School productive performance and technology gaps: new evidence from PISA 2018

Improving educational outcomes is a global political imperative due to its favourable influence on a country’s economic prosperity. Although researchers have endeavoured to gauge school performance through diverse data resources and techniques, there remains a lack of clarity regarding the factors that enhance school effectiveness. Using the latest version of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2018), this paper employs a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) to investigate the factors underlying the performance of 8825 schools across 34 OECD countries in terms of their national and international technological capabilities. The central idea is that technological heterogeneity and the technology gap significantly influence the benchmarking process. The findings confirm the presence of substantial technology gaps, indicating that the examined schools are unable to fully harness their potential due to limitations in metatechnology. These gaps are influenced by student characteristics, school features and educational practices.