The Use of the DEA as a Tool of Alternative School Management in Institutional Evaluation

Abstract

This paper is part of the reflections performed on the development of the Ph.D. thesis defended in 2005 and 2008 at the College of Education, in State University of Campinas. Our aim was to explore the methodological application process of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in the performance evaluation of primary and lower secondary education in public schools. One of the characteristics of DEA is to make possible the construction and data analysis, respecting each school data separately, and at the same time, to build an efficiency border for each school, based on criteria which are not arbitrary or strange to them. Each school has their own resources (infrastructure, number of teacher, support technical, library, etc) and these resources should obtain some results (rate of approved students, student’s proficiency, reduction of the violence inside of school, etc). DEA allows an observation of this relation resource x results inside of a school and simultaneously it’s possible to observe it compared with the set of analyzable schools. Two important methodological decisions were focused on this paper: DEA model orientation and the use of weights in the educational data analysis. Following thus, it’s shown an operational synthesis to apply the DEA. We conclude that DEA can become a practical and useful tool for manager’ schools, mainly because it relates resources and results, related to other data, in a simple and useful way.