Determinants of Efficiency of Public Schools in Pakistan: A Case Study of Multan District

Abstract

The importance of effective allocation of resources and the quality of education sector has attracted a lot of attention in the developed countries in terms of academic performance. In contrast in developing countries like Pakistan there has been little work to estimate the performance of education sector to meet the increasing demand for improving the quality of education. The present study focuses on the assessment of technical and scale efficiency and efficiency differences among 134 public secondary schools of Multan district of Punjab province of Pakistan for the academic year 2013-2014 by two stages Data Envelopment Analysis. Number of students, percentage of teachers possessing master degree, average experience of teachers and number of classrooms has been used as inputs. While pass rate, percentage A⁺, A, B and C grades have been taken as outputs. Average technical efficiency of schools is 85% and 91% under CRS and VRS assumption. Majority of schools are operating on decreasing returns to scale. In 2^nd stage DEA male schools showed positive significant impact on inefficiency of schools. Facility index, dummy for location and student teacher ratio was insignificant while teachers having professional degree showed unexpectedly highly significant positive impact on inefficiency scores of schools.

Keywords: Education, Data envelopment analysis, Technical efficiency, Scale efficiency, Schools

DOI: 10.7176/JESD/10-9-03

Publication date:May 31^st 2019