Relationship between socio-economic status and school academic performance: Evidence from the 2019 Census Student Assessment

The objective of this research is to determine whether there is a causal relationship between socioeconomic level (SES) and the academic performance of school students in Peru. For this purpose, the 2019 Student Census Evaluation (ECE 2019), applied by the Office for the Measurement of the Quality of Learning (UMC) of the Ministry of Education to students in the second grade of secondary school, was used. This census contains information from the scores of three standardized assessments: Reading, Mathematics, and Science and Technology. To measure the causal effect of student SES on academic performance in these subjects, regression models were estimated for each assessment and the exogenous variation of the SES of the rest of the school was used as an instrumental variable of student SES. The results show that there is no statistically significant relationship between student SES and Mathematics score. In the cases of Reading and Science and Technology, student SES helps predict academic performance, however, its causal effect is very small.