These results suggest that both sides of the public versus private debate need to exercise caution in their recommended policy approaches to improve education quality. Advocates of private schools need to confront the fact that the lottery-winners did not learn more in Maths and Telugu compared with the lottery-losers (suggesting that most of the observed differences between public and private schools reflect socio-economic factors). Given the abysmally low levels of overall literacy and numeracy, they also need to recognize that increasing the share of private-schooling, in its current form, is unlikely to solve India’s education quality problem. While private school teachers are clearly more accountable and work harder than their public school counterparts, it is possible that the binding constraint to education quality lies elsewhere—including a mismatch between the curriculum and student learning levels, and an education system that disproportionately values top-performing students and does not care about helping low-performing students to achieve functional literacy and numeracy and realize their full potential. These systemic pathologies afflict both public and private schools and an excessive focus on private schooling as a panacea may divert attention from fundamental issues of pedagogy and learning.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 14:28:38 +0000
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