The efficiency of public and private schools: do environmental conditions matter in a Latin American country?

This paper analyses whether (environmental) socio-economic conditions have a heterogeneous effect on the efficiency of Ecuadorian secondary public and private schools. To tackle this question, we develop a conditional order-m efficiency estimation and run non-parametric regressions to understand the effect of environmental conditions on school performance. We find that the gap between private and public schools’ performance is reduced after controlling for external factors that affect mainly the performance of public schools. More precisely, efficiency values move from a value of 1.29 to 1.01 for public schools and from 1.18 to 1.01 for private schools. In particular, the education level and employment status of the parents are the main drivers of educational performance. Parents with more than 10 years of schooling positively influence the pupils’ performance, whereas the impact of unemployment status varies depending on the mother’s and father’s employment status and the type of school.