Suchergebnisse

This paper provides an overview of school education in India. First, it places India's educational achievements in international perspective, particularly against countries with which it is now increasingly compared, especially China. Second, the paper examines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendance rates, and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates, learning achievement levels, school resources, and teacher inputs. Third, the paper investigates the role of private schooling in India, examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveying evidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of private and public schools. Last, the paper discusses some major public education initiatives. The concluding section suggests a future research agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impacts and costs of the numerous existing educational interventions, in order to learn about their relative cost-effectiveness for evidence-based policy-making.

This paper examines the size, growth, salaries, per-pupil-costs, pupil achievement levels and cost-effectiveness of private schools, and compares these with the government school sector. Official data show a steep growth of private schooling and a corresponding rapid shrinkage in the size of the government school sector in India, suggesting parental abandonment of government schools. Data show that a very large majority of private schools in most states are 'low-fee' when judged in relation to: state per capita income, per-pupil expenditure in the government schools, and the officially-stipulated rural minimum wage rate for daily-wage-labour. This suggests that affordability is an important factor behind the migration towards and growth of private schools. The main reason for the very low fee levels in private schools is their lower teacher salaries, which the data show to be a small fraction of the salaries paid in government schools; this is possible because private schools pay the market-clearing wage, which is depressed by a large supply of unemployed graduates in the country, whereas government schools pay bureaucratically determined minimum-wages. Private schools' substantially lower per-student-cost combined with their students' modestly higher learning achievement levels, means that they are significantly more cost-effective than government schools. The paper shows how education policies relating to private schools are harmful when formulated without seeking the evidence.

Differential treatment of sons and daughters by parents is a potential explanation of the gender gap in education in developing countries. This study empirically tests this explanation for India using household survey data collected in urban Uttar Pradesh in 1995. The gender difference in educational attainment is decomposed into the part that is explained by men and women's differential characteristics and the part that is not so explained (the conventional "discrimination" component). The analysis suggests that girls face significantly different treatment in the infra-household allocation of education - there is a large unexplained component in the gender gap in schooling attainment. (InWent/DÜI)