The Relative Effectiveness of Private and Public Schools: Evidence from Two Developing Countries. Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper No. 60.

Fiscal constraints have limited education budgets in developing countries. Increases necessary to expand access to highly subsidized and publicly provided education have not been forthcoming. Another concern is that education is being inadequately and inefficiently provided by the public sector. This study is an inquiry into the nature of the achievement differential between public and private schools in Colombia and Tanzania. It questions the extent to which the differential in academic achievement can be attributed to student characteristics rather than school inputs, attempts to estimate the quality differences between the public and private secondary schools in these two countries, as measured by student performance on the achievement tests (ACATESTs). Estimated sample-selection effects suggest that Colombian students sort themselves by type of institution, public or private; but Tanzanian students are selected by a hierarchical mechanism, with the lowest-scoring students entering private institutions. These effects are consistent with the different institutional frameworks for educational choice in these two countries. For each country, however, private schools offer an achievement advantage. By standardizing for differences in student and school attributes, private school students have higher achievement test scores. (Author/NL)