Performance evaluation of special education in China based on Data Envelopment Analysis

The existence of special schools aims to provide education opportunities and environment for physically and mentally disabled people. The provision of more exquisite and diversified services for parents, at ease, placing the children in the schools becomes an essential issue for current special schools. The special needs of students are more complicated that special schools have to overall study the service being more exquisite and diversified to correspond to the needs of students and parents. For this reason, the management of special schools takes the priority when discussing the function of special education institutions. Data Envelopment Analysis is applied to evaluate efficiency in this study. Shanghai, being the municipal city and the national central city of People’s Republic of China, presents the education quality at the head nationally. Special schools in Shanghai are therefore selected as the evaluated units in this study. The research results show strong efficiency of 1 DMU, revealing the good efficiency of special education execution, 4 DMUs with the efficiency between 0.9 and 1, revealing the efficiency being easily promoted, and 5 DMUs with the efficiency below 0.9, presenting obvious inefficiency. Moreover, the efficiency analysis with Malmquist shows the improvement of efficiency changes between two periods of special schools. Finally, suggestions are proposed according to the conclusion, expecting to assist in the development of special education in China. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature.