Why is education performance so different across Latvian schools?

This paper aims to identify the school characteristics consistently associated with better performance of pupils in state exams in Latvia and understand the reasons behind substantial exam score gap between urban and rural schools. We find that exam scores are positively related to school size and teacher salaries, but negatively related to teacher age. Oaxaca–Ransom decomposition shows that the whole urban–rural exam score gap can be attributed to a few observable characteristics of schools, teachers and pupils.