It is well documented that private school students outperform their public school counterparts in India. However, researchers have only focused on the achievement gap in levels without considering the underlying dynamics of how students move through the distribution of achievement over time. We bridge this gap here by exploring the dynamics of the public-private school achievement gap in India by applying nonparametric measures of distributional mobility to panel data on math and Peabody Picture Vocabulary test scores from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that public school students are at least as mobile as private school students during early childhood. During preadolescence, however, public school students, relative to private school students, are significantly less upwardly mobile while at the same time more downwardly mobile through the distribution of test scores. These mobility patterns, taken together with the level gap in test scores, suggests one would expect to see very little convergence in achievement between private and public school students during the middle and high school years of schooling.

有充分的文献证明，私立学校的学生在印度的表现优于公立学校的学生。但是，研究人员仅关注成绩的差距，而没有考虑学生如何随着时间推移而在成绩分配中移动的内在动力。通过在印度安得拉邦的数学和皮博迪图片词汇测试成绩面板数据上应用分布迁移率的非参数度量，我们探索了印度公立和私立学校成就差距的动态，从而弥合了这一差距。我们发现，公立学校的学生在幼儿时期至少与私立学校的学生一样流动。但是，在青春期之前，公立学校的学生相对于私立学校的学生而言，通过测试分数的分布，向上移动明显较少，而同时向下移动较大。这些流动性模式，加上考试成绩的水平差距，表明人们期望在中学和高中阶段私立学校和公立学校的学生在成绩上的衔接很少。