One Laptop per Child? Using Production Frontiers for Evaluating the Escuela2.0 Program in Spain

Abstract

Over the last few decades, public programs have driven the gradual adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education. The most ambitious project in Spain so far was Escuela 2.0, which provided students from the regions that opted into the program with laptops. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of this program on school performance and productivity. To do this, we developed a new methodological approach based on combining causal inference techniques and the analysis of production frontiers. We calculated the differences in productivity and performance between treated and control schools using the base-group Camanho–Dyson Malmquist index and the base-group performance gap index. We estimate the impact of the program as the variation of these differences, following the essence of the difference-in-differences analysis. The main results are that Escuela 2.0 had a negative impact on performance and productivity.