Why do private schools consistently outperform public schools in Zanzibar?

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Policy, monitoring & evaluation

Proposal

The relationship between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their educational outcomes is well documented in the literature (Noel & de Broucker, 2001; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2004). The higher a student’s SES, the stronger his or her educational outcomes tend to be on average. For example, higher SES students typically have higher scores on standardized achievement tests and are more likely to complete secondary school and university than their peers from lower SES backgrounds (Blossfeld & Shavit, 1993; Willms, 1999). This study focused on the non-socioeconomic factors influencing student exam performance in Zanzibar. An emphasis on alternative factors for low performance was important for the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) in Zanzibar because it wanted to understand what evidence-based policies it could pursue with the limited resources it had within the education sector to level the playing field, in particular between public and private school students.

In Zanzibar, private schools outperform public schools in terms of student performance on national examinations. On average, private schools score 9 percentage points higher on Standard VI examinations taken when students are about 12 years old and 15 percentage points higher on Form II examinations, taken when students are about 14 years old (MoEVT, 2017). Moreover, the performance gap between private and public schools is growing significantly, from 8 percentage points in 2015 to 15 percentage points in 2017 for Standard VI, and from 11 percentage points in 2015 to 15 percentage points in 2017 for Form II (ibid).

My colleagues and I within the research department at the MoEVT conducted a comprehensive survey administered to students, teachers and parents across 97 randomly selected primary and secondary schools, both public and private, across Zanzibar. The mixed method survey consisted of head teacher and teacher interviews; lesson observations in math, science, English and Kiswahili, student interviews, student take home questionnaires, school observations, as well as student knowledge assessments based on prior national exams for Standards IV, VI and Form 2. We find that after controlling for the socio-economic background of Zanzibari students, the most significant out-of-school factor that impacted exam performance was having had a pre-primary education. Within in-school factors, we find that a consistent use of English in classes by teachers, employment of a larger number of non-teaching staff to reduce the administrative burden of teachers, and reduction of the size of the student: classroom ratio was significant for explaining why private school students consistently and significantly scored higher than their public-school counterparts.

The findings of this study are important for Zanzibar, in terms of the policies the MoEVT can pursue to ensure that the playing field between public and private school students is leveled and that all students have a higher opportunity to do well in the national exams, regardless of their SES. It is also informative for other East African and developing countries who may see high inequalities in their inter-school performance in their countries.

Authors

• Masoud A. Masoud, Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, Zanzibar

• Nisma Elias, University of Minnesota