Paper title: Inclusive Education in Soviet-Inherited Exclusive School System: The Effects of Student Background Factors on School Efficiency
Simona Ferraro joint work with Kaire Põder (Estonian Business School) and Triin Lauri (Tallinn University)

Abstract:

Relying on the school-level data and evaluating inclusive practices in education, we evaluate how the low socioeconomic status of families, the disparity in language spoken at home and at school as well as the special education needs (SENs) students affect schools’ efficiency. We adopt a two-stage double Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and estimate efficiency scores in the first, and the effects of nondiscretionary variables in the second stage. Our findings first show that the efficiency scores improved between the two academic years. Secondly, the reversed share of SEN students and high parental income affect positively school efficiency while language match between home and school has a non-significant impact on efficiency. Our policy implications indicate that the autonomy of schools over student admission and competitive drive for producing better student outcomes for the leaderboard works contrary to the inclusive reform aims – schools are incentivised not to admit SEN students and use decentralised admission interviews for selecting advantaged students.

The public research seminars of the Department of Economics and Finance (DEF) at Tallinn University of Technology  usually take place on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month in online format, unless announced otherwise. The seminar will last one hour, presentation will last approximately 45 minutes followed by 15 minutes of discussion. The seminars are held in English. Questions about the seminar can be sent to the seminar coordinator Natalia Levenko: natalia.levenko@taltech.ee.