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This study develops an empirical selection model to estimate the impact of pre-school attendance on student proficiency disentangling it into two, a direct and an indirect impacts. The direct impact is the effect on the proficiency at a grade level in itself. Attending a pre-school, a student may develop abilities that are important to learning such as attention, cooperation, curiosity to learn, etc. The indirect impact is the impact through retention reduction in the previous grades. Having attended a pre-school, a student accumulate initial knowledge that can help the learning process in the first grade. The knowledge accumulated in the first grade have an influence in the learning in the next grade, and so on. Because of lack of knowledge from previous grades, student may be eventually delayed in a given grade. Since the delay in itself affects the learning, the pre-school may affect the grade repetition which in turn, through delay, may affect the proficiency later on. It finds that attending a pre-school decrease the probability to have repeated a grade at least once by seven to ten percentage points. It also finds that attending a pre-school increases Math proficiency at Fourth grade. The direct impact ranges from 86% to 51% and the indirect impact through grade repetition reduction from 14% to 49%.

Pre-School, Grade Repetition, Proficiency, Selecion Models