Recently, quality and efficiency of elementary education in Brazil has been questioned. Evaluations conducted by INEP showed that only 5% of the students present a performance that can be classified as adequate. Even this low performance has been decreasing mainly due to the lower performance of public school students. Given the differences onpublic and private schools performance wedecided to analyze thecomparative efficiencyof public and private schools using a methodology developed by Thanassoulis (1999) and further extended by Portela and Thanassoulis (2001). The former decomposes efficiency into two components: one attributed to the school and the other exclusively to the student. Results show large differences in efficiency between public and private schools. Private schools obtained maximum efficiency score while public ones reached only 0,901. Moreover, federal public schools reached a score of 0,910 and state schools 0,879. Schools were further analyzed with respect to the equity performance considering the different performance obtained by each student. This result showed that there is no difference between federal public and private schools. With respect to state schools, they showed relatively lower efficiency for the best students compared to average students.
efficiency analysis; public and private schools; Brazil
