Private Education for All: Policy Drift in Mass Education Expansion in India

• In Event: The Supply Side of Teacher Labor Markets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Proposal

In the early 1980s, very little of India's primary education was provided privately. What existed was mainly targeted at wealthy households and concentrated in urban areas. In 2019, approximately forty percent of Indian primary school-aged children attend a private school, many in "low-fee" private schools. How did such a dramatic shift happen in that time? Existing explanations point to the role of international communities promoting private education, the poor quality of public education, and India's market-oriented reforms that allowed for the expansion of private providers. In this paper, I argue that the rapid expansion of private primary education is an indirect consequence of the rapid expansion of access to publicly provided primary education. Indian State and Central Governments expanded publicly provided education by radically decreasing the cost of hiring teaching labor in the public sector. This created an excess supply of low-cost teaching labor that taught in both the public and private sector, allowing private actors to also reduce the cost of expanding education. I first test this argument by tracing the history of State and Central level programs that sought to expand public primary education beginning in the late 1980s. I then explore the effects of these policies on who becomes a teacher over this period. I test this quantitatively against a panel dataset of the teacher labor force and find that the expansion of publicly provided education was soon followed by the expansion of private education. Using seven rounds of the National Sample Survey from 1986 to 2012, I explore the changing demographics of the teacher labor force in the government and private sector. This provides a novel, long-term explanation for the expansion of private education, and argues that scholars of comparative education should study processes that evolve over a long period of time for contemporary phenomena.

Author

• Emmerich Davies, Harvard Graduate School of Education