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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
The progress of school education in India
* Department of Economics, University of Oxford, e-mail: geeta.kingdon{at}economics.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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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.
Key Words: school education • India
1 Though see section III(ii) on India's current school attendance rates.
2 For TIMSS, see http://nces.ed.gov/timss/; for PIRLS see http://timss.bc.edu/pirls2001.html; for SACMEQ see http://www.sacmeq.org/
3 There are certain caveats about the direct comparability of the Indian and international results (see World Bank (2006, p. 58) for details). In particular, internationally the tests were administered to students of grades 8 and 12, but in India they were applied to students of grades 9 and 11 for logistical reasons (e.g. there was a desire not to disturb students of grade 12 who were close to their board examinations). The more difficult items in the original TIMSS intended for grade 8 were selected for grade 9 and the easier items originally intended for grade 12 were applied to grade 11. The selected items were shown to state officials, teachers, and students to ensure that they were a reasonable choice in relation to the curriculum.
4 International comparison of achievement among school-going 14-year-olds across 25 high- and low-income countries, using IEA data collected in the early 1970s, showed that the mean science test score of Indian students was the second lowest. Iran was behind India by a small margin. Mean scores of students in Bolivia, Thailand, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay were all higher than those of Indian students; the mean score of Japanese students was twice as high as that of Indian students. The results were similar in (own-language) reading comprehension: median reading score was 26 points, Chile's mean was 14 points, Iran's 8 points, and India's the lowest at 5 points (Kingdon, 1994, p. 8).
5 Though the figure seems high in relation to the Government of India's ‘Selected Education Statistics’ for 2002/3, where gross enrolment rate in middle-level education (grades 6–8) was only 61 per cent, even though it was 95.4 per cent in primary education (grades 1–5). The great progress in basic education participation is consistent with an increase in both the demand for and supply of education. The PROBE report (Probe Team, 1999, p. 19) reported a broad-based surge in educational aspirations in the 1990s. Demand for education also increased owing to the well-documented reductions in poverty since the early 1990s, which made it possible for the poor to realize their educational aspirations. It may also have risen partly due to reduction in fertility levels if there is a trade-off between the number of children and the education of each child within the family: total fertility rate for India as a whole fell from 3.4 to 2.7 in the period between 1993 and 2005 (National Family Health Survey, 2007). Finally, demand for education may also have increased if the perceived benefits of education—its private economic rates of return—increased.
6 While education is endogenous in an earnings function, Card (2001) finds that estimates of the coefficient on schooling made using an instrumental variable strategy are not far different from (and, indeed, typically larger than) corresponding OLS estimates.
7 Jharkhand split off from Bihar, and Chattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh in 2001 to form independent new states.
8 National Sample Survey (NSS) data show that among 5–14-year-olds, school attendance rate in 2004–5 was 82.1 per cent. Of course this cannot be compared directly with NFHS school attendance rates, since the latter refer to ages 6–14, and the mandated school starting age is 6.
9 Literacy rates increased by 6.2 percentage points in the 1960s, 9.2 points in the 1970s, and 8.5 points in the 1980s.
10 Corresponding data from NFHS 2005/6 are not available yet.
11 Absence rates varied from 15 per cent in Maharashtra to 42 per cent in Jharkhand, with higher rates concentrated in the poorer states. They also found that in a village fixed-effects equation of teacher absence, private-school teachers were 8 percentage points less likely to be absent than public-school teachers in the same village.
12 We do not include the so-called ‘private aided’ schools in the category of private schools. Aided schools are run by private management but funded largely by government grants-in-aid and are very similar to government schools in many respects. They charge the same fee levels as government schools (now mandated to be nil) and, following centralizing legislation in the early 1970s, their teachers are paid directly from the state government treasury at the state teacher salary rates. Schools run by private management without state aid are ‘private unaided’. These run entirely on fee revenues and have virtually no state involvement. Unaided schools are, thus, the genuinely private schools and henceforth we refer to these simply as ‘private’ and refer to private aided schools simply as ‘aided’.
13 Indeed, some of the conditions are, or have over time become, mutually inconsistent. For instance, the condition to charge only government-school tuition-fee rates is now incompatible with the condition to pay the government-prescribed salary rates to teachers, since government school fee rates have been cut consistently since the 1960s and were abolished altogether in the early 1990s in all elementary schools, and since government-prescribed minimum salaries to teachers have risen inexorably over time: Kingdon and Muzammil (2003, ch. 13) estimate that average teacher salary rates rose by a remarkably high rate of 5 per cent per annum in real terms in the 22-year period between 1974 and 1996.
14 See Kingdon (1996a) for an early challenge to the notion, based on official published data, that the size of the private sector in primary education was ‘infinitesimally small’ or ‘negligibly small’.
15 Only national figures are available in spring 2007. The latest figures for the year 2004/5 from the District Information System for Education (DISE) are not shown because of its incomplete coverage. Similarly, findings from the ASER household survey are not shown as it does not distinguish between aided and unaided schools, and merges them together into a single ‘private’ category.
16 The two sources are not exactly comparable since it is possible that some school-going 6–10-year-olds may attend pre-primary or upper primary classes. However, it is unlikely that many 6–10-year-olds would be in upper primary classes. Overall, 9.8 per cent of all 6–14-year-old rural Indian school-goers went to private schools (Shariff, 1999).
17 Although ASER merged aided and unaided private schools into a single category ‘private’, at the primary level of education, there are very few aided schools so that the ‘private’ enrolment rates in ASER can be taken to mean mostly private unaided school enrolments.
18 It seems that rural private schools, in particular, do not easily obtain government recognition, for which many conditions need to be shown to be satisfied. As Kingdon (1996a) says, given the exacting conditions for and scant rewards of recognition, it is not surprising that most private primary schools remain unrecognized.
19 Aggarwal (2000) found that in his four surveyed districts of Haryana in 1999, there were 2,120 private primary schools, of which 41 per cent were unrecognized. The Probe survey of 1996 in five north-Indian states did a complete census of all schools in 188 sample villages. It found 41 private schools, of which 63 per cent were unrecognized. Mehta (2005) found that in seven districts of Punjab, there were 3,058 private elementary (primary plus junior) schools, of which 86 per cent were unrecognized. For more detailed evidence on this based on various data sources, see Kingdon (2006).
20 While Kingdon's study is based on students in the final year of upper primary education (grade 8), the other studies are based on students in the final year of lower primary schooling (grades 4 or 5). The methods used differed, too. Bashir used hierarchical linear modelling, Govinda and Varghese used OLS regression, and Kingdon used sample selectivity correction models. The extent of controls for home background differed across the studies, too, as well as whether school and teacher characteristics were included in the achievement equations. Finally, the costs of private and public schooling were calculated differently in the different studies.
21 See the section entitled ‘Fifth Pay Commission related strikes (1997–2001)’ in ch. 10 and also see ch. 13, of Kingdon and Muzammil (2003). The pay increase came into effect retrospectively from 1 January 1996.
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