Private Schooling in India: A New Landscape

1. Private Schooling in India: A New Landscape Sonalde Desai Amaresh Dubey Reeve Vanneman Rukmini Banerji

2. 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?

3. 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

4. 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

5. Highlights from International School Effects Literature • School inputs don’t necessarily improve student learning (Coleman report, review for LDCs by Hanushek) • But may be important in poor settings • 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 kids • 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

6. 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

7. Reading Test Interviewer Training Video

8. 58% urban and 24% rural children in private schools. Why? Discussions with parents during our fieldwork – anecdotal evidence or grounded theory if you prefer: • Dissatisfaction with public schools – “Master comes when he feels like it” • 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)

9. But do private schools offer better education?

10. 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

11. Selection bias not fully addressed in this “naïve” model… • Imperfect measurement of controlled variables (e.g. income, quality of parental education etc.) • 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

12. 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 + 𝜖𝑖 Where Zi is supposed to stem from an unobservable latent variable: 𝑍𝑖 ∗ = 𝛾𝑊𝑖 + 𝑢𝑖 The 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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.

16. 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…

17. Alternative: Family fixed effects estimates Since 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

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

19. This improvement is located among children from lower socioeconomic strata

20. Reason for this is not clear but some clues…

21. 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: • Government schools in some states are better than private schools in other states • The very act of parents paying may be causing some of the benefits to private schooling

22. 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)

23. 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?

24. Thank You

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