Stochastic Frontier Analysis of Efficiency of Czech Grammar Schools

The study focuses on the evaluation of the relative efficiency of Czech grammar schools (gymnazia) in the placement of the schools’ freshmen graduates within university programs, taking into account relative demands for the programs, grammar school endowments and a number of other relevant external factors. We argue that the 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 a lot of aspects related to the educational process, e.g., differences in the level of non-cognitive skills of students, family background, overall living standards in region and a specific focus of a secondary school in question. Relying on high-quality panel data and the stochastic frontier methodology commonly applied in efficiency evaluation within a wide number of sectors including education, the study further argues that the divergence between selected direct measures of school performance and our indirect indicators has been increasing over time.