RANKING AND SCHOOL AUTONOMY: EFFICIENCY EFFECTS OF NEW INITIATIVES ON THE SINGAPORE EDUCATION SYSTEM

From 1979, the Singapore government started to transform the nature of secondary education in Singapore. In 1979, nine schools were chosen as Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools. After the call towards reforming the school system in the 1980s, the development of Independent schools evolved. In 1994, a new category — the autonomous school — was established. Besides reforming the school structure, in 1992, the "ST Schools 100" (first published by The Straits Times on 19 August 1992) started to rank the top 50 schools in the Special/Express stream and the top 40 schools in the Normal stream, along with separate tables listing the top value-added schools in both streams. Until quite recently, this ranking scheme had been endorsed by the Ministry of Education since 1992 and published on their website annually since 1995. This paper looks at how these new initiatives have affected secondary school outcomes. Comprising a panel data set of 30 of the top 50 schools in Singapore over the 1991–2001 period, the study looks at the technical efficiency of schools as a response to the introduction of new initiatives using two methodologies. The first baseline approach is that of a Corrected Ordinary Least Squares (COLS) multiple-output distance function. The second methodology used is the technical efficiency frontier effects model as described by Battese and Coelli (1995) and Coelli and Perelman (1996) which is a maximum likelihood estimation technique.