On the impact of aspirations on learning levels of indigenous students in Latin America

Indigenous knowledge is paramount for the sustainable development agenda. Increasing the learning levels among disadvantaged indigenous populations is critical for the post-2015 SDG agenda, both for an equity perspective... [ view full abstract ]

Indigenous knowledge is paramount for the sustainable development agenda. Increasing the learning levels among disadvantaged indigenous populations is critical for the post-2015 SDG agenda, both for an equity perspective (target 4.5) and for the culture contribution to sustainable development (target 4.7) of indigenous communities. In this paper, we investigate the role of parental aspirations among indigenous populations as a barrier for their children learning for 13 Latin American countries using the recent TERCE learning survey for sixth grade students. Our hypothesis is that aspirations has a causal effect on indigenous students learning even after family’s wealth is controlled for because of internalised discriminatory values from non-indigenous elite. We also consider which channels could weaken the negative effect of aspirations. Our empirical analysis shows that indigenous students coming from households where parents have lower aspirations achieve between 9 and 75 points less in math and between 30 and 79 points less in reading than indigenous children whose parents have higher expectations, with variation on this association across the region. Importantly, the aspirations trap is more prominent for indigenous students than for non-indigenous students. For instance, lower aspiration leads to negative effects on maths scores of 75 (Brazil), 29 (Chile), 19 (Ecuador), 32 (Mexico) and 35 (Paraguay) among indigenous children but only in the range 9-25 lower scores for non-indigenous students. Additionally, we find that fostering social capital throughout school activities or increasing teacher quality can help to narrow the learning gap among indigenous and non-indigenous due to aspirations. Our results highlight the need to expand the scope of social and teacher policies to tackle the adverse role of aspirations (internalised through discriminatory values) to weaken the transmission of education inequality from parents to their children in indigenous populations in Latin America.