Adding Value To Education

India should celebrate the low-cost private school revolution that is underway

James Tooley

Something extraordinary is happening in education across rural India – that’s the conclusion that stands out in Pratham’s ASER 2009 report launched recently. The extraordinary concerns private education: Pratham devotes two special sections to private schools, which shows it recognises their importance.But it’s even more significant than highlighted. True, it points to enrolment of 6-14 year old rural children in private education being stable at around 22 per cent – that’s more than one in five children who go to private school. In some states it’s much higher – Haryana has 41 per cent and Uttar Pradesh has 36 per cent private school enrolment. In those states, two in five children go to private school. And this is about rural India; it is much higher in urban areas.

It’s true too that Pratham agrees children do much better in private than government schools – although it doesn’t seem particularly excited about it. Take ‘reading in children’s own mother tongue’. Here, the percentage of children in government schools who can read at least a class I text is 43.6. But in private schools it is 52.2 per cent. That’s an 8.6 percentage point difference, or a huge 20 per cent advantage to private schools. Fair enough, Pratham cautions us to hold on: it might be the brighter children who go to private schools, or the ones with more educated or wealthier parents. So the report’s writers adjust the results to take this into account.

Doing so, they find the private school advantage decreases: down from 8.6 percentage points to 2.9 – that is, they write, “a measly 5%” advantage. Perhaps it is only small. But remember, this is the children’s mother tongue. Most government schools teach in the mother tongue, whereas private schools are often English medium. You’d think that for all the criticisms levelled against Englishmedium private schools that they’re damaging young children’s prospects of learning, that at least government schools would do better in the mother tongue? Not a bit. Private schools are doing better in the area where everyone says government schools should have the advantage.

But what about English? This year, Pratham tested for English ability. Here the results are quite outstanding – and incidentally answer those critics who say rural private schools are English medium in name only, fooling poor parents who can’t really tell what they’re teaching. In government schools, the percentage of children who can at least read simple words in English is 26.5, compared to 44.2 per cent in private schools – a 17.7 percentage point difference, or a massive 67 per cent advantage. After statistically controlling for important variables, the difference falls, but only to 10.8 percentage points, still a huge 41 per cent advantage.

So private schools are serving a significant proportion of rural children, and are outperforming government schools. But here, Pratham misses a trick. Perhaps it’s because we always think of private education as being elitist, that we don’t then ask the next obvious question: what about cost? And here, the true remarkableness of this private education revolution is revealed. For private schools in general in the villages are not the expensive ones we’re used to, but are low-cost, budget schools, affordable to many even on minimum wage incomes. My team looked at rural private schools a couple of years ago, in rural Mahbubnagar, one of the poorest districts in rural Andhra Pradesh. We found a roughly similar proportion of children enrolled in private schools in that district as Pratham found for the (rural) state – we found 26.0 per cent, it found 29.2 per cent. But we also looked at fees: these were, for class IV, about Rs 100 per month in the recognised private schools, and Rs 70 per month in the unrecognised. That’s up to Rs 1,200 per year, incredibly little. And these low-cost private schools are exactly the type of school that will make up the majority of Pratham’s nationwide sample.

So the trick Pratham misses is about value for money. Even looking at the costs in the classroom alone, we found salaries in government schools are about seven times higher than private unrecognised schools, and about three and a half times higher than the private recognised schools. And that’s ignoring all the other funding that comes from the state for all those people serving the education department, and it’s forgetting contributions from central government too.

In other words, the revolution revealed by Pratham taking place in rural India today features private schools serving a significant minority of children, outperforming government schools, at a fraction of the cost. Now, surely that’s something we should be celebrating?

The central government’s flagship programme is Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, designed to increase access to, and raise the standards, in elementary schools across India. It alone brings in Rs 1,700 per child per annum – over and above what states already pay for government education. Now here’s a thought: if all that money had gone on education vouchers, that alone would pay the fees for every child in India to attend a low-cost private school and leave something to spare for books. Wouldn’t that have been a very simple, but rather effective, way of raising the quality of education in India today?

The writer is professor of education policy, Newcastle University, UK.

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