Assessing the Impact of Private School Sector Growth on Caste-based Segregation in India

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education Policy and Practice in South Asia

Proposal

Despite having a comprehensive caste-based affirmative action system for over 70 years, caste continues to stratify Indian society. Even today, caste is associated with occupational status (Cassan, et al., 2022), income and wealth (Bharti, 2018; Borooah, 2005), intergenerational mobility (Asher, et al., 2020), and residential location (Adukia, et al., 2019; Singh, et al., 2019). These societal disadvantages have seeped into the educational system as well. Children from marginalized castes face consistent disadvantages in both educational attainment (Varughese & Bairagya, 2020) and achievement (V. K. Borooah, 2012; Desai, et al., 2010). These inequalities may be perpetuated, or even exacerbated, by school-level factors as evidence shows widespread caste-based segregation in Indian schools. I calculated several indices of segregation including the isolation index, Theil’s H index, and intense segregation index. The Theil’s H index, which is a measure of diversity, ranged from 0.43 to 0.45 between 2006-07 and 2017-18 (Authors Calculations). This is extremely concerning as an H index over 0.4 is considered to be extremely high (Ayscue et al., 2018). Further, there has been no substantial reductions in segregation over the past decade. These results highlight the need for further research on caste-based school segregation in India and an exploration of factors contributing to such segregation.

One often-cited, potential source of caste-based segregation is unequal access to private schools. Over the past decade, private school enrollment in India has grown rapidly. Between 2005-06 and 2017-18, the number of private schools has increased 136%, compared to only 21 percent growth in the number of government schools (Author’s calculations). At the same time, the private school (unaided) share of enrollment rose from 14 percent 2005-06 to 35 percent in 2019-20 (Author’s calculations). The growth of the private sector could exacerbate gaps in access. This is supported by descriptive statistics which show that there is unequal distribution of students across public and private schools, i.e., a larger proportion of non-marginalized caste students attend private schools compared to marginalized caste students (Author’s calculations, Chudgar & Creed, 2016). More concerningly, this caste gap in private school attendance widened over the last decade (Author’s calculations). This has led to a concern that private schools may be increasing segregation (Chudgar & Creed, 2016; Kingdon, 2020). On the other hand, proponents argue that this rise in private schools is driven by low-fee schools that improve access to education in areas where government schools are unavailable or under-resourced (Tooley & Dixon, 2003). To answer this question, Chudgar and Creed (2016) assessed if private school growth was associated with increased access for marginalized groups and found no evidence for this argument. I propose to build on this study by assessing the impact of private sector growth on caste-based school segregation.

This will also be the first study to use school-level data from a national census of Indian schools, the District Information System in Education (DISE), to answer this question. DISE includes data on a wide range of educational variables including administrative information (urbanicity, management type, medium of instruction, etc.), student enrollment data (by caste), school infrastructure and facilities, and teachers. I use data from the 2006-07 school year to 2017-18 on around 17.8 million school-year observations. Since previous studies have relied on state-level datasets, DISE affords us the unique ability to study national trends in segregation and private sector growth. I plan to use these longitudinal, school-level DISE data to understand whether year-to-year growth in private sector enrollment at the village level is associated with increases in village-level segregation measures (measured in multiple ways). I will be using fixed effects regression to study this question.

Author

• Rohitha Edara, Pennsylvania State University