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The political, economic and societal challenges encountered by public school systems in developing countries

Tue, March 7, 2:45 to 4:15pm, Sheraton Atlanta, Floor: 1, Georgia 5 (South Tower)

Proposal

This paper was motivated by the question, what are the challenges faced by public schools in developing countries in their quest to reform and compete? An understanding of impediments and supports to public school reform efforts, as experienced by school personnel and education officials, is critical for the long-term survival of public schools since private schools are growing in popularity in emerging Asia and Africa (Thapa, 2011; Tooley and Dixon, 2005; World Bank, 2013).

In many parts of the world, public schools seem to be on an un-ending cycling of reform. For instance, in the United States, the complexity of reform process that has led to the rise of very different accountability pressures to incentivize productive public school behavior in many developed countries (Rouse, Hannaway, Goldhaber and Figlio, 2013). Low- income public schools face a wide variety of other challenges, including populations with difficult backgrounds, difficult disciplinary environments, higher teacher turnover, and bleak future prospects. Not surprisingly, previous research into the processes of school choice has suggested that a school’s response to compete would be affected by a wide variety of mediating factors, such as resource constraints and personal motivation and expectations (Hess, Maranto and Milliman, 2001; Mohrman and Lawler, 1996; Zief, Maynard, Bradley, Keefe, and Kralik, 2005).

While not as well studied, the challenges faced by low-income contexts are likely to be intensified and more foundational, given the much higher levels of poverty.

This study is a mixed methods analysis of the challenges and supports faced by public schools in their quest (1) to reform and (2) to compete with ever growing numbers of private schools in developing countries.

Using primary and secondary survey and interview data collection, I first conduct qualitative analysis of interview data (80 interviews with national, district and school level officials) and descriptive statistics of principal perceptions (293 principals from public and private schools in two districts) to describe the barriers and supports to reform that affect public schools more frequently than private schools.

Then, I analyze whether the barriers (and supports) to reform can be systematically linked to the extent of private sector growth by conducting logistic regressions of the perception indicators of barriers and supports to reform on competition measures, school and community covariates.

I find that principals of public schools that face more competition are more likely to highlight poor government monitoring and the lack of parental educational awareness than principals of public schools that face less competition. School principals in high competition regions experience significant district influence in teacher hiring and agree that public schools lack incentives to compete due to a lack of monitoring supports and a higher number of politically appointed teachers. Furthermore, principals in regions with high privatization are much more likely to agree that public school parents are not education conscious than principals in public schools in low competition regions, which provides suggestive evidence of flight of middle class and educated families to private schools in regions with higher privatization.

These results suggest that the public schools that are located in high privatization regions face a higher order of constraints, and may be unable to respond to competition without significant targeted government intervention.

This paper adds to the limited literature on public school officials and principals’ perceptions of the barriers they face in trying to reform and compete in a low-income setting, Nepal. It highlights the various political, community and financial and bureaucratic challenges faced by public schools in Nepal – some of which are actionable and others are deep rooted challenges which require actions beyond the education sector.

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