Private or public school advantage? Evidence from 40 countries using PISA 2012-Mathematics

Christos Sakellariou

Applied Economics, 2017, vol. 49, issue 29, 2875-2892

Abstract: It is known that in most countries, private school students outperform students in public schools in international assessments. However, the empirical literature recognizes that assessing the true effect of private school attendance requires addressing selection and sorting issues on both observabland unobservables. The existing empirical evidence on the private school effect mostly covers OECD and Latin American countries, with little evidence on other parts of the world. There is recent emerging country-specific evidence doubting the existence of a private school advantage. I use PISA 2012 data for Mathematics and two different methodologies to derive baseline and bias-corrected estimates of the private-dependent and independent school effect for 40 countries. A robust private school advantage is found only in a handful of countries. Public schools generally perform as well as private subsidized schools and outperform independent schools. Accounting for both peer effects and selection is necessary when evaluating school effectiveness, especially in the case of independent schools.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2016.1248361 (text/html)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:applec:v:49:y:2017:i:29:p:2875-2892

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2016.1248361

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().