Evaluating the efficiency of primary schools in Canary Islands: A Three-Stage SBM Approach.

Abstract

Education, as a process of human capital accumulation, is essential for a society’s economic growth. Given its relevance and bearing in mind that public spending is not exclusively devoted to financing the education system, it is essential to analyse and identify the different obstacles that hinder school efficiency. Throughout this paper we have carried out an efficiency analysis of Canarian schools for the period 2018-2019 using data provided by the Canarian Agency for University Quality and Educational Assessment. Specifically, a three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on the slack measure (SBM) and combined with stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) has been applied to find the benchmarks of inefficient schools, understand their characteristics and explore the different opportunities for improvement. Using this non- parametric methodology, we can overcome one of the drawbacks of the DEA approach by enabling us to consider the influence of contextual variables and random errors in the assessment of efficiency. In particular, using mathematics and reading scores as outputs, teacher-student ratio and an index of the quality of schools’ educational resources and some contextual variables such as socio-economic status, we have tried to find out how efficiency varies when contextual variables are introduced, and which contextual variables have the greatest influence on schools’ inefficiency.