Comparing public-private school management through a new educational Malmquist index approach

Abstract

It is well known in the educational literature that public and private-voucher schools show different production technologies and present differences in the productivity of their educational inputs due to management issues. On the one hand the students attending public schools differ in their socioeconomic characteristics from students in the private-voucher (private management and funded by the government) ones. In this paper we propose a new non-parametric Educational Malmquist index approach in order to analyse total factor productivity changes and divergences between publicly financed schools when only a pseudo-panel database is available. To do this we use the Basque Country data from PISA 2003 and 2006. The results suggest a higher productivity change for public schools, due to technical efficiency improvements, whereas the technology progress is higher in private-voucher schools within 2003-2006.