The efficiency of public and private schools: do environmental conditions matter in a Latin American country?

Abstract

This paper analyses whether (environmental) socio-economic conditions have a heterogeneouseffect on the efficiency of Ecuadorian secondary public and private schools. To tackle this question,we develop a conditional order-m efficiency estimation and run non-parametric regressions tounderstand the effect of environmental conditions on school performance. We find that the gapbetween private and public schools’ performance is reduced after controlling for external factorsthat affect mainly the performance of public schools. More precisely, efficiency values move froma value of 1.29 to 1.01 for public schools and from 1.18 to 1.01 for private schools. In particular, theeducation level and employment status of the parents are the main drivers of educationalperformance. Parents with more than 10 years of schooling positively influence the pupils’ perfor-mance, whereas the impact of unemployment status varies depending on the mother’s andfather’s employment status and the type of school.