Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies

Danny Pfeffermann*, Victoria Landsman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

In observational studies the assignment of units to treatments is not under control. Consequently, the estimation and comparison of treatment effects based on the empirical distribution of the responses can be biased since the units exposed to the various treatments could differ in important unknown pretreatment characteristics, which are related to the response. An important example studied in this article is the question of whether private schools offer better quality of education than public schools. In order to address this question, we use data collected in the year 2000 by OECD for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Focusing for illustration on scores in mathematics of 15-year-old pupils in Ireland, we find that the raw average score of pupils in private schools is higher than of pupils in public schools. However, application of a newly proposed method for observational studies suggests that the less able pupils tend to enroll in public schools, such that their lower scores are not necessarily an indication of bad quality of the public schools. Indeed, when comparing the average score in the two types of schools after adjusting for the enrollment effects, we find quite surprisingly that public schools perform better on average. This outcome is supported by the methods of instrumental variables and latent variables, commonly used by econometricians for analyzing and evaluating social programs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1726-1751
Number of pages26
JournalAnnals of Applied Statistics
Volume5
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2011

Keywords

  • Average treatment effect
  • Goodness of fit
  • Identifiability
  • Instrumental variables
  • Private-dependent schools
  • Propensity scores
  • Sample distribution

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this