Testing for Quasi-Market Forces in Secondary Education

This paper investigates the effect of introducing quasi-market forces into secondary education on the allocation of pupils between schools and on the exam performance of pupils. A unique database is used which covers all publicly-funded secondary schools in England over the period 1992–98. We find several effects consistent with the operation of a quasi-market. Firstly, new admissions are found to be positively related to a school's own exam performance and negatively related to the exam performance of competing schools. Secondly, a school's growth in pupil numbers is positively related to its exam performance compared to its immediate competitors. Thirdly, there is strong evidence that schools experiencing an excess demand for places have responded by increasing their physical capacity. Fourthly, there is some evidence of an increase in the concentration of pupils from poor family backgrounds in those schools with the poorest exam performance of schools during 1992–98 can be attributed to the introduction of quasi-market forces.     

Diversity,Choice and the Quasi‐market: An Empirical Analysis of Secondary Education Policy in England*

This article investigates the extent to which exam performance at the end of compulsory education has been affected by three major education reforms: the introduction of a quasi‐market following the Education Reform Act (1988); the specialist schools initiative introduced in 1994; and the Excellence in Cities programme introduced in 1999. Using a panel of schools for all state‐funded secondary schools in England (1992–2006), we find that only about one‐third of the improvement in school exam scores is directly attributable to the combined effect of these three major education reforms. The distributional consequences of the policy, however, are estimated to have been favourable, with the greatest gains being achieved by schools with the highest proportion of pupils from poor families.     

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.     

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 Value of Secondary School Quality*

Improving the quality of state‐funded secondary school education has become a major policy aim in the UK. However, without a valuation of the social benefits derived from public provision of educational services, the rational evaluation of policy to this end is difficult. Utilizing the argument that dwellings near better schools command a price premium, this paper presents results from an empirical exercise aimed at providing such a social valuation of increased school quality. Using a large set of data for England, and an instrumental variable approach, results indicate an elasticity of dwelling purchase price with respect to exam performance by schools at around +0.05. One implication is that society would value a general increase of five percentage points in exam performance by about £450 million per annum.     

Racial Fractionalization and School Performance

The literature on racial “peer effects” suggests that diversity improves at least some students' school performance. However, a literature in economic development posits that diversity may negatively affect school performance by undermining the efficient provision of education. This article empirically tests this claim, which we call the “public goods channel,” by examining the relationship between racial diversity and student performance in Ohio's school districts. We find that moving from a completely homogenous school district to one in which two racial groups have equal population shares is associated with a 7–17.5 percentage point decline in the passage rate on the state math exam, holding per pupil spending across districts constant. These results suggest that racial diversity is negatively associated with school performance but that the public goods channel is not responsible for this relationship.     

Competition and public high school performance

Increasing the level of school competition has been suggested as a way to improve school performance. This study examines one of the most extreme examples of such reform using data from New Zealand public high schools. In the 1990s school zoning was abolished in New Zealand and public schools competed for students, not just with private schools, but also with each other. A categorical Data Envelopment Analysis model using data on school resources and student academic performance, stratified using student socio-economic characteristics, is used to calculate efficiency scores for schools. A regression model is then used to analyse differences in these efficiency scores and their relationship to different levels of competition.     

Measuring efficiency in education: The influence of imprecision and variability in data on DEA estimates

Many studies devoted to efficiency performance evaluation in the education sector are based on measures of central tendency at school level as, for example, the average values of students belonging to the same school. Although this is a common and accepted way of summarizing data from the original observations (students), it is not less true that this approach neglects the existing dispersion of data, which may become a serious problem if variability across schools is high. Additionally, imprecision may arise when experts on each evaluated subject select the battery of questions, with different levels of difficulty, which will be the base for the final questionnaires completed by students. This paper uses data from US students and schools participating in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2015 to illustrate that schools' efficiency measures based on aggregate data and imprecision may reflect an inaccurate picture of their performance if they are compared to measures estimated accounting for broader information provided by all students of the same school. In order to operationalize our approach, we resort to Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis. This methodology allows us to deal with the notion of fuzziness in some variables such as the socio-economic status of students or test scores. Our results indicate that the estimated measures of performance obtained with the fuzzy DEA approach are highly correlated with those calculated with traditional DEA models. However, we find some relevant divergences in the identification of efficient units when we account for data dispersion and vagueness.     

Does class matter more than school? Evidence from a multilevel statistical analysis on Italian junior secondary school students

This paper assesses the differences in educational attainments between students across classes and schools they are grouped by, in the context of Italian educational system. The purpose is to identify a relationship between pupils' reading test scores and students' characteristics, stratifying for classes, schools and geographical areas. The dataset contains detailed information about more than 500,000 students at the first year of junior secondary school in the year 2012/2013. By means of multilevel linear models, it is possible to estimate statistically significant school and class effects, after adjusting for pupil's characteristics, including prior achievement. The results show that school and class effects are very heterogeneous across macro-areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy), and that there are substantial discrepancies between and within schools; overall, class effects on achievement tend to be larger than school ones.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of seemingly unrelated stochastic frontier regressions

This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools.     

Exploring the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and academic performance: A multilevel analysis for Spain

With the world becoming increasingly digitalized, determining the relationship between the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and educational outcomes takes on special relevance for guiding educational policy decisions in a reasoned way. The objective of this research is to explore the relationship between different types of ICT use at school and at home, students' attitudes towards ICT, and academic performance, as well as to see if these associations differ according to the level of performance of the students. For this purpose, we apply multilevel regression models and quantile regression models with data from the Programme for International Student assessment survey (PISA) 2015. The results show differences in the sign of the association according to the ICT variable analysed. The positive association between ICT use and academic performance is related with its use for entertainment at home, the students’ interest in ICT and an earlier starting age for using ICT. Results also show that higher availability of computers per student in the schools is associated with higher levels of academic performance. However, the use of ICT for schoolwork at home, the use of ICT by students in schools and the importance of ICT as a topic in social interaction for students, are factors negatively associated with academic performance. Finally, our quantile regressions by ability levels suggest that certain types of ICT use appear to be particularly associated with the academic performance of students in the lowest percentiles of performance. These results highlight the need to consider and include ICT as an input into the educational production function. Moreover, public policies should consider the interaction between ICT and the educational performance of underperforming students.     

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.     

The impact of the low income housing tax credit program on local schools

The low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program has developed over two million rental homes for low-income households since 1986. The perception of deterioration in school quality has been a main reason for community opposition to LIHTC projects in middle- and upper-income areas. In this paper, we examine the impact of LIHTC projects on the nearby school performance using data on all LIHTC projects and elementary schools in Texas from the 2003–04 through 2008–09 academic years. We employ the longitudinal structure of the data to control for school fixed effects and estimate the relationship between the opening of nearby LIHTC on campus-level standardized test scores and performance ratings. We address the potential selection biases by controlling for preexisting trends in school performance prior to the study period. We find no robust evidence that the opening of LIHTC units negatively impacts the performance of nearby elementary schools.     

An Analysis of the Value Added by Secondary Schools in England: Is the Value Added Indicator of Any Value?*

This paper argues that the value added score published for all publicly funded secondary schools in England is an unreliable indicator of school performance. A substantial proportion of the between‐school variation in the value added score is accounted for by factors outside the school's control. These factors include several pupil‐related variables such as the proportion of pupils on free school meals, the authorized absence rate of pupils and the proportion of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds. The value added score is also related to several school characteristics such as the school's admission policy and its subject specialism. The main policy recommendation of this paper is that the value added score should not be used as a performance indicator, but should be used to gain a better understanding of why the value added score varies between 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 effects of school competition on the achievement of Italian students

In this paper, we study the impact of the degree of school competition on the achievement of Italian students. Specifically, competition is measured as the number of schools available to students in a given area. The aim is to evaluate whether an increase in school choice improves the quality of education. Using the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2006) dataset we investigate with simple Least Squares regression models, controlling for a host of individual and school characteristics, if secondary school students with a wider range of schools choices perform better than those students whose choice is more limited. We find a significant positive correlation between students' performance and the degree of local schools competition. Moreover, we show that students achieve much better outcomes if schools operating in more competitive environments also experience a higher pressure on academic standards coming from parents. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social identity and schooling inequality

The focus of this paper is to evaluate similarities and differences between and within socio-economic samples of school attendance. Eight variables broadly classified by income, education, family background, and class size, are employed for this purpose. For each of the eight variables, the null hypothesis is that the means by various classifications (income, mother’s schooling, father’s schooling, math score, language score, 4th grade class size, number of 4th grade classes, 4th grade enrollment) are equal against an alternative hypothesis that at least one of the member group differs. The method employed for this purpose is one-way analysis of variance. In each of the classifications, samples were divided to reflect public schools, voucher private schools and unsubsidized private schools as well as the full sample. Furthermore, the full samples are employed to find whether differences between the three groups exist for the eight variables. The full sample is n = 3,776 schools. The results point to statistical significant differences for all of the variables.     

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.     

Fundraising for primary schools in England—Moving beyond the school gates

In response to depleting budgets and intensified performance pressures, primary schools are increasingly turning to fundraising as one mechanism for combatting ongoing challenges. Although research identifies that two thirds of primary schools are actively trying to increase their fundraised income, some primary schools are significantly more successful in attracting additional funds than others, whereas many struggle to focus fundraising efforts “beyond the school gates.” This article focuses on 3 case study schools and the individuals tasked with the role of fundraising, which have each adopted different approaches in a successful attempt to increase their fundraised income. The findings propose that when primary schools proactively focus on their fundraising, invest in people in terms of both time and their skills, and create a positive fundraising narrative that embraces both the schools and local communities' needs, primary schools can succeed in attracting significant philanthropic support, which can be transformative for the school community.     

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.