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“Inclusive Education in Soviet-Inherited Exclusive School System: The Effects of Student Background Factors on School Efficiency”
Simona Ferraro (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech)
Relying on the school-level data and evaluating inclusive practices in education, we evaluate how the low socioeconomic status of families, the disparity in language spoken at home and at school as well as the special education needs (SENs) students affect schools’ efficiency. We adopt a two-stage double Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and estimate efficiency scores in the first, and the effects of nondiscretionary variables in the second stage. Our findings first show that the efficiency scores improved between the two academic years. Secondly, the reversed share of SEN students and high parental income affect positively school efficiency while language match between home and school has a non-significant impact on efficiency. Our policy implications indicate that the autonomy of schools over student admission and competitive drive for producing better student outcomes for the leaderboard works contrary to the inclusive reform aims – schools are incentivised not to admit SEN students and use decentralised admission interviews for selecting advantaged students.
Keywords: school efficiency, special educational needs, family background, double bootstrap DEA, autonomy of schools
JEL classification: H52, I20, I21
Authors: Simona Ferraro (Department of Economics and Finance, TalTech), Kaire Põder (Estonian Business School), Triin Lauri (Tallinn University)