Stochastic Frontier Analysis of the Efficiency of Czech Grammar Schools

The study focuses on the evaluation of the relative efficiency of Czech grammar schools ('gymnadzium') at preparing their graduates for admission to university programmes, taking into account the relative demand for the programmes, grammar school endowments, and a number of other relevant external factors. The authors argue that a comparison of secondary schools based exclusively on university acceptance rates or other direct measures of study achievements might be misleading, given that such approaches ignore many aspects related to the educational process, such as differences in the level of non-cognitive skills of students, family background, overall living standards in a region, and the specific focus of the given secondary school. The authors derive novel indirect measures of grammar school efficiency that take into account relative demands for university study programmes. Relying on high-quality panel data that cover the period 2000-2004, and using the stochastic frontier methodology commonly applied in efficiency evaluation in a wide number of sectors, including education, the study also argues that the divergence between selected direct measures of school performance and indirect indicators has been increasing over time.