Why Growth Matters (29 page)

Source data for
Figures 17.1
to
17.4
:
www.educationforallinindia.com/ses.html
(accessed December 12, 2011)

That most children ages six to fourteen are now in school is further corroborated by the annual surveys conducted in rural areas by the NGO Pratham. According to its latest survey, summarized in the report
Aser 2010
, the percentage of children ages six to fourteen not enrolled in school fell from 6.6 percent in 2005 to 3.5 in 2010 in rural India. The proportion of girls not enrolled fell from 11.2 to 5.9 percent over the same period.

These trends show the power of growth directly and through enhanced revenues to support social goals. Given the increasing role private schools have played in elementary education, the direct role of growth in its spread cannot be denied.
²
At the same time, the government has been able to expand public schools more rapidly, thanks to enhanced revenues. The government effort became particularly intense after the launch of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA; universal education movement) in November 2000. It is on the strength of this expansion in both private and public sectors that the Indian government was able to adopt free and compulsory elementary education as a fundamental right beginning on April 1, 2010.

It is important to discuss the effectiveness of private schools, which have become an increasingly important part of India's elementary education landscape, in relation to that of public schools. These schools represent a wide range in terms of physical infrastructure and other resources, formal training of teachers, and tuition.

At one extreme, we have a small proportion of elite government-recognized schools, which offer excellent infrastructure, trained teachers, low student–teacher ratios, and very high tuition fees. This set of schools attracts talented students from elite families and produces outcomes superior to those of public schools. At the other extreme, we have a large number of “unrecognized” schools with relatively poor infrastructure, untrained teachers, and low tuition fees. These schools exist in both rural
areas and in poor neighborhoods and slums in the cities. The number of private schools now ranges in the hundreds of thousands across India.

According to available evidence, even the low-end unrecognized schools have produced outcomes superior to those of their public counterparts operating in the same geographical area. They have done this while paying salaries to teachers that are a small fraction of public-school salaries. Compared to the latter, they are also generally poorly equipped in terms of playgrounds, classroom space, and libraries. The single most important key to their success has been the accountability of teachers. Public schoolteachers are state employees and are almost entirely immune from layoffs under any circumstances. Therefore, unless they feel morally obligated to teach their pupils, they have no incentive to carry out their assigned duties with any degree of sincerity. Teachers in private school do not enjoy such immunity and can be shown the door if they fail to deliver minimum outcomes. The result has been a far greater incidence in the public schools of teacher absenteeism and poor performance by the teachers when present in the classroom.

Muralidharan and Kremer (2006), who collected a nationally representative sample from rural India in 2003, estimate that 28 percent of the rural children in India had access to fee-charging private primary schools in the village where they lived that year. They show that children in these schools exhibited higher attendance rates and test scores than in government schools. Private school teachers were 2 to 8 percentage points less likely to be absent and 6 to 9 percentage points more likely to be teaching when present than government schoolteachers. Muralidharan and Kremer also report that private schoolteachers received salaries that were typically one-fifth and sometimes as low as one-tenth of those received by government schoolteachers.

The authors point to the head teacher's ability to discipline the teachers under him as the key reason for lower absenteeism in private schools. They note that out of 3,000 government schools they surveyed, only one head teacher had dismissed a teacher for repeated absences. In the private sector, they found thirty-five such cases in just six hundred schools surveyed.

Tooley and Dixon (undated), who undertook a census of primary and secondary schools in one of the poorest areas of Delhi, Shahdara, in
2004–2005, report very similar findings. They found a total of 275 schools in the area, of which 27 percent were government owned; 7 percent private but government aided; 38 percent private, unaided, and recognized; and 28 percent private, unaided, and unrecognized. The last two categories, accounting for 66 percent of the total number of schools, represented entirely private schools.

Tooley and Dixon state that upon unannounced visits, their researchers found 38 percent of teachers teaching in government schools, compared with 70 percent in private schools. They tested 3,500 students and found that compared to their government-school counterparts, students in unrecognized private schools scored on average 72 percent higher in mathematics, 83 percent higher in Hindi, and 246 percent higher in English. Students in the recognized private schools did even better. The private-school advantage was maintained after controlling for background variables.

Tooley and Dixon further report that the government teachers earned seven times as much as teachers in private unrecognized schools. Though class sizes were larger in the government schools, the salary per pupil in them remained two and a half times that of private unrecognized schools. Yet, surprisingly, the teachers in unaided schools reported that they were no less satisfied than their counterparts in government schools in terms of salaries, holidays, or social standing.
³

Against this background, we may examine the current elementary education policy of the Indian government. The key features of this policy are now enshrined in the 2009 Right to Education (RTE) Act and the model rules that elaborate upon several of the provisions in the act. (We provide the salient features of the RTE Act in Appendix 3.)

At one level, the RTE Act is quite pernicious. Potentially, it can do to elementary education what we found the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) to have done to manufacturing: enforce standards of protection that end up hurting the very population it is intended to protect while bringing significant benefits to a lucky few. On the one hand, the IDA
has provided ultrahigh protection to workers lucky enough to land a handful of the jobs in the organized sector. On the other hand, it has been destructive of organized-sector labor-intensive manufacturing and therefore well-paid manufacturing jobs. As our discussion below suggests, if implemented as provided, the RTE Act would similarly end the access of millions of poor children to decent private elementary education while giving a select few access to the country's best private schools.

The RTE Act provides that every child between six and fourteen years of age has the right to free and compulsory elementary education. The “right” is given to the child, while the burden of “compulsion” falls on the state government (or the central government in the case of the union territories) and on the local government, such as the municipal corporation in the city and
panchayat
in the village.

Given that universal elementary education is now within India's grasp, this provision is clearly welcome. Yet, the simultaneous requirement that local governments proactively pursue every child in their jurisdiction to place him or her in school is quite unrealistic.
⁴
For one thing, state and local governments in India lack the capacity to enforce such a requirement. And besides, given the high levels of poverty, there are bound to be cases, especially in rural areas and among the tribes, in which families are so poor that they need children to work to help them get two square meals a day.

The RTE Act further requires all unaided private schools to reserve 25 percent of the seats in grade one for children from weaker sections and disadvantaged groups in the neighborhood. Under the act, the government must reimburse the school at the per student rate that it spends in public schools.

It should be obvious that this provision does not advance in any way the right to education since it crowds out one-for-one the students from other sections of the society in favor of the students admitted from weaker and socially disadvantaged families. Therefore, it is purely a redistribution measure that gives the children from weak and disadvantaged families access to high-quality private schools. While this is a worthy objective, its promotion as a right-to-education measure misleads.

There are other downsides of the provision. It essentially amounts to a cross-subsidy. Reimbursement at per student expenditure in public education will fall short of the actual expense in the high-quality private schools. This will raise the cost to fee-paying students and discourage the entry of new high-quality private schools on the margin. A more efficient instrument would be for the government to offer to cover the entire fee of the selected students, from the general budget. Alternatively, it could offer the children vouchers worth the per capita expenditure in public schools and then have them find the private school of their choice willing to admit them in return for the voucher. This would encourage rather than discourage the emergence of private schools.

The government's approach to promote equality in the manner it has chosen raises other questions. The poor and disadvantaged who are nevertheless rich or lucky enough to live in areas where quality private schools exist will gain access to such schools. But the poorest among the poor, who live in poor neighborhoods and remote villages where quality private schools do not exist, get nothing at all. Indeed, as we discuss below, another provision in the RTE Act positively hurts them. Thus, the act effectively divides the underprivileged themselves into beneficiaries and victims.

Finally, there is a real danger that implementing the provision will lead to wholesale interference in the admission process by influential politicians and bureaucrats. The government must first devise the means to identify the weak and disadvantaged families. It must then match the children from these families with the schools. Given that no admission tests are permitted under the act (see Appendix 3), there would seem to be no obvious alternative transparent mechanism for this matching other than a lottery. But one and a half years into the implementation phase, the mechanisms are far from clear.

However, the most pernicious provision of the act involves setting minimum norms and standards for all schools. These take the form not of outcomes, such as achievements of children in reading, writing, and problem-solving, but instead physical amenities in the school. They include a student–teacher ratio of thirty for primary and thirty-five for
middle-level education; an all-weather building with one classroom per teacher, a kitchen for midday meals, and a playground; a well-equipped library; games and sports equipment; and more. All schools are required to achieve these norms by March 31, 2013.

At the fee they charge, the vast majority of the low-end unrecognized schools will not be able to meet these norms and standards.
⁵
At the same time, the poor families they serve cannot pay significantly higher fees. Therefore, if this provision is implemented, the impact will almost surely be a closure of many of these schools. Alternatively, it will create a large-scale inspector raj in elementary education whereby government inspectors will falsely certify that the school meets the prescribed norms and standards in exchange for an appropriate bribe.

If the first of these outcomes is what is realized, it is doubtful that the government will be able to provide the displaced children seats in schools that meet the prescribed norms and standards and have the qualified teachers as stipulated in the RTE Act. Indeed, there is a good chance that rather than bring more children into the fold of elementary education, the RTE Act will wind up forcing some of the children currently enrolled in low-end private schools out of the education system altogether.

Several other provisions of the RTE Act and model rules are problematic as well. According to the latter, scales of pay and allowances, medical facilities, pension, gratuity, provident fund, and other prescribed benefits of teachers are to be those applicable to regular teachers. Once again, the vast majority of unrecognized schools will go bust if they have to pay these salaries since the children they serve come from poor families.

Ironically, while guaranteeing teachers in all schools much higher salaries and benefits than most private schools currently can afford, the RTE Act stops well short of providing effective measures to force the teachers to perform their duties. It simply prescribes “disciplinary action under the service rules applicable” to the teacher for failure to perform his or her duties. Such disciplinary actions have done precious little to discourage teachers from shirking their duties in the past and surely won't do so in the future.

The RTE Act stipulates that no child can be required to pass any board examination until completing the elementary examination with automatic promotion to the next grade guaranteed. At one level, this measure is intended to bring down the dropout rate, but the other side of the coin is that it can potentially kill the value of education altogether. In a system that grants diplomas without passing a single board examination and everyone has the diploma in view of the compulsory education, its value to a potential employer is hard to assess. Absent examinations, it will also become nearly impossible to measure the progress in improving the quality of education over time.

Finally, the RTE Act also prohibits schools from subjecting either the child or the parent to any kind of screening procedure for admission purposes. While there is some merit in this provision, especially the prohibition on the screening of parents, it is not clear how else schools would make their admission decisions. Once testing of children is outlawed, the scope for arbitrariness in admissions is likely to rise unless the government forces schools to do admissions by random assignments among applicants. That is, however, an unlikely prospect.