Browsing by Author "Ongaya , Victor Elikana"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Technical and scale efficiency of public secondary schools in Kenya: a data envelopment analysis of counties
    (Kenyatta University, 2024-06) Ongaya , Victor Elikana
    Kenya is working towards achieving a rapidly growing upper-middle income economy status by 2030. Education and training have been identified as among the enablers of this vision and have subsequently seen their public spending sustained at above 4% of the GDP over the last decade. Although there have been deliberate efforts which have yielded tremendous progress towards improving access to public education in the country over the years, there still remain direct challenges facing public secondary education. Notable among them is the coexistence of overutilization and underutilization of educational resources, and significant disparities in academic achievements of students across the 47 counties. This points to inefficiency in public secondary education, whose determinants are unknown. This study therefore sought to fill this gap by making use of the data envelopment analysis model approach to assess the technical efficiency levels of public secondary schools in Kenya and their determinants. The model was estimated using secondary cross-sectional data on one output and three input variables for the 2019 academic year, collected from public secondary schools across the country and using the 47 counties as decision making units. The output variable used was the number of form four candidates who scored a mean grade C+ and above in the 2019 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations. The inputs used were the county student-teacher ratio, county textbook-student ratio and county average school size. Results revealed that public secondary schools were inefficient, and could improve their efficiency by 51% using the available resources; there was a huge variability in efficiency levels of public secondary schools across the counties; public secondary schools were operating sub-optimally, and could improve on their unutilized capacity by 11.1%; counties with more secondary schools were more efficient than those with fewer secondary schools, and also counties with higher literacy rates were more efficient that those with lower literacy rates. Gender parity index and county aridity level were not found to significantly affect inefficiency The study recommends that policies that will ensure effective management of public schools, for instance benchmarking, should be implemented by the Ministry of Education. It also recommends opening of more secondary schools by the Ministry of Education in counties with fewer schools to encourage competition. The study additionally recommends inclusion of literacy programs into other community focused programs being funded by both the government and nongovernmental partners, and application of technology to promote continuous learning among communities, especially those in the ASALs.