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Private Schooling in India: A New Landscape Sonalde Desai Amaresh Dubey Reeve Vanneman Rukmini...
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Transcript of Private Schooling in India: A New Landscape Sonalde Desai Amaresh Dubey Reeve Vanneman Rukmini...
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
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?