Opportunity to learn and widening gaps: school-level drivers of equity in Paraguay’s Grade-3 mathematics (SNEPE 2015–2018)

Paraguay’s National System for the Evaluation of Educational Process (SNEPE) conducted census-based Grade-3 mathematics tests in 2015 and 2018, revealing a sharp overall drop in scores. We used these open datasets (n = 182,016) to investigate the source of this decline. We estimated two-level random-intercept models with standardised predictors, first separately for each cohort and then pooled across years with a random slope for year. In both cohorts, teacher attendance—a proxy for opportunity to learn—and socio-economic status (SES) were the strongest predictors of students’ performance, while teacher attendance was the strongest predictor of schools’ performance. By 2018, additional factors—digital connectivity, a safe climate, and engaged leadership—had become salient. Schools that improved teacher attendance and teacher–parent relations experienced a noticeably smaller decline in scores, yet the SES gradient steepened and the between-school variance rose, signalling emerging equity risks. Policy options centre on attendance monitoring, purposeful family engagement, and violence-prevention measures.