Determinants of School Efficiency in Oklahoma: Results from Stochastic Production Frontier and Data Envelopment Analysis

Economic

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

The efficiency of public schools:the case of Kuwait

This paper investigates the technical, allocative and economic efficiency of public schools in Kuwait over four levels of schooling (kindergartens, primary, intermediate and secondary) and two periods (1999/00 and 2004/05) using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Mean pure technical efficiency varies between 0.695 and 0.852 across all levels of education; the majority of schools at kindergarten, primary and intermediate levels are operating at a point where returns to scale are increasing; and there are considerable cost efficiencies to be gained. In a second stage analysis of the determinants of efficiency, teacher salary and the proportion of teaching staff who are Kuwaiti are highly significant in explaining school efficiency at all levels. The former has a positive effect and the latter a negative effect. All-girls schools have significantly higher efficiency than all-boys schools. There is limited evidence that geographical location affects efficiency, and this may be a consequence of differences between regions in terms of affluence or density of population