Do students attending private schools learn more and have higher cognitive abilities than their public school counterparts in India? Though some recent works have discussed this question, the empirical contours to address the issue remain unclear, particularly in a diversifying school education market in India. This paper examines the factors determining the inequality in children’s learning outcomes (i.e., reading and math scores) in India using the second round of India Human Development Survey data. We examine the effect of a child’s ‘school absenteeism’ and ‘time spent for studying and doing homework’ on learning outcomes, and how these explain the existing learning gap between private and government school children. We provide strong evidence that the children attending private schools have significantly better learning outcomes than their government school counterparts. However, this performance difference between private and government school-going children reduces with the increase in school attendance and the time spent in studying and doing homework by a child. The findings of the study implicate that the cognitive abilities of low performing government school students can be improved by reducing their absenteeism in schools and increasing time for studying and doing homework after school.

就读私立学校的学生是否比印度的公立学校的学生学习更多并具有更高的认知能力？尽管最近的一些著作已经讨论了这个问题，但是解决这个问题的经验轮廓仍然不清楚，尤其是在印度多元化的学校教育市场中。本文使用第二轮印度人类发展调查数据研究了决定印度儿童学习成果（即阅读和数学成绩）不平等的因素。我们研究了孩子的“学校旷工”和“花在学习和做功课上的时间”对学习成果的影响，以及它们如何解释私立学校和公立学校孩子之间现有的学习差距。我们提供有力的证据表明，就读私立学校的孩子比公立学校的孩子有更好的学习成果。但是，私人上学和政府上学的孩子之间的这种表现差异随着上学率的提高以及孩子学习和做家庭作业的时间的增加而减小。该研究结果表明，通过减少在学校缺勤和增加放学后学习和做家庭作业的时间，可以改善表现不佳的公立学校学生的认知能力。