The Competing State: The Causes and Consequences of Private Education in India

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Over the last two decades the Indian government has rapidly expanded public school provision. Public expenditure on primary education has tripled since 1990. Since the implementation of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (or Education for All) in 2004, a Central Government Scheme, India has built an average of 200 new government schools per district, or about 30 schools per district per year. The Right to Education Act, a constitutional amendment passed in 2009, has been compared to the United States Civil Rights movement for its sheer ambition in attempting to address the educational inequities of previously disenfranchised groups. As a result, India has achieved near universal enrollment in education, previously a pox on India’s social development record. At the same time, Indian households are increasingly turning to private and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for education. Approximately 35 percent of students attended a private school in 2011, nearly a doubling in private school enrollment since 2003. What is most striking about this move away from public education is that while it was previously an upper and middle class phenomenon, India’s poor have also begun to abandon public education. Citizens are choosing to “exit” state services and turn to private schools for education.

My dissertation asks two questions of this phenomenon. First, why has private school enrollment grown despite a large expansion of public education? And second, what effect has this had on Indian citizens’ engagement with the Indian state?

Poster Presentation
My poster presents two chapters from my dissertation: a chapter on the causes of the growth of private education across the country and a chapter on the effects of this growth on political attitudes and behavior.

The first chapter relies on a newly constructed dataset that combines census data, economic census data on all economic enterprises in India, school-level data on enrollment and infrastructure, and election data.

Through this, I show that private schools across India expanded fastest where state capacity had grown the fastest in the preceding years.

The second part of the poster speaks to my second research question. This chapter is based on a field experiment and original survey I conducted in late 2013. In this, I leverage a private school voucher lottery experiment that randomly distributed school vouchers to households in a large South Indian state. The vouchers allowed households to send their children to a private school for five years. I returned to the households five years after the vouchers were distributed and conducted a survey on political attitudes and behavior complemented with semi-structured interviews and participant observation in private and public schools.

Through this experiment, I found that physical exit to private schools change political attitudes to reflect greater comfort with the private sector in service provision for a broader number of services. Physical exit, however, does not lead to reduced political participation or engagement, and in some instances even increases participation.

Conclusions
My research findings suggests that private schools are inherently dependent on the prior growth of state capacity, both in territoriality and strength, to thrive. At the same time, exposure to private schools creates a class of citizens that are hostile to the further growth of the state. These results are concerning for a country trying to increase educational attainment as there are few examples of countries that have large numbers of students in the private sector and high educational achievement.

Author

• Emmerich Davies, University of Pennsylvania