Socioeconomic Level and the Gap Between Public and Private Secondary Education in Argentina. The Data from PISA 2015

In Argentina, it has been repeatedly observed that students from private schools achieve a better academic performance than those from public schools. The objective of this work is to reveal if this gap is explained by a greater efficiency of private schools or if it is, on the contrary, exclusively due to exogenous factors, such as the social origin of the student and the socioeconomic composition of the students in the school. For this, the data of PISA 2015 are used and the results of the assessment of Science, Mathematics and Reading are analyzed with multilevel regression models with two levels: school and student. The results indicate that when the difference between both types of school is controlled by this set of indicators, it vanishes in the three evaluated subjects. It is concluded that these differences are totally explained by exogenous factors to the school and that certain methodological aspects regarding the construction of indicators to be used, are of special importance in order to reveal the determinants of that inequality. Finally, the results obtained in this article are discussed in relation to those reported by other studies where the public-private gap has been analyzed.