Determinants of Grade 12 Pass Rates in the Post-Apartheid South African Schooling System

Haroon Bhorat () and Morne Oosthuizen

Journal of African Economies, 2009, vol. 18, issue 4, pages 634-666

Abstract: This paper utilises an educational production function approach on post-apartheid data that include both schooling and community-level information, in order to empirically estimate the key determinants of Grade 12 pass rates in 2000. Quantile regression techniques are applied, allowing for more nuanced information. The key results are, firstly, that the pupil--teacher ratio is insignificant in explaining pass rates for schools below the 95th percentile of the school performance distribution. Secondly, the impact of resources on performance is not strong and, where there is a significant effect, it is highly dependent on the resource in question and the metric utilised for the dependent variable. Thirdly, knowledge infrastructure may be important to understand the absolute and relative performance of schools. Fourthly, proxy variables for teacher and parent characteristics are strongly significant, and the former should probably be a priority focus for any policy programme aimed at improving Grade 12 performance levels in South Africa. Copyright 2009 The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejn027 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:18:y:2009:i:4:p:634-666

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.oup.co.uk/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is edited by Marcel Fafchamps

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Oxford University Press
Address: Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().