Primary school student employment and academic achievement in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru

Across Latin America, large numbers of students engage in non-school work during their years of compulsory education, either in the home or in an outside job. Drawing upon newly available data, this article uses OLS and multi-level models to detect associations between different intensities and locations of employment and student achievement in mathematics and reading in the final year of primary school in four Andean countries. Even after controlling for the selection of working students into worse schools, employment is found to have a detrimental impact on achievement, especially when students work four or more hours per day. The author 2011 Journal compilation