private-schools-full-report

The role and impact of private schools in developing countries: a rigorous review of the evidence
government primary graduates benefit from government secondary schooling. She also
explains that the government secondary schools tend to have more stringent admission
requirements than the private secondary schools, and that the latter (in contrast to the
primary sector) tend to have low status.
Important caveats
Comparing the effectiveness of ‘private’ with government schools in developing countries
is problematic because a potentially very large proportion of schools are
unregistered/unaided and therefore typically missing from the analysis (Tooley et al.
2011). If, as some studies have demonstrated, there is a difference between the
performance of children in aided versus unaided 8 private schools (Kingdon 2008), then
research that does not differentiate between them risks misrepresenting the ‘true’ private
school effect. There is also variation in the degree to which empirical studies address the
recognised methodological puzzle of accounting for unobserved/unmeasurable
differences in the socio-economic backgrounds of private and public school pupils. These
unobservables, which include home educational environment, or the degree to which
parents are educationally motivated, affect academic performance but cannot be easily
adjusted for in a statistical study. If they are not taken into account, however, then the
private school advantage is likely to be over-estimated and while many may not be able to
address the puzzle given data and methodological limitations, most studies do recognise
it; some even address it reasonably convincingly through methods such as family fixed
effects (Desai et al. 2008), panel data approaches (French and Kingdon 2010) and
randomised controlled trials (RCTs) (Angrist et al. 2002, 2006). Another major caveat is
that the debate about the relative quality of education should not detract from the fact
that overall learning levels of children in rural areas in many countries remain
worryingly low, whether at private or public schools. As the latest ASER report from
Pakistan acknowledges, the private school effect is often calculated relative to incredibly
low achievement levels in state schools, which ultimately questions the real measure of
the advantage for children attending them (ASER Pakistan 2014).
Notwithstanding the above caveats, the majority of the evidence reviewed here
supports the assumption that children attending private schools do achieve better
learning outcomes than their government counterparts, albeit to differing degrees, and
with some significant exceptions. Importantly, however, the size of this advantage is
sometimes small, always declines when unobservable and selection effects are controlled
for, varies between countries, within them (between urban and rural areas), and between
learning outcomes (e.g. numeracy, literacy) within schools. Additionally, it is widely
recognised that while quantitative studies drawing on survey data can show correlation
between school type and outcomes, they typically cannot explain the causal processes
underlying the observed correlations.
8 Private aided schools receive grants from the government whereas unaided schools are entirely
self-financed (Kingdon 1996).
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