Explaining efficiency differences of New Zealand secondary schools

The New Zealand Secondary School system is characterized by centrally provided government funding for almost all schools, yet responsibility for use of that funding has been devolved right down to the school level. The central provision of funding has resulted in consistent collection of data across the system including, for one recent year (2001), a census of teachers. We use this data in a two-stage analysis of school efficiency. Data envelopment analysis is employed at the first stage to derive a score for each school representing the efficiency with which it transforms basic inputs into outputs. At the second stage of the analysis, to explain variations in efficiency, we regress the efficiency scores on a range of environmental and school type variables, some of which are controllable by schools and some of which are not. We find that school type, defined along a number of dimensions, matters. 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