Something odd happens when Mexico’s students are compared with the rest of the world. Standardized tests show that Mexican private-school students perform surprisingly poorly compared to private-school students abroad. In math, they rank 47th out of 67 countries. Mexican public-school students, meanwhile, rank 43rd. The same pattern appears in science: Mexico ranks 46th among private schools, but 44th among public schools.
This does not mean every private-school student in Mexico is poorly educated. Yet, many students whose families are paying for what is supposed to be a better education often look unusually weak by international standards.
That is why today, we decided to use Mexico Decoded’s weekly essay to examine the evidence behind this surprising pattern and explain why it happens.
