Governing by Contract: The Privatization of Basic Education: The case of Education Management Organizations in Pakistan

• In Event: Governing and Leading Education Reform: Policy, Partnerships, and Peace in Complex Systems

Proposal

This study presentation highlights the design, implementation, and effects of Education Management Organization (EMO) contracts—Sindh’s flagship public–private partnership (PPP) reform for basic education—within the post-devolution policy space created by Pakistan’s 18th Constitutional Amendment (2010) and the province’s PPP legal framework. Using Sindh as a revelatory case, we analyze how globalization-era privatization logics and contractual governance reconfigured the roles of the state, private providers, and civil society in schooling: government as rule-setter and evaluator, and non-state actors as operating agents.

Research questions: (1) How does the EMO PPP model redistribute authority, accountability, and day‑to‑day practice across provincial, district, and school levels? (2) Through what mechanisms—and with what distributional effects—does EMO contracting influence access, staff attendance, and student learning outcomes in public schools from 2016 to 2022, amid shocks such as COVID‑19 and FLOODING-22?

We focus on EMO contracting linked to a large provincial school‑improvement program (planning initiated 2012–2018 with extension; EMO operations 2016–2022). EMOs were selected via competitive procurement to manage newly constructed and clustered public schools under performance‑based contracts with key performance indicators (KPIs), monitoring, and financial oversight. Convergent mixed methods integrate desk review of policy and contract documents with key‑informant interviews (provincial and district officials, PPP units, school leaders, EMO staff), focus‑group discussions with teachers/parents, and a small-scale survey. The analysis combines thematic coding and descriptive statistics to assess accessibility, accountability, and quality, including system resilience during COVID‑19 (2020–2021) and flood‑related disruptions (2022).

Findings reveal substantial scale and measurable shifts: over 400,000 additional students engaged in the system, more than 28% enrollment growth in EMO schools, over 12% staff attendance, and average annual assessment scores rising from 53% to 75% (girls and boys). We probe mechanisms and trade‑offs behind these aggregate gains—selection effects, cluster governance, peer‑accountability routines, and the political economy of contracting—alongside bottlenecks (turnover, geographic dispersion, fiscal predictability). We conclude with actionable implications for school‑clustering policy, contract design (Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), oversight, equity safeguards), and provincial capacity under devolution—offering comparative lessons for PPPs in multi‑hazard, low‑ to middle‑income settings.

Keywords: public–private partnerships; EMO; contracting; political economy; non-state actors; accountability; devolution; Sindh; Pakistan; resilience; learning outcomes

Authors

• Daman A. Bozdar, The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)

• Imdad Ali Baloch, International Education Policy Department, University of Maryland, College Park