Should we charge environmental factors for poor students’ achievement?

Abstract

The literature states that an unfavourable environment negatively affects students’ performance. However, there is evidence showing that low socio-economic status does not always have a negative influence on students’ outcomes. To shed some light on this issue, we develop a conditional order-m efficiency estimation. The results confirm that the environment impacts differently among schools and unfavourable socio-economic background does not always imply a negative influence.

Keywords:

• school efficiency
• environmental factors
• order-m

JEL Classification:

• C14
• C61
• I21

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Professor José Manuel Cordero and the anonymous referee for their valuable suggestions and comments.

Notes

¹ Following Simar (2003), the level of repetitions (B = 200) seems to be a reasonable choice.

² Following Daraio and Simar (2005), we use the value of m for which the decrease in super-efficient observations stabilizes (m = 100).

³ Methodological procedure and equations are not shown in this article due to space restrictions.

⁴ See this paper for a comprehensive explanation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [ECO2013-44115-P] and the FPU grant [12/01341].