Private Schooling in India:

A New Landscape

Sonalde DesaiAmaresh Dubey

Reeve VannemanRukmini Banerji

Ideological Shift in the Role of the State in Educational Provision? Massive worldwide educational expansion

in 20th century, coincided with decolonization

Provision of public education one of central functions of modern statehood

In recent years, dissatisfaction with the quality and cost of public schooling

Is state funded but privately provided schooling a viable alternative?

Public-Private partnership in education Calls for P-P-P in education based on three

key assumptions: Public schooling is expensive Private education must be better than public education

since parents are voting with their feet But only rich (and a few poor) parents manage to send

their children to private schools so for equity reasons, government must make it possible for poor children to attend private schools

Discourse and Data Innocence of this logic vs. quagmire of charter

school politics in the US Washington D.C. home to some of the worst

public schools and some of the best private schools in the U.S.

Middle class flight to private schools -> decline in public schooling

Lobby for PPP – focus on charter schools which are publicly funded but privately managed and voucher programs

But charter school performance remains poor and many elite private schools refuse to participate in voucher programs

Highlights from International School Effects Literature1. School inputs don’t necessarily improve student learning

(Coleman report, review for LDCs by Hanushek) But may be important in poor settings

2. Private (catholic schools in U.S.) schools have higher student output but due to “social capital” arising out of school & classroom interactions rather than material inputs

Particular benefit for poor kids3. Voucher programs in Latin America show negligible to

modest benefits and causal effects remain unclear

So careful scrutiny of private education in India is warranted before concluding that it might be the solution to educational woes

India Human Development Survey 2005

Result of collaboration between NCAER & Univ. of Maryland Multi-topic, multi-purpose survey designed to be a public

resource Nationally representative household survey of 41,554

households in rural & urban areas Extensive data on income, employment, education, health,

social networks, gender relations, caste 33 states and union territories Facilities survey of one private and one public school and

medical facility Includes reading, writing and arithmetic tests for 11,667

children aged 8-11 Tests designed by PRATHAM for cross-language

comparability and ease of administration

Reading Test Interviewer Training Video

58% urban and 24% rural children in private schools. Why?Discussions with parents during our

fieldwork – anecdotal evidence or grounded theory if you prefer:

1. Dissatisfaction with public schools – “Master comes when he feels like it”

2. Middle class aspirations – “Private schools teach English from class one, government schools don’t”

Good quantitative support for both – Won’t go into details but you will find it in the paper (Table 2; p. 14)

But do private schools offer better education?

Fig. 4. Distribution of Reading Skill by School Type

12 1524 22

27

511

1622

47

Can not read Letters Words Paragraph Story

Government Private

Fig. 5. Distribution of Arithmatic Skills by School Type

21

37

2417

10

2631 34

No Numbers Numbers Subtraction Division

Government Private

Selection into private schools Educated, higher income parents send their

children to private schools (Table 3) However, controlling for household income,

education, caste/religion, place of residence, state of residence, household size etc., private school enrollment remains significantly associated with children’s scores on reading/arithmetic tests (Table 7):

+0.39*** reading reading test mean=2.5, std=1.35

+0.28*** arithmetic arithmetic test mean=1.51, std=1.03

Selection bias not fully addressed in this “naïve” model…

1. Imperfect measurement of controlled variables (e.g. income, quality of parental education etc.)

2. Omitted variables such as parental preference for education which may lead to both private school enrollment as well as increased attention to child’s homework

In absence of experimental assignment to private and public schools… Use of control function model, also called

switching regression, first proposed by James Heckman

𝑌𝑖 = 𝛽𝑋𝑖 + 𝛿𝑍𝑖 + 𝜖𝑖Where Zi is supposed to stem from an

unobservable latent variable:𝑍𝑖 ∗ = 𝛾𝑊𝑖 + 𝑢𝑖The decision to send a child to private school or

not is made according to the rule:𝑍𝑖 = 1, 𝑖𝑓 𝑍𝑖∗ > 0= 0, 𝑖𝑓 𝑍𝑖∗ ≤ 0

W – the variables included in first stage of the this switching regression

Fundamental considerations:At least one variable should be

theoretically exogenous to skill attainment equation

These excluded variable/s should be strongly correlated with private school enrollment

Excluded Variables from First Stage Regression: Presence of private school in village (assumed yes,

in all urban areas) Attractiveness of the local government schools:

Has a cook making for attractive mid-day meals (see Dreze & Goyal, 2003)

Teaches English by Standard 1 English as a medium of instruction for any

subject Social networks of the household

Know anyone in medical profession Know anyone working in the government

Descriptive statistics Table 5, regression results Table 6. All variables significant except English medium and in expected direction

Effect of private school enrollment in switching regression model +0.36** for reading skills

Compare with +0.39*** for “naïve” regression

+0.22** for arithmetic skills Compare with +0.28*** for “naïve”

regression

Coefficients change in expected direction but small change. Wald test suggests that the possibility that the enrollment and skills equation are unrelated can not be ruled out.

Results based on exclusion restrictions or instruments sensitive to the choice of instruments…

Prof. Richard Murnane at Harvard equates search for weapons of mass instrumentation to search for weapons of mass destruction.

Dependence on prior assumptions and sometimes wishful thinking…

Alternative: Family fixed effects estimatesSince IHDS studied all children aged 8-11 in

a household, family fixed effects models provide comparison based on child characteristics and type of school, holding all family characteristics constant

Private school effect +0.31*** for reading skills +0.22*** for arithmetic skills

Caution: Child specific unmeasured effects can only be controlled in longitudinal analysis

Recap: Improvements in Reading & Arithmetic Scores associated with enrollment in private schools

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

0.4

Reading Arthithmetic

Basic OLS

SwitchingRegression

Family Fixed Effects

This improvement is located among children from lower socioeconomic strata

Fig. 6. Predicted Reading Scores by Standard of Living for Government

and Private Schools

01234

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24

Standard of Living Scale

Read

ing S

core

Govt

Private

Reason for this is not clear but some clues…

Fig. 8. Probability of Child Being Beaten in the Last Month by

Standard of Living

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24

Standard of Living Scale

Govt

Private

Does this imply that private schooling is the panacea for India’s educational woes?

Standards of evidence for such a significant conclusion should be higher

Two considerations:1. Government schools in some states are

better than private schools in other states

2. The very act of parents paying may be causing some of the benefits to private schooling

Government schools are not doomed to failure Government school students in Himachal,

Kerala, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh perform at higher levels than private schools students in many other states Potential for innovative programs in

government schools In some states private school students

have little to negative advantage (Table 8)

Nor is it guaranteed that if school vouchers are given out freely, private school advantage would continue..

Can we assume that if private schools were more accessible to students from all social classes with low cost to families their advantage would continue? Government grant-in-aid schools used

extensively in Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and benefits to private schools appear lower in these states

Does the very act of paying offer parents greater ability to demand fair treatment for their children, reduce labour demands from children or spur children to work harder?

Thank You

School Based Statistics Vs. Household Surveys (Source: Kingdon 2007)

Year Official School Based Data

Household Survey

1993 2.8% in 6th All India Educational Survey

10.1% in NCAER Human Development Survey

2002 5.8% in 7th All India Educational Survey

19.5% in Pratham’s ASER 2005