DT 22/21 - An assessment of pupil and school performance in public primary education in Uruguay

This paper discusses the potential improvements in pupil’s academic results at public primary schools in Uruguay. Using student level data from the first national assessment of educational achievements, we decompose education attainments into pupil’s own effort and school value added following a multilevel metafrontier approach originally introduced by Silva-Portela and Thannassoulis (2002). We find that on average, pupils miss 19.2% of their potential achievement, mainly driven by their own underperformance. The extent of output students cannot obtain because of school effects is mainly explained by suboptimal resource availability at the school level rather than schools’ own managerial ability. The shortfall in the school’s contribution to efficiency affects those students in the least advantaged socioeconomic contexts and those with lower test scores.