Do private schools really produce more learning than public schools in India? Accounting for student’s school absenteeism and the time spent on homework
Introduction
There is credible evidence that being in school is not equal to learning, and it is the academic achievement of the children (and, not merely accessing schools) which is a good predictor of well-being at an individual and social level. India, like several other developing countries, has made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom but the learning challenge still remains, as documented extensively (World Bank, 2018; Pratham, 2019; MHRD, 2019; NCERT, 2020). The observed growth in enrolment rates in India has not been matched by comparable improvements in learning outcomes. Millions of Indian children cannot read, write or even carry out basic arithmetic (addition and subtraction), despite having attended eight years of schooling (World Bank, 2018; MHRD, 2019). For instance, nearly half of all children enrolled in grade 5 cannot read second-grade level text or solve simple two-digit subtraction problems (Pratham, 2019). The inequality in learning outcomes is a more serious concern in India as observed in the recent National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Children living in rural areas, with less-educated parents, poor households, and born in socially disadvantaged families such as scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and Muslims are not able to access good quality education in India. Over the years, parental decisions in India are shifting from just sending their children to schools to offer ‘quality school education’ that works as a reliable input for higher education and labour market outcomes of their offspring in the later part their life (World Bank, 2018).
A large body of research shows that the increasing demand for quality education, which has got specific attention in the changing realm of school education in India, is found to be a significant driver of the growing presence of private schools in India (Kingdon, 1996, 2007, 2020; Tilak and Sudarshan, 2001; Srivastava, 2008; Muralidharan and Kremer, 2009; Desai et al., 2009; Nambissan, 2012; Galab et al., 2013; Singh and Colin, 2014; Sahoo, 2017; Narwana, 2019; Choudhury, 2020). Several recent works find higher cognitive abilities of children attending private school than public school counterparts (Chudgar, 2012; Chudgar and Quin, 2012; Singh, 2015; White et al., 2016; Azam et al., 2016; Alcott and Rose, 2017; Wamalwa and Burns, 2018; Singhal and Das, 2019; McDonough et al., 2021). An early attempt to assess the school quality by Govinda et al. (1993) showed that achievement levels of primary school students in private unaided schools were considerably higher than those of pupils in either aided or government schools. Bashir (1997) found that, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (a state with better performing government schools), private primary school students performed significantly better than government school students. The study by Kingdon (1994) in Uttar Pradesh revealed that students attending private schools outperformed their aided and government school counterparts. The PROBE report findings show that private schools are generally more effective than public schools in India and provide better quality education (PROBE Team, 1999). Singh (2015) finds a substantial positive effect (>0.5 SD) of private schools on English test score in rural India. Singhal and Das (2019) find that children attending private schools perform significantly better than those from public schools, and this difference is evident among ‘low-fee’ private schools as well. Overall, several studies on measuring school quality tend to find a private school premium in India. However, Chudgar (2012) finds that “positive private effect” or the “private-public performance gap” does vary based on the village context. The presence of a robust government public school education system reduces private school advantage in the village.
Why do private schools perform better than public schools in India? Do they adopt some innovative strategies to produce more learning than their counterparts? It is evident that private schools implement better management practices (Bloom et al., 2015; Lemos et al., 2021), and effective classroom teaching methods (Singh, 2013) to improve the learning outcome of children as compared to government schools. Bloom et al. (2015) find that higher school management scores (specifically, principal leadership and governance) are positively correlated with better educational outcomes. Also, private schools in India scored most highly in managerial sores (an index that includes four broad areas of management such as operations, target setting and people management) than government schools. In a recent study, Lemos, Muralidharan & Scur (2021) find that private schools in India have higher management quality (especially people management), which is significantly correlated with teaching quality and student value-added. The better managed private schools are more likely to retain more effective teachers that improve the children’s learning outcome. Singh (2013) finds that specific practices of teachers within classrooms in private schools, such as checking children’s notebooks and using textbooks in class seem to have a significant impact on test scores. There is substantial evidence that more teachers and their availability in the private schools helps them in imparting better quality education in India (PROBE, 1999; Muralidharan and Kremer, 2009; Kingdon, 2009; Wadhwa, 2009; French and Kingdon, 2010; Thorat, 2011; Lahoti and Mukhopadhyay, 2019; Narwana, 2019). For instance, due to the better chain of accountability in private schools, teachers come to the school regularly and take the teaching activity seriously even though they are paid significantly less (Kingdon, 2020). Private schools hire more teachers (as they pay much lower salaries than the government schools), which helps them to lower the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) and reduce multi-grade teaching (Mehrotra and Panchamukhi, 2007; Goyal and Pandey, 2012; Kingdon, 2020). Also, private schools mostly appoint younger teachers from the locality where the school is situated which works as an added advantage for private schools to engage them in teaching activities for a longer time and also minimising their absence in the school (Muralidharan and Kremer, 2009). Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2015) study reveals that a typical day in a private school is longer than that of a government school, helping them learn for longer times than the government school-going children.
Even with the growing academic interest in measuring school efficiency, the precise channels through which private schools provide better quality education are still subject to discussion in India. Much academic research on measuring the efficiency of schools in India has been devoted to examining the school-related factors, particularly the availability of physical infrastructure and the role of teachers (Govinda et al., 1993; Kingdon, 1996, 2009, 2020; Kumar and Choudhury, 2020). And, relatively less is understood how home factors are accounted for improving the learning outcomes of the children. For instance, given the high degree of variation in the socioeconomic status of the school-going children in India, it is important to examine the impact of the time spent by the children in studying and doing homework at home on their learning outcomes, and more importantly, how this effect varies between the students accessing government and private schools? Similarly, understanding the effect of school attendance on the cognitive skills of students is another grey area in the literature on the learning crisis in India. Does the loss of school attendance affect student’s cognitive skills? How does its effect vary between government and private school children? These are some of the critical questions that have received less attention in private school literature in India, even though these are widely viewed as serious social and policy concerns. We pay particular attention to address these specific concerns in our analysis, and perhaps it is best accomplished with the use of a nationally representative household survey data in India. First, we examine the effect of attending private schools on children’s learning abilities to understand the growing preference for private schools in India. Second, we estimate the effect of a child’s school attendance and time spent on homework after school on his/her learning outcomes. Third, and most importantly, it accounts for the difference in the effect of these factors on children’s reading and math scores between private and government schools. We hypothesise that children attending private schools regularly attend classes and spend more time at home for study (than the students of government schools), which contributes to their learning achievements. That said, we expect that if students accessing government schools attend the school regularly and spend more time on homework after school, they can perform at par with private school counterparts.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the data and empirical design of the study. Section 3 discusses the empirical results, and the final section concludes and suggests a future research agenda.
Section snippets
Data
This study uses the second round1 of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) data that was collected in 2011–12. The survey was designed and administered by the researchers from the University of Maryland, the USA and the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi (Desai & Vanneman, 2015). The IHDS (2011−12) is a nationally representative survey of 2,04,569 individuals and 42,152
Determinants of reading and mathematics assessment score
Tables 2 provides the estimated coefficients of the explanatory variables for reading (i.e., Equation 1) and math assessment score (i.e., Equation 2). The results show that there is no significant gender difference in the reading score while female children have significantly lesser chances of performing better in math score as compared to their male counterparts. In the literature, there is a systematic documentation of the gender gap in math score in many countries, including India, and
Concluding comments
Several recent developments in Indian education have led to a growing interest in assessing private schools' performance, especially in their relative ability to improve student achievement compared to public schools. Largely, the available studies on comparing the school quality find a private school advantage in India, and this has led to a growing presence of the private sector in the school education market. The debate on the growth of private schooling and its association with learning
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [ICPSR] at https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36151.v6 [doi], V6 [2018-08-08].
Desai, S., & Vanneman, R. (2015). India Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II), 201 1-12. ICPSR36151-v6. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 31.
Declaration of Competing Interest
We wish to confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest.
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