Bacolod, Marigee; Tobias, Justin

Economics of Education Review (2006) (Originally published as WP #05006, February 2005)

A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools,
proxies for school quality,
and family background on children's achievement growth
using the education production function.
Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce
and estimate a model that imposes
little structure on the relationship between intake achievement and
follow-up achievement and evaluate school performance based on this
estimated relationship. Our methods nest typical value added specifications
that use test score gains as the outcome variable and
models assuming linearity
in the relationship between intake and follow-up scores.
We find evidence against the use of value-added models
for our data and show that such models give very different
assessments of school performance in the Philippines.
Using a variety of tests we find that
schools matter in the production of student achievement, though
variation in performance across schools only explain about 6 percent
of the total (conditional) variation in follow-up achievement.
Schools providing basic facilities - in particular schools
providing electricity - are found to perform much better
in the production of achievement growth.

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