The Effect of School Size on Exam Performance in Secondary Schools

This paper investigates the relationship between school size and the exam performance of school pupils in their final year of compulsory education. Previous studies of this relationship have been seriously constrained by lack of appropriate data, but the publication of the School Performance Tables for all publicly-funded schools in England since 1992 permits the construction and testing of a multivariate model which includes school size as one of the explanatory variables. After controlling for factors such as type of school, teaching inputs and eligibility for free school meals, the partial effects of school size on exam performance are estimated. The primary result is that there is a non-linear relationship (in the form of an inverted-U) between school size that maximizes the exam performance of schools is estimated to be about 1,200 for 11–16 schools and 1,500 for 11–18 schools. These estimates are considerably higher than the current mean size of schools.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Using DEA for measuring teachers’ performance and the impact on students’ outcomes: evidence for Spain

This research contributes to the ongoing debate about differences in teachers’ performance. We introduce a new methodology that combines production frontier and impact evaluation insights that allows using DEA as an identification strategy of a treatment with high and low quality teachers within schools to assess their performance. We use a unique database of primary schools in Spain that, for every school, supplies information on two classrooms at 4th grade where students and teachers were randomly assigned into the two classrooms. We find considerable differences in teachers’ efficiency across schools with significant effects on students’ achievement. In line with previous findings, we find that neither teacher experience nor academic training explains teachers’ efficiency. Conversely, being a female teacher, having worked five or more years in the same school or having smaller class sizes positively affects the performance of teachers.     

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.     

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.     

Charter school closure and student achievement: Evidence from Ohio

The closure of low-performing schools is an essential feature of the charter school model. Our regression discontinuity analysis uses an exogenous source of variation in school closure—an Ohio law that requires charter schools to close if they fail to meet a specific performance standard—to estimate the causal effect of closure on student achievement. The results indicate that closing low-performing charter schools eventually yields achievement gains of around 0.2–0.3 standard deviations in reading and math for students attending these schools at the time they were identified for closure. The study also employs mandatory closure as an instrument for estimating the impact of exiting low-quality charter schools, thus providing plausible lower-bound estimates of charter school effectiveness. These results complement the more common lottery-based estimates of charter school effects, which likely serve as upper-bound estimates due to their focus on oversubscribed schools often located in cities with high-performing charter sectors. We discuss the implications for research and policy.     

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.     

Disentangling the efficiency drivers in country-level global health programs: An empirical study

Motivated by the cost reductions and outcome improvements generated by benchmarking in many industries, we focus on in-country global health programs to identify and quantify opportunities for process improvement. We empirically study the major efficiency drivers of reproductive health (RH) country programs in Sub-Saharan Africa sponsored by international funding organizations. To ensure a level playing field for comparison across countries, we quantify the impact of cross-country heterogeneity and random shocks on the efficiency of RH programs. To analyze these relationships and isolate the effects attributable to managerial inefficiency, we use a three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)/Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model. We show the impact of environmental factors on program efficiency, linking policy making decisions with operational and health outcome performance. We also show that donor fragmentation negatively impacts managerial efficiency, and we suggest actions to mitigate this effect. We then provide a way to improve performance through benchmarking efforts within groups of countries and present an initial prototype of such efforts.     

A decision support system to improve the efficiency of resource allocation in healthcare management

Limitations in healthcare funding require hospitals to find more effective ways to utilize resources. An effective patient management system is critically dependent on the accurate analysis of individual patient outcomes and resource utilization. In the current paper, a management-oriented decision support model is thus proposed to assist health system managers in improving the efficiency of their systems. In the first stage of the model, the key variables affecting system efficiency, as well as their causal relationships, are identified through causal maps. Efficiency is measured by the total time spent in the system. In the second stage, a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) is employed to represent both the conditional dependencies and uncertainties of the key variables. In the third stage, a sensitivity analysis is performed using a BBN to determine the most critical variable(s) in terms of impact on the system. Finally, strategies to improve system efficiency are proposed. The suggested decision support system is applied to the tomography section in the radiology department of a private hospital in Turkey.     

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 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.     

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.     

Performance impacts of management in Korean schools: Testing the Meier and O’Toole model

This article investigates the impact of management on performance in Korean schools. Drawing upon the model of Meier and O’Toole, we test the linear relationships of internal management, managerial networking, and managerial quality with multiple dimensions of performance. We also examine the nonlinear relationships between networking and performance. The results show a general consistency in the positive link between management and performance, providing evidence to support the key arguments from the model. Still, there are noticeable differences in specific findings. As one of the first applications of the Meier and O'Toole model in Asia, this study illustrates the importance of the national context in management–performance linkage.     

Raising Standards in our Schools: Does Class Size Really Matter?

In this article Anna Vignoles reports the results of a recent research project which evaluated the effects of class size and expenditure per pupil in secondary schools on students’ academic performance and their subsequent earnings. Controversially she concludes that simply providing secondary schools with more resources is not likely to improve student outcomes, although increasing class sizes dramatically would almost certainly have a negative impact. The implication of this research is that attention should be focused on identifying the characteristics and management strategies of successful secondary schools.     

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.     

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.     

Establishing high-tech industry: The Tunisian ICT experience

Although the high-tech sector in developed countries is well understood, there are considerable gaps in our knowledge about the high-tech sector in developing countries. This study addresses questions about the nature of high tech in Tunisia and about factors associated with information and communications technology (ICT) firms’ success as examples of the high-tech sector. The literature identifies the key characteristics of the sector to be human capital, access to appropriate finance and supporting institutions to provide synergy. Thus we address these factors to establish if they have led to success in Tunisian ICT high tech. We surveyed 60 Tunisian ICT firms and employing a multiple component analysis, supported by a multinomial LOGIT analysis, we found that research and development was negatively associated with firm success. This, we argue, indicates the early stage of high-tech development. Our findings also suggest a subordinate role in the global value chain.The paper concludes with some observations and recommendations.