Private Schooling and achievement in India: A new Educational - PDF document

First Draft Private Schooling and achievement in India: A new Educational Landscape? Suvarna Pande 1 and Amaresh Dubey 2 1. Introduction The Indian Education system has undergone massive structural change in the past few years. The trajectory and mechanism of effect of private school system in India remains a sparsely understood and an under researched field. Increased enrollment has not meant similar results in learning outcomes especially in the Indian context where private schools are often unrecognized, unregulated with poorly trained teachers. Without a thorough analysis it cannot be concluded that they are of higher quality than government schools. The World Bank in its Development Report 2018 discusses the global education and learning crisis and the associated future development costs. The wasted development opportunities and widened social gaps have been highlighted as a major public policy failure in the recent times. With multiaxial lines of inequalities in India the resulting disadvantage is even greater- young students struggling with poverty, gender and social discrimination reach adulthood without even the most basic skills. Any sustainable economic transformation and catch-up is not possible if basic human skill and capital is left behind. Each additional year of schooling has the potential to raise individual’s earnings by 8 to 10 percent. The effect has been reported to be even greater for disadvantaged sections in particular women. In spite of these expected benefits, glaring gaps in cognitive capabilities have been found for India (India ranks second after Malawi in a list of 12 countries wherein a grade two student could not read a single word of a short text. India also tops the list of seven countries in which a grade two student could not perform two-digit subtraction). It is in this backdrop that the paper demands paramount attention. Numerous policy interventions in the field have resulted in greater quantity numbers, while quality focus has been left behind. Public education, despite massive central and quasi-central fund support is perceived as inferior and inefficient. The scenario has changed 1 Corresponding author: Ph. D. Student, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi – 110 067, India. e-mail: suvarnapande2008@gmail.com 2 Professor, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi – 110 067, India. amareshdubey@mail.jnu.ac.in 1

drastically especially after the 1990s when growth picked up and private schools were hailed as substitutes and the “better off” solution to the education panacea. However, during the same period efforts at improving primary education were intensified even further leading to three ambitious and far-reaching initiatives, the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) introduced in the mid-1990s, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) launched in 2000 following the MDG declaration and the Mid-day Meal Program (MDM) universalized in 2001(Datta Gupta, Dubey et al. 2017). DPEP and SSA were ambitious programs primarily focused on large-scale infrastructure funded by World Bank and Central Government Cess. These interventions though succeeded in improving enrollments, did not lead to perceptible and documented increments in quality aspects. In the same period, numerous private institutions – aided and unaided mushroomed across the country as a way out for the populace struggling with government institutional apathy but understood the importance of education for growth. The paper is an attempt to explore effectiveness of private education in India. The work considers the quality debate surrounding the private schooling system. It empirically explores the following considerations: parental choices that propel children from certain backgrounds into certain types of schools (Hanushek 1997) and whether private schools in India, often unrecognized and unregulated were necessarily better than government schools in terms of learning outcomes. There has been relatively limited research on these important public policy issues for the Indian scenario due to lack of appropriate extensive data on the issue. The India Human Development Survey (IHDS-I; 2005) and IHDS-II (2011-12), a joint exercise conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and University of Maryland makes it possible to link factors private school growth and quality variables. The paper takes off from and expands on similar work by Desai et al., 2008, where the authors use data from the first round of Indian Human Development Survey (2005) to describe public and private schools, factors driving parents in selecting private schools and association with student performance. Here, we use the findings from IHDS- II (2011-12) to document and reason out changes between the two periods and therefore “effectiveness” of private school enrollment. In particular, in addition to studying factors guiding school choices, we also seek to ascertain whether enrollment actually results in higher learning outcomes and whether those gains are concentrated among particular sections of the population. The paper progresses with a descriptive survey of international studies on public and private schooling, concluded policy considerations from the limited available Indian studies in section two. It is followed by a brief description of the India Human Development survey – I and II and the methodology used in the third section. These theoretical sections give way to statistical descriptions of the nature of school systems, characteristics of public and private schools and social and economic backgrounds of students who attend these schools in the fourth section. The next section examines 2

impact of private school enrollment on child’s outcome and is subsequently followed by unearthing the characteristics of children who benefit most from private school enrollment. The paper finishes with discussion on changes observed between the two rounds, the policy conclusions and description of possible implications for the future. 2. Literature on Public and Private Schools Comparative past experiences of currently leading world economies bring out the centrality of the issue at hand in a manner that doesn’t need much proof. The European and American cases show how government initiatives are necessary to f8acilitate and sustain long-term economic and social progress. Beginning Nineteenth century, the Asian countries learnt their lessons from the erstwhile developed nations and began recognizing the transformative role of school education. Japan, the first one to do so in Asia, its authoritative yet constructive focus on literacy allowed it to deliver exponential progress. In the following years, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and China followed similar routes and firmly focused on state delivered basic education. The transformative role of public education in their development experience has been rightly emphasized as one of the most important factors behind their successes. “But that process was greatly helped by the achievements of these countries in public education. Widespread participation in a global economy would have been hard to accomplish if people could not read or write.” (Drèze and Sen 2013). This recognition of indispensable role of state supported education in any mature civil society resulted in massive expansion of publicly provided education(Meyer 1977). However, with increased enrollment rates, exasperation over learning outcomes from an already strained public education system exacerbated and private education was hailed as the more efficient alternative. The increased disappointment led to steady growth in private enrollments. The debate over public vs. private education systems can be triangulated into three aspects – a) international school effects debate; b) the Indian experience on quality of public and private schools and c) policy alternatives under consideration. 1. School effects debate in an International Context The debate on school effects in the United States began with the Coleman report in 1966.The report concluded that it was not only school level characteristics but also family level household factors that determined what students learned. In fact the report specifically argued for placing greater importance on household factors to positively affect learning outcomes. The early focus on home environment and parental effects was an upshot in education research and an important policy takeaway from a field that gave primacy to role of school level inputs. Literature from developing countries also concluded weak to negligible relationship between school inputs and child outcomes (Hanushek 1995, Banerjee, Cole et al. 2007). Comparative 3