Equity and e¢ ciency in private and public education: a nonparametric comparison

We present a nonparametric approach for the equity and e¢ ciency evaluation of (private and public) primary schools in Flanders. First, we use a nonparametric (Data Envelopment Analysis) model that is specially tailored to assess educational e¢ ciency at the pupil level. The model accounts for the fact that minimal prior structure is typically available for the behavior (objectives and feasibility set) under evaluation, and it reckons with outlier behavior in the available data, while it corrects for ‘environmental’ characteristics that are speci…c to each pupil. Second, we propose …rstand second-order stochastic dominance (FSD and SSD) criteria as naturally complementary aggregation criteria for comparing the performance of di¤erent school types (private and public schools) in Flanders. While FSD only accounts for (Pareto) e¢ ciency, SSD also takes (Pigou-Dalton) equality into consideration. We …nd that private schools outperform public schools in terms of SSD. We would like to thank Jan Van Damme for his permission to use the SiBO-data, Frederik Maes and Peter Helsen for their very useful help with the data, and the educational department of the Flemish government for the provision of some additional data. yLaurens Cherchye is a post-doctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scienti…c Research Flanders. E-mail to [email protected]. zEmail to [email protected]. xErwin Ooghe is a post-doctoral Fellow of the Fund for Scienti…c Research Flanders. E-mail to [email protected]. {Email to [email protected].