Efecte de la titularitat del centre en el rendiment acadèmic dels estudiants de secundària: evidències per a Espanya amb dades PISA 2009

Abstract

This study evaluates the effects of school ownership on the academic performance of 15 years old students within the Spanish educational system using econometric techniques. According to their ownership, schools are classified into state schools, privately run schools funded by the state and purely private schools. As a matter of fact, average marks in private schools are higher than in other schools. This project evaluates whether this fact is due to the nature of the school ownership or not. The study concludes that variables other than the ownership of the school are responsible of such a divergence in the results, namely some characteristics of the students themselves (the individuals), their family and their school. In fact, private but state funded schools and purely private schools cause a negative effect in comparison with public schools. In addition, we have also studied using quantile regression how this influence varies depending on the skills level of the student. We conclude that students with marks pertaining to 0.1 and 0.75 quantiles are the most affected by the type of school. On the contrary, students with marks pertaining to 0.9 quantile are the less influenced by the kind of ownership of the school. The data used in this study come from the 2009 database of the program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is an international project that measures student performance at the age of fifteen in different fields. In this case we have taken the data on the test of reading comprehension.