Nonparametric measurement of productivity and efficiency in education

Nondiscretionary environmental inputs are critical in explaining relative efficiency differences and productivity changes in public sector applications. For example, the literature on education production shows that school districts perform better when student poverty is lower. In this paper, we extend the nonparametric approach to decompose Malmquist productivity index suggested by Färe et al. (1994) into efficiency, technological and environmental changes. The approach is applied to analyze educational production of Ohio school districts.