Abstract:
This study aims to investigate the causal effects of school type on
the student achievement. Schools type involves two categories:
public schools and private schools; whereas student achievement
is defined in terms of an overall measure named as Basis for
Admission Score (BAS), which is a weighted score reflecting both
the grades obtained from courses in each school and the points
obtained at nation-wide centralized exams. Factors used as controls
in the study include gender of the student, parental attributes (are
they alive and live together; their levels of education and
occupations), type of the house (own/rent/public housing),
separate room of the student, city the family lives in and the level
of development of the geographical region. This study utilizes a
dataset comprising 3,752,374 secondary school students, which
covers all of the student population of Turkish secondary schools
within 2014-2016 period. This comprehensive dataset is utilized for
the first time in such a study.
At the first step, we present the literature on the effects of school
type on academic achievement measured by test scores. This
literature can be traced back to 1960’s. On the other hand, a second
line of literature, which focuses on the evaluation of causal effects
of policies and of programs has progressed swiftly starting from
1980’s and promises an important methodological framework for
evaluation of policies and programs in education science. The
methodology of this study is designed by bringing together the
mentioned two lines of research. Methodology involved the
application of regression adjustment, inverse probability
weighting, and exact matching techniques in a complementary
style in order to ensure the robustness of estimations.
Under the assumptions discussed in detail in the study, we have
found that school type has significant impact on student
achievement in Turkey. Being a private school student instead of
public school student leads to 87 points increase (29.6%) on average
in BAS score. It is found that school type has a comparatively larger
effect in Turkey compared to other country examples. Based on the
findings of the study, a set of research topics are suggested with the
objective of improving equality of opportunity in education and of
identifying new policies to improve quality of education in public
schools
