Public and Private school management systems: A Comparative analysis

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the investigation of the relative performance of private versus public schools. We take advantage of the co-existence in Portugal of strictly private, strictly public and state funded private schools to isolate the impact of different property and management schemes on the performance of students, resorting to cross-section data on the scores obtained on national exams by 9th grade students in 2010. The results corroborate the well-established result on the relevance of the family socio-economic background for students’ performance, but do also sustain the existence of a positive impact of private ownership on the scores of students. We also compare the number of years required to finish mandatory schooling in these three types of schools and conclude that the benefits of state funded versus strictly public schools are unclear: the probability of a student being retained at last once is slightly higher in state funded public schools but the probability of relapsing situations, failing twice the same grade, is lower.