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

DOI10.1214/11-AOAS456zbMATH Open1228.62156arXiv1112.1541OpenAlexW2003434414WikidataQ35661788 ScholiaQ35661788MaRDI QIDQ652340FDOQ652340

Authors: Danny Pfeffermann, Victoria Landsman 

Publication date: 14 December 2011

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

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.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.1541

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zbMATH Keywords

identifiabilityinstrumental variablesaverage treatment effectpropensity scoresgoodness of fitprivate-dependent schoolssample distribution

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of statistics to social sciences (62P25) Mathematics education and society (97A40) History and society (aspects of mathematics education) (97A99)

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

Cited In (6)

• Comparing Inference Methods for Non‐probability Samples
• Measuring Discontinuities in Time Series Obtained with Repeated Sample Surveys
• Estimation under mode effects and proxy surveys, accounting for non-ignorable nonresponse
• Accounting for Non‐ignorable Sampling and Non‐response in Statistical Matching
• Are private schools better than public schools? Appraisal for Ireland by methods for observational studies
• Matching information from two independent informative samples

Uses Software

• R
• Stata
• BayesDA

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