Efficiency of secondary schools in Ecuador: a value based DEA approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel Value-Based Data Envelopment Analysis (VBDEA) model which specifically tackles non-discretionary data to assess the performance of 159 secondary schools from Ecuador by employing data from the Programme for International Student Assessment for Development (PISA-D). The factors considered to perform the efficiency assessment of each school include an index, which reflects the quality of basic school infrastructures and instruction resources, the economic, social and cultural level index of students, the student-teacher ratio, and test scores in maths, reading and science. Overall, our findings suggest that the average efficient school has mean scores across all competences above the scores attained by the average national school, but below the average of Latin American and Caribbean countries. In addition, schools operating with the lowest efficiency scores usually need to make a greater effort to improve results in maths when compared to reading and science competences. Finally, schools more often selected as a reference in terms of best practices, and which are classified as robust in terms of efficiency, are not necessarily performing with high test results.