ABSTRACT
This book addresses the issues of educational quality, grade repetition, and early school dropout in primary school in Latin America. The importance of primary school education is universal: primary school education is a fundamental ingredient for creating economic development and growth. In the United States, it has been more important than increased capital in accounting for worker productivity and U.S. economic growth (Denison 1974, 1985). In developing countries, social returns to education are at least as high as any reasonable measure of the opportunity cost of capital and are greater for primary education than for secondary and higher education (Tilak 1989). The social returns to primary education in Latin America are more than 17 percent, according to a 1990s estimate for fourteen Latin American countries (Wolff, Schiefelbein, and Valenzuela 1994). In Brazil, a literate man earns about 50 percent more than an illiterate one; a man with elementary school education earns about 130 percent more; and a man with at least a secondary school education earns almost 550 percent more (Thomas and Strauss 1997).
