Investigating private and public school performance gap: A case study in Turkey

Abstract

Recent literature has suggested that private-public school performance gaps are rooted in individual differences and that they disappear after adequately controlling for student characteristics. However, most of this research is based on samples from the U.S. and other developed countries and it is not clear how empirical results generalize to populations in developing nations. In this paper we used a national sample from Turkey to test the hypothesis that private-public school differences in performance disappear once important student characteristics are controlled for. Our results indicate that after controlling for such differences the gap between private and public school performance does indeed disappear. However, the gap reemerges in the opposite direction once school-specific predictors are added suggesting that public schools in fact perform better than private schools in Turkey when the playing field is level. Implications are discussed.