Does school ownership matter? An unbiased efficiency comparison for regions of Spain

The programme for international student assessment (PISA) 2006 Report (OECD, PISA 2006: science competencies for tomorrow’s world, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris in 2007) showed significant differences among Spanish students attending publicly financed schools. Publicly financed schools include entirely public schools and schools that are privately managed but publicly funded. Families with a lower socioeconomic status may self-select into public schools, so a direct efficiency comparison between the two school types could lead to flawed conclusions because of the possible school selection bias. In this paper, we suggest using a propensity score matching approach in order to correctly analyze the impact of school ownership on student performance. After tackling the self-selection problem, we use a stochastic parametric distance function framework to compare student efficiency and productivity in both school types across ten Spanish regions using PISA 2006 data. Furthermore, we propose two original measures to analyze the impact of school ownership on academic performance across regions: the average treatment effect on the treated on the production frontier and the average treatment effect on the treated assuming school inefficiency. We find that, on average, private government-dependent schools are more productive than public schools, although efficiency results across regions are highly divergent.     

Identification and estimation of bounds on school performance measures: a nonparametric analysis of a mixture model with verification

This paper identifies and nonparametrically estimates sharp bounds on school performance measures based on test scores that may not be valid for all students. A mixture model with verification is developed to handle this problem. This is a mixture model for data that can be partitioned into two sets, one of which (the so‐called verified set) is more likely to be from the distribution of interest than the other. An administrative classification of each student as English proficient or limited English proficient determines these sets. An analysis of performance measures for some California public schools reveals how verification information and plausible monotonicity restrictions can bound the range of disagreement about school performance based on observed scores. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Breaking the link between poverty and low student achievement: An evaluation of Title I

This study provides an evaluation of the impact of Title I funding of compensatory education programs on school finance and student performance in New York City public schools during the 1993, 1997 and 2001 school years. Estimates based on a regression-discontinuity approach indicate that the program was unsuccessful in improving student outcomes in high-poverty schools in New York City during this period, and may in fact have had adverse effects during the earlier years in our sample. Less evidence of a negative effect is found for the 2001 school year. These findings are related to the way in which the federal funds were spent.     

A graphically based machine learning approach to predict secondary schools performance in Tunisia

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the key factors that impact schools' academic performance and to explore their relationships through a two-stage analysis based on a sample of Tunisian secondary schools. In the first stage, we use the Directional Distance Function approach (DDF) to deal with undesirable outputs. The DDF is estimated using Data Envelopment Analysis method (DEA). In the second stage we apply machine-learning approaches (regression trees and random forests) to identify and visualize variables that are associated with a high school performance. The data is extracted from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 survey. The first stage analysis shows that almost 22% of Tunisian schools are efficient and that they could improve their students’ educational performance by 15.6% while using the same level of resources. Regression trees findings indicate that the most important factors associated with higher performance are school size, competition, class size, parental pressure and proportion of girls. Only, school location appears with no impact on school efficiency. Random forests algorithm outcomes display that proportion of girls at school and school size have the most powerful impact on the predictive accuracy of our model and hence could more influence school efficiency. The findings disclose also the high non-linearity of the relationships between these key factors and school performance and reveal the importance of modeling their interactions in influencing efficiency scores.     

Government secondary school finances in New South Wales: accounting for students’ prior achievements in a two-stage DEA at the school level

This study measures the efficiency of government secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia, using a two-stage semi-parametric production frontier approach to schooling. In contrast to previous research comparing school performance with two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA), we control for prior academic achievement of students by using a rich data set from 2008 to 2010. We employ detailed financial data for deriving the envelope for the efficient production frontier of the schools. Using Simar and Wilson’s (J Econ 136:31-64, 2007, J Prod Anal 36:205-218, 2011a) double bootstrap procedure for two-stage DEA, the study finds that schools with lower total student numbers, a higher average of years of service of teachers, a higher ratio of special education students that attracts extra government funding, and girls only do better than other schools. On the other hand, a negative influence comes from a school’s location in provincial and outer metropolitan areas. An important result is that the socio-economic background of students attending a school has no significant effect on their academic performance, whereas higher prior academic achievements have a positive and statistically significant impact on student achievement. These results are relevant to decision makers for the school sector, in particular for funding criteria contained in the Gonski (Review of funding for schooling - Final report (December). Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia, 2011) review report.     

Efficiency in public schools: Does competition matter?

The focus of many recent school reforms has been on changing the incentives faced by school administrators, mainly through increased competition. In this study, we assess whether competition amongst public schools influences the efficiency in which these schools operate, using a two-stage estimation procedure and data from the state of Illinois from 1997–1998. We find some evidence that public school districts become more efficient as neighboring districts become more efficient. However, such spillovers only occur if districts operate within a financially flexible environment.     

On the Determinants of School District Efficiency: Competition and Monitoring

A number of researchers have asserted that inefficiency in the U.S. school system arises from a lack of incentives for public schools to behave efficiently. This paper uses a Shephard input distance function to model educational production, and a switching-regressions estimation to explore the relationship between school district efficiency and two existing incentive mechanisms—competition and voter monitoring. We find evidence that ease of monitoring enhances both technical and allocative efficiency of urban school districts, and that increased competition reduces allocative inefficiency in communities above a competitive threshold. We find no evidence that competition is related to technical inefficiency.     

A two-stage double-bootstrap data envelopment analysis of efficiency differences of New Zealand secondary schools

We conduct a two-stage (DEA and regression) analysis of the efficiency of New Zealand secondary schools. Unlike previous applications of two-stage semi-parametric modelling of the school “production process”, we use Simar and Wilson’s double bootstrap procedure, which permits valid inference in the presence of unknown serial correlation in the efficiency scores. We are therefore able to draw robust conclusions about a system that has undergone extensive reforms with respect to ideas high on the educational agenda such as decentralised school management and parental choice. Most importantly, we find that school type affects school efficiency and so too does teacher quality.     

Public Governance and School Performance

Abstract

According to the New Public Governance paradigm, this paper analyses the institutional and organizational conditions that can lead to an improvement in student learning (a typical co-produced outcome) by acting on the promotion of genuine collaborative relationships. The distinctive features of Italian distributed governance and the challenges for school management are discussed by examining TIMSS and INVALSI data. The results show that collaborative public management supports schools in improving student learning, confirming the research hypothesis for primary schools (IV grade) and schools that operate in socially and economically poor contexts.     

Barriers to skill acquisition in Brazil: Public and private school students performance in a public university entrance exam

This paper uses a novel data set to quantify the difference in performance of public and private school students in an entrance test exam of the major public university in Brazilian Northeast (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE). Although there are many public universities in Brazil, from our knowledge, there is no study that uses data on entrance test scores at such universities to evaluate the determinants of students’ performance and the barriers for public school students to get in the good universities. The data set has detailed information on individual and school characteristics, and family background. We found that test scores of public school students are on average about 4.2–17% lower than those taken by private school students, depending on the set of controls. This result is robust when we address problems related to attrition, omitted variables (e.g., cognitive ability), and unobservable selectivity. We also show that once students get into the university, those from public schools perform as well as those from private schools. In addition, the proportion of public school students that gets into the university is roughly the same as the proportion of students doing the entrance exam. However, there is a strong barrier for public school students to get into high competitive majors. The fraction of students from public schools that gets into high competitive majors such as law, medicine, and electronic engineering is almost null. Our findings provide quantitative evidence to the common view that the Brazilian elitist high education system is an important channel for inequality persistence.     

The impact of Chicago’s small high school initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.     

The influence of school size,principal characteristics and school management practices on educational performance: An efficiency analysis of Italian students attending middle schools

The aim of the paper is to identify which among the aspects that relate to the composition of the student body, school (district) size, management practices and the school principals' own characteristics are associated with the performance of Italian students at grade 8, measured through standardised test scores in reading and mathematics. The analysis makes use of a student-level efficiency model, and several school level variables are included as explanators for efficiency scores. The results show that, especially for reading, the most influential variables relate to the composition of the student body, while the students' performance in mathematics is partly correlated with the management practices adopted by the school principal/head teacher. Schools and schooling can only explain a minor part of the variance in achievement scores, however, and the characteristics of the students themselves play the most significant role.     

Schooling Resources, Educational Institutions and Student Performance: the International Evidence

This paper estimates the effects of family background, resources and institutions on mathematics and science performance using an international database of more than 260,000 students from 39 countries which includes extensive background information at the student, teacher, school and system level. The student-level estimations show that international differences in student performance cannot be attributed to resource differences but are considerably related to institutional differences. Among the many institutions which combine to yield major positive effects on student performance are centralized examinations and control mechanisms, school autonomy in personnel and process decisions, individual teacher influence over teaching methods, limits to teacher unions' influence on curriculum scope, scrutiny of students' achievement and competition from private schools.     

College Readiness: Are California Charter School Students Better Prepared?

Using US data from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) I analyse student outcomes from Advanced Placement tests and Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments to determine whether charter school students display higher levels of college readiness. Using panel data from 2011–12 through 2014–15 for the Advanced Placement tests, I find a gain of between 10.8 and 21.0 percentage points for charter students on average over students attending traditional public schools. For the Smarter Balanced Assessment using school years 2014–15 and 2015–16, I again find that charter students outperform traditional public students on average with gains in all categories for both the English and the mathematics portions of the exam. The results of this study seem to offer some support for the view that offering choice in schooling tends to improve performance.     

The relationship between principals’ configuration of a bundle of HR practices for new teachers and teachers’ person–organisation fit

Abstract

Based on studies in the private sector showing the positive effects of strategic human resources management (SHRM) on performance, many stress the value of adopting SHRM in the public sector. However, until now, the argument for applying SHRM in the public sector remains largely theoretical. Especially in educational contexts, it is unclear through which mechanisms SHRM affects performance. Therefore, this paper zooms in on the relationship between the configuration of a bundle of human resources (HR) practices and person–organisation (P–O) fit. A mixed methods design was used to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from principals and teachers in 56 Flemish primary schools. The qualitative data, which provides insight into principals’ configuration of HR practices, were converted into numerical scores and analysed, together with the quantitative teacher data, using multilevel analysis. The results show that both principals’ strategic and HR orientation are associated with teachers’ P–O fit. This study contributes to the research field of SHRM in education by studying a bundle of HR practices and how this relates to the fit of teachers’ own values with the school culture. The practical implications for schools are discussed.     

Do charter schools crowd out private school enrollment? Evidence from Michigan

Charter schools have been one of the most important dimensions of recent school reform measures in the United States. Though there have been numerous studies on the effects of charter schools, these have mostly been confined to analyzing their effects on student achievement, student demographic composition, parental satisfaction, and the competitive effects on traditional public schools. This study departs from the existing literature by investigating the effect of charter schools on enrollment in private schools. To investigate this issue empirically, we focus on the state of Michigan where there was a significant spread of charter schools in the nineties. Using data on private school enrollment from biennial NCES private school surveys, and using a fixed effects as well as an instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation from Michigan charter law, we investigate the effect of charter school penetration on private school enrollment. We do not find any causal evidence that charter schools led to a decline in enrollment in the private schools. Further, we do not find evidence that enrollments in Catholic or other religious schools were affected differently from those in non-religious private schools. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.     

Assessing the efficiency of secondary schools: Evidence from OECD countries participating in PISA 2015

One of the most important issues accompanying the publication of the main results of the well-known Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the classification of countries according to student attainment. However, this ranking does not take into account some highly relevant factors, such as the different resource endowments of each education system or the heterogeneous context in which schools operate. This study aims to provide a fuller picture of education system operation worldwide by assessing the managerial efficiency of secondary schools in a cross-country framework. To do this, we use data from OECD countries participating in PISA 2015 and apply a robust nonparametric approach that accounts for the fact that schools were operating under heterogeneous conditions before the efficiency measures of performance were estimated. Our results suggest that the consideration of both school resources and environmental factors significantly modifies the country ranking based solely on student results.     

The efficiency of schools in developing countries,analysed through PISA 2012 data

This paper analyses the efficiency of more than 6800 schools in 28 developing countries, by means of a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis and using data from OECD PISA 2012. The results reveal that the average efficiency of schools is around 70%, meaning that achievement scores can be raised by 30% by employing a more effective use of available resources. Substantial heterogeneity exists both between and within countries; in general, efficiency scores are higher when comparing schools only with those in the same country. Among factors associated with schools' efficiency, the most important are the characteristics of student population (for instance, motivation, truancy, etc.). Therefore, some practices related to accountability, teachers’ involvement and professional development, and extracurricular activities are also positively associated with higher levels of efficiency.     

Enhancing economic freedom via school choice and competition: Have state laws been enabling enough to generate broad-based effects?

An aspect of economic freedom that varies across U.S. states is K-12 educational freedom. Some states allow a degree of choice for families in selecting schools outside public schools for their children. However, the enabling laws for such programs are often quite restrictive and limited to few children. Can this limited degree of competition and choice have a noticeable effect on an entire state's overall K-12 performance? I find strikingly large test score gains for states that have adopted voucher programs and/or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), swamping the effect of per pupil K-12 spending on test scores. Moreover, vouchers and ESAs are associated with less per pupil spending. These effects are robust to a host of specification checks. A key factor is the amount of a program's funding that “follows the student,” even if a small number of students are eligible. Overall, it seems that even a small measure of educational freedom has a large effect.     

Mathematical analysis applied to school attendance areas

The objective of this paper is to develop a generalized mathematical model of pupil assignment within school districts. This model can then be used to examine various policies of student integration. Proposed bussing schemes, school location policies, educational parks, attendance boundaries, etc., can be tested for cost, travel time or other measures of efficiency. Extension to other areas of educational planning is feasible.

Mathematical programming techniques are used to assign resources (say school children) to facilities (say schools) subject to restrictions on facilities (say capacity limits) and resources (say a maximum travel time or a desirable range of school “mixtures”) so that a measure of performance, the “objective function” (say total cost or total time of travel) is optimized. The model is intended to allow examination of a wide range of objective functions and system constraints.