Schools, School Quality and Academic Achievement:Evidence from the Philippines

A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools, proxies for school quality, andfamily background on children's achievement growth using the education production function.Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce and estimate a model that imposes littlestructure on the relationship between intake achievement and follow-up achievement and evaluateschool performance based on this estimated relationship. Our methods nest typical value addedspecifications that use test score gains as the outcome variable and models assuming linearityin the relationship between intake and follow-up scores. We find evidence against the use ofvalue-added models for our data and show that such models give very different assessments ofschool performance in the Philippines. Using a variety of tests we find that schools matter in theproduction of student achievement, though variation in performance across schools only explainabout 6 percent of the total (conditional) variation in follow-up achievement. Schools providingbasic facilities - in particular schools providing electricity - are found to perform much better inthe production of achievement growth.[...]