Apples and oranges: Educational enrollment and attainment across countries in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper uses household survey data to rank LAC countries’ performance in two areas: (i) getting children into school on time and keeping them there, and (ii) turning their contact with the educational system into years of schooling. It presents multiple rankings because most countries’ performance is not uniform across these dimensions. For instance, the Dominican Republic performs almost as well as the richest countries when it comes to keeping children in school, but as badly as the poorest few in terms of turning attendance into years of schooling. Further, the rankings, which are based on conventional and new measures of educational systems’ performance, are occasionally quite different from those obtained using more widely available administrative data.