Domingo P. Ximénez-de-Embún

The efficiency of public and publicly subsidized high schools in Spain: Evidence from PISA-2006

This paper compares the efficiency of Spanish public and publicly subsidized private high schools by data envelopment analysis (DEA), employing the results provided by a hierarchical linear model (HLM) applied to PISA-2006 (Programme for International Students Assessment) microdata. The study places special emphasis on the estimation of the determinants of school outcomes. The educational production function is estimated through an HLM that takes into account the nested nature of PISA data. Inefficiencies are then measured through DEA and decomposed into two types: managerial (related to individual performance), and programme (related to structural differences between management models), following the approach adopted by Silva Portela and Thanassoulis. Once differences in students’ backgrounds, school resources and individual management inefficiencies are removed, the results reveal that Spanish public high schools are more efficient than their publicly subsidized private equivalents.

Equality of school choice: a study applied to the Spanish region of Aragón

The aim of this paper is to test whether the distribution of students by social, cultural and racial characteristics is homogeneous between Spanish public schools (PS) and publicly subsidised private schools (PSPS) or whether segregation exists between the profile of pupils attending each type of school. The theoretical framework is based on the contributions of researchers into school choice policies, while the empirical application uses a 2005 questionnaire answered by the final year secondary school students of the Spanish region of Aragón. We quantify the degree of internal segregation within each sector (PS and PSPS) and estimate a probit model in order to discover which factors determine the choice of a PSPS. We conclude that the distribution of pupils between PS and PSPS follows a clear socioeconomic pattern which favours privately owned schools. Our study offers an additional result, namely, that cream-skimming processes are more recurrent within the publicly subsidised sector, which is shown to be far more selective than the public sector in its distribution of pupils. Finally, it is found that the higher the socioeconomic status, the higher the probability of choosing PSPS, suggesting that the segregation found in this paper may be caused partly by the choice patterns of Spanish families.

Does Educational Management Model Matter? New Evidence for Spain by a Quasiexperimental Approach

One of the subjects that has focused the empirical work of many educational economists has been the public funding of privately run schools. In this paper we use a quasiexperimental approach in order to evaluate the effect of attending a Spanish publicly subsidised private school on some of the educational skills promoted by Spanish primary schools. Our results underline the existence of a certain advantage of the publicly subsidised private school in some educational competencies, in particular those related to the dominance of abilities in solving problems and questions related to scientific skills.