Do the national education systems explain something in the performance of the European students?

This master dissertation gives a general overview of the educational systems in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia and aims to identify whether the features of the national school systems affect the performance of the students. The four countries have to some extent similar history, economic and social characteristics and their schooling systems developed in a similar way. However, the performance of the Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak students on PISA tests varies. To study the relationships between the individual scores of the students and the possible factors influencing them, an international production function and correlation statistics were used. The performance of the students was measured by the individual PISA math scores. The control variables described family, socioeconomic characteristics of the students, institutional and school characteristics. Observations from the PISA surveys from 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012 were included in the dataset. In addition to the family and socioeconomic background of the students, elements of the national educational system such as general or vocational orientation of the schools, student per teacher ratio, school size, shortages in math teachers, to some extent the location of the schools were shown to have a significant impact on student performance in the Visegrad countries. Furthermore, we show by a difference in difference estimation that the Polish educational reform implemented in 1999 had a positive effect on the scores of the Polish students.