The Assessment of Performance of Educational Services: The Case of Portuguese Secondary Schools

This paper describes the assessment of performance of educational services recurring to benchmarking. We adopted two perspectives for the evaluation of secondary schools, aligned with the objectives of different stakeholders. In the society perspective schools are viewed as promoting students achievement (ideally including not only academic results but also interpersonal capacities) given the students characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socio-economic backgrounds. In the educational authorities perspective schools are viewed as transforming a set of resources (including students with given characteristics in terms of academic abilities and socio-economic backgrounds and also school resources, such as teachers) into students achievement. The relative performance assessment was carried out using Data Envelopment Analysis models, followed by an exploratory analysis of contextual indicators that potentially affect schools’ performance, in order to understand their impact on the educational process.