Does the academic performance of the Francophone education subsystem exceed that of the Anglophone education subsystem at primary level? Evidence from Cameroon

Abstract

This paper aims to implement the differences in academic performance between students in the francophone and anglophone education subsystems at primary level in Cameroon Using data from the Programme d Analyse des Syst mes Educatifs de la Confemen organised in 2014 the study employs a two-stage modelling approach Firstly the estimation of educational production functions by OLS shows that student characteristics and school context are important determinants of students achievement in the anglophone and francophone subsystems Second the Oaxaca-Blinder 1973 decomposition method showed that at the end of the primary school year students in the francophone education subsystem perform better than those in the anglophone subsystem The share of explained factors contributes to increase this differential to more than 100 in both mathematics and language therefore it does not matter how much the unexplained share is given it does not suggest the existence of discrimination in school performance towards the anglophone subsystem This calls for policy makers to consider their role in reducing the various sources of inequality among students of all kinds particularly that focused on the linguistic-educational subsystem