Colima education authorities also attribute their performance to two other innovations: competitive testing for half of all new teachers and an agreement with the teacher union not to rotate teachers during the school year. In other states, such rotations start a chain reaction that can result in some classes having 3-4 different teachers during the academic year.

# **School-Based Management Program in Mexico: “** **_Programa Escuelas de Calidad_ ” (PEC)**

In 2001, the Mexican federal government introduced PEC to empower the school community and promote school autonomy and accountability. The main objective of this initiative was to encourage parents, teachers and directors to design and carry out School Strategic Transformation Plans that responded to the needs of the school and its students. For this purpose, PEC yearly awards a monetary grant and technical assistance to implement these improvement plans in selected schools. While it builds on previous small-scale experiences that decentralized limited decision-making powers to the school, PEC was the most extensive SBM program implemented in Mexico before 2013 (see Schmelkes 2001 for more details on other SBM initiatives in Mexico prior to PEC). PEC also became one of the flagship programs of the Fox administration (2000 - 2006) and it expanded rapidly, from 2,239 schools included in the program in 2001 to around 55,432 schools at 2014. PEC was canceled in 2014, after 14 years of implementation; a new SBM program was initiated called “ _Escuelas al Centro_ ” (Schools at the Center).

The national PEC intervention has been subject to evaluation. Murnane et al. (2006) use nationally representative data and difference-in-difference estimation techniques to compare PEC schools – defined as schools that joined the program in its second year of operation (2002) – to non-PEC schools. They validate the equality of pre-intervention trends between both sets of schools. However, the authors reject the equality of trends in the pre-period when schools that received benefits during the first year of operation of the intervention are included in the treatment group. These schools were improving outcomes more rapidly in the pre-PEC years than comparison schools which suggests that any PEC evaluation is likely to suffer from self-selection bias, at least on its initial stages – that is, better performing schools had a higher probability to apply for and receive benefits in the first years of program operation. The authors find that the program reduced dropout rates by 0.27 percentage point but find no impact on failure rates.

Skoufias and Shapiro (2006) build on the standard difference-in-difference methodology in Murnane et al. (2006) to evaluate PEC on school averaged repetition, failure and dropout rates over the first three years of PEC benefits. Their approach combines difference-in-difference techniques and propensity score matching. In this way, each PEC school is matched to a set of comparison schools with similar observed characteristics and located in similar communities, rather than to all comparison schools. However, because they only have data on two periods, the authors are forced to assume that pre-intervention trends between treatment and comparison schools were the same. Their findings suggest that participation in PEC decreases dropout rates by 0.24 points, failure rates by 0.24 points and repetition rates by 0.31 points.

Loera (2005) and Loera and Cazares (2005) use achievement and coverage data over school years 2001-02 to 2003-04 and report a statistically significant positive correlation of 0.90 point between student test scores and PEC benefits. Bando (2010) exploited the exposure to the program across cohorts and schools over time; Bando finds that the program impacted decreasing failure and drop6