Educação: Teoria e Prática (Jul 2010)
The use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as Alternative Tool to School Management in the Institutional Assessment
Abstract
This paper is part of the reflections performed on the development of the Ph.D. thesisdefended 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 EnvelopmentAnalysis (DEA) in the performance evaluation of primary and lower secondary educationin public schools. One of the characteristics of DEA is to make possible the constructionand data analysis, respecting each school data separately, and at the same time, tobuild an efficiency border for each school, based on criteria which are not arbitrary orstrange to them. Each school has their own resources (infrastructure, number of teacher,support technical, library, etc) and these resources should obtain some results (rate ofapproved 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 andsimultaneously it’s possible to observe it compared with the set of analyzable schools.Two important methodological decisions were focused on this paper: DEA modelorientation and the use of weights in the educational data analysis. Following thus, it’sshown an operational synthesis to apply the DEA. We conclude that DEA can becomea practical and useful tool for manager’ schools, mainly because it relates resourcesand results, related to other data, in a simple and useful way
