Most of our knowledge about private schools is based on urban schools catering to elite students. Unfortunately, this has resulted in many misconceptions. India Human Development Survey of 2005 helps dispel some of these myths.
This all-India survey of 41,550 households was organised by researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, and was funded by the US National Institute of Health. Using data from about 36,700 children aged 6-14, this survey challenges a number of beliefs:
Myth 1: Only the rich send their children to private schools: Enrollment in private schools has grown rapidly in the past decade with 20% of rural and 51% of urban children in private schools. Even among households below the poverty line, 11% of rural and 35% of urban children are in private schools.
Myth 2: Excluding urban elite schools, most private schools offer little educational benefits: I must confess to sharing this belief. When I visited a three room school in a Rajasthan village, I wondered why parents would spend Rs 75 per month to send their children to this crowded school with untrained teachers when they could send them for free to a nearby spacious government school with trained teachers.
I better understood this preference for private schools when we administered simple reading, writing and arithmetic tests to 12,380 children aged 8-11 and found better educational performance for children from private schools independent of age and sex of the child. Figures show that 66% children from rural private schools were able to read simple paragraphs compared to 49% from government schools; the difference in urban areas is 74% vs 63%. Similar differences are visible in the ability to do simple subtraction and write a sentence.
Myth 3: Private schools educate elite children or children of highly motivated parents who would do well in any school: Children from most backgrounds seem to learn more in private schools, even those from households where no adult has been to school. Among families with no educated adult, 47% of children going to private school can read compared to 37% in government schools.
Since we were concerned that these results only reflect differences in parental emphasis on learning and motivation, we compared children from households where one child goes to private school and the other to government school. This is a very small sample, only 308 children, but the results are striking. In this matched group of children, 63% in private school can read, while 51% in government schools can read.
Myth 4: Market forces ensure higher quality of private schools: The difference between government and private schools is vast in some states and relatively minor in others. In Kerala and Maharashtra, the difference between children in government schools and private schools is relatively small while that in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan is large. In general, the difference between government and private schools has less to do with market forces and more with the quality of government schools. For example, urban kids in government schools seem to perform at a level similar to those in private schools in villages.
Myth 5: Private schooling is limited to enrolment in private schools: When we think of privatisation of education we focus mainly on private school enrolment. However, a substantial proportion of children take private tuition. In our sample, about 18% of the children from government schools took tuition at some time in the past year; the number for students from private schools is 27%. Nearly 40% children nationwide receive some private education, either through enrolment in private schools or through private tuition.
These results serve to highlight the shortcomings of public education. Although some poor parents find ways of stretching their budgets to send their children to private schools, most can't. When children of the rich and the poor study side by side, elites invest in ensuring higher quality schooling for their own children, which may lead to better accountability and improvement in overall school quality.
With the flight of middle class families from government schools, the school quality further deteriorates increasing educational inequality. With 51% of the urban children attending private schools, this process seems irreversible in cities. But there is still chance to turn things around in rural areas. Children of the rural rich and the poor have studied side by side in the years gone by, somewhat levelling the playing field. The present trend towards privatisation in rural areas is worrisome and suggests a need for restructuring of education system to improve quality and keep the middle class children in government schools.
(The author teaches at University of Maryland)