Radiography of the Pre-University Educational System in Romania: Decisive Factors in Performance Appraisal

Educational performance can be defined as a priority and desired at the international level, considering the fundamental impact it generates in the socioeconomic development of a state. Therefore, the objective of the current work is to develop the radiography of the educational system in Romania and to profile the decisive factors that contribute to improved educational performance. Thus, we will focus on two of them, namely, educational infrastructure and the level of government spending. Furthermore, regarding performance, we define it from two perspectives: qualitative, through the results recorded in the PISA assessments, and quantitative, through the average number of years spent in school. Regarding the further methodology, a set of three hypotheses are built, which will define the educational model and answer several research questions: the existence of a level of homogeneity of the didactic infrastructure, the impact of government spending, and the characterization of the Romanian education system as a competitive and performant one, compared to other states. In studying the hypotheses, we used descriptive and statistical analysis, as well as regression and cluster models, through the affinity propagation algorithm. The results profile an ineffective educational model from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective, inhomogeneous in terms of infrastructure and underfunded. Lastly, we have identified a shortage of studies in the related literature, focused on the performance of the pre-university education system in Romania, so the current work meets this absence.