How does schools’ efficiency look like across Europe? An empirical analysis of Germany, Spain, France, Italy and UK using OECD PISA2012 data

This research conducts a comparison of secondary schools’ efficiency in an international perspective, focusing on five economies in the European Union (UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and employing an institutionlevel dataset built through data from the 2012 edition of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Overall, around 2,700 schools from these five countries are included in the empirical analysis; it uses a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), and a common (international) frontier of efficient schools is assumed. The production process is modelled in a very simple way, by including human and capital resources, together with students’ socioeconomic background, among inputs; and average scores in reading and mathematics, as outputs. Although within-country dispersion of efficiency scores is much wider than between-countries differences, some between-countries efficiency differentials can be observed. A second-stage tobit regression reveals that some factors are statistically associated with schools’ efficiency, as for example the indexes for the quality of educational resources and teachers’ morale. Conversely, the efficiency scores are inversely correlated with the proportion of students who perform below proficiency level 2, suggesting that there is not a trade-off between efficiency and equity. All these evidences can stimulate interesting reflections for national and European-based policy-makers.