The efficiency of bilingual education in Guatemala is confirmed by a crude cost-benefit exercise. A shift to bilingual schooling in Guatemala would result in considerable cost savings as a result of reduced repetition. The higher quality of education generating higher promotion rates will probably help students to completed the primary education cycle, and will substantially increase total educational levels at a lower cost. The costs savings due to bilingual education are equivalent to the cost of providing primary education to about 100,000 students per year. Show Less -

This paper reviews the basic concept of the profitability of investment in education and enumerates the various techniques that have been used in the literature to ... Show More + estimate the rate of return to investment in education. This various estimating techniques are illustrated by using household survey data from Venezuela and Guatemala. The paper also reviews the controversies that have appeared in the literature regarding the use of rates of return to investment in education for designing educational policy. Show Less -

This paper provides an overview of bilingual education in several Latin American countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil. Bilingual educati... Show More + on is defined in this paper as instruction to minority groups through the use of their mother language and, progressively, and mainstream language, such as Spanish or Portuguese. Studies have shown that the combination of providing education to minority groups in their own language and using teachers from the same group is highly effective. A bilingual program also increases learning when the group's history and perspective are included in the school curriculum. Other investigations show that bilingual education can have contradictory effects in the education process, depending on the child's language and socioeconomic status. Immersion programs -- such as the highly successful French Canadian immersion program -- are positive for middle-class students whose maternal language is prestigious; conversely, the immersion model is negative for lower-class students who speak a language of lower prestige. Bilingual education appears to offer a solution to the problem of repetition, dropout and low educational attainment among indigenous children. Show Less -