A decision support methodology for increasing school efficiency in Bolivia's low‐income communities

Abstract

This paper presents a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based decision-support methodology that has been implemented and is being used by a not-for-profit organization, Fe y Alegrı´a, which runs 439 Bolivian schools reaching over 160,000 disadvantaged students in that poverty-stricken Latin American nation. Bolivia is a poor country with the highest percentage of indigenous population and the lowest per capita income in South America and as such its inhabitants are in dire need of effective educational resources to help them out of poverty. The DEA-based methodology described in this paper has offered an objective way to compare network schools among themselves and with out-of-network schools, providing a deeper understanding of school efficiency levels in the face of scarce resources, and allowing for sharing of best practices across the network. The paper introduces the educational environment in Bolivia, presents the DEA model, describes the decision support methodology, and provides two examples of its use. The first example compares Fe y Alegrı´a secondary schools with out-of-network secondary schools using publicly available data, and the second compares Fe y Alegrı´a secondary schools among themselves using a proprietary database. The paper also comments on lessons learned and the need for broad consensusbuilding and organization-wide buy-in for successful adoption and maximum impact. and a very large portion of its population live in abject poverty. In such an environment education is the only hope for low-income families to reach an improved standard of living, but sadly, in Bolivia, the poor indigenous communities have been the hardest hit by the historical dearth of institutional education resources. Fe y Alegrı´a (FyA) is a Jesuit-sponsored not-for-profit network of schools which operates throughout Bolivia and other countries (as described herein), and focuses on providing quality education to the disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the socially excluded, in an attempt to improve their lot. As described in detail in Section 3 below, FyA manages a network of 439 schools reaching over 160,000 poverty-stricken students in all regions of the country. This paper describes the development and implementation of a decisionsupport methodology in FyA-Bolivia which is being used to examine and improve school efficiencies in the low-income communities which they serve.The original objective of this project was to offer preliminary answers to two research questions. The first question was to verify whether the pedagogical and managerial techniques used in the FyA-operated schools which are perceived by FyA to be best performers indeed resulted in higher efficiency levels than other in-network schools. This inquiry into the relative performance of FyArun schools had the objective of documenting quantitatively their efficiency levels and identifying, assessing, and ultimately disseminating best practices across institutions in the network. The second research question was to confirm whether the pedagogical and manag...

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Operations Research, Economic Development, and Social Mobility

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