Private Schooling Research Articles

Does private education pay off?

AbstractEducation plays a crucial role in promoting innovation, entrepreneurship, and equal opportunities in society, acting as a “social elevator.” However, an inequitable educational system can perpetuate inequalities, leading to significant social consequences. This paper examines two mechanisms through which schooling systems may generate or reinforce inequalities: private schooling and school composition. Earlier studies often suggested that private schooling, particularly government-dependent private schools, had a positive impact on student achievement. However, more recent research has challenged this view, highlighting the importance of contextual factors such as school composition and socio-economic background. Building on these findings, our analysis explores how the advantages attributed to private schools are shaped by the demographic profiles of their students. Using data from the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 and employing an education production function, we assess the effects of private schooling and school composition on student performance. Our findings contribute to the growing body of research questioning the comparative advantage of private schools, demonstrating that their perceived superiority often arises from the socio-economic advantages of the students they enroll, rather than the quality of education provided. The study also reveals significant variations across countries, underscoring the urgent need to address the segregation issues linked to private school networks.

Private schools and inequality

Abstract Among the significant inequalities within Britain’s school system, the greatest lies in the resources gap and the social segmentation between fee-paying and state schools. Published estimated average effects of attending private schools in Britain on academic performance are modest, but nevertheless significant at each stage of education. Cumulatively, by the end of a school career the private school pupil has gained notably higher qualifications compared with a state school pupil with an observably similar background—enough to ensure a distinct advantage in access to a high-status university, a good job and high pay. These gains add to the educational advantages of growing up with an affluent family background. An unusually high proportion of private school alumni occupy highly influential positions in business, in the judicial system, in the press and in politics. A further financial advantage from private school stems from an increased probability of partnering with a richer spouse. The hallmark of a good school policy for reducing inequality would be one that opens up access to private schools, so that participation is no longer constrained as much by financial background, and diminishes substantially the inequalities between schools’ resources. Feasible reforms are of two kinds: those that would lower parental demand for private schooling, inducing enlargement of the state sector, and those that would directly integrate pupils from the state sector into currently private schools. Currently, bursaries are far too small to make a substantial difference.

Problematising school classifications in Pakistan: the case of English-medium private schools

ABSTRACT This article problematises the widely accepted classification of English-medium private schools in Pakistan which reproduces academic literature along the binaries of elite/non-elite, rich/poor, and English-medium/Urdu-medium. It seeks to expand this classification to acknowledge the existence of middle-tier English-medium private schools which are neither elite nor low-fee. Utilising interdisciplinary evidence to distinguish between elites and a ‘new middle class’, the article strives to highlight the existence of a wide swath of middle-class population in Pakistan which is almost invisible in the academic discourse in the field of education. The article also draws on findings from a case study conducted at an English-medium private school in Karachi, Pakistan, which show that the current binary classification of private schooling does not fit the realities of this school site. The results suggest that English-medium private schools that cater to the new middle class need to be recognised as a separate category. The article incorporates code-switching and translanguaging research to give a glimpse of how students negotiate bilingualism/multilingualism in this resource-rich and literacy-rich school. As such, stepping beyond the binaries will enable scholars to explore how bilingualism/multilingualism affects a cross-section of the population rather than focusing only on lower socioeconomic groups across Pakistan.

Awarding gaps in higher education by ethnicity, schooling and family background: a UK university case study

ABSTRACT It is well established that UK students who had attended private schools before university perform less well at university, on average, than students educated in state schools. Using data for a particular university, we find that while this result holds for White students, among Black, Asian and Mixed Ethnicity (‘BAME’) students private schooling is – on average – associated positively with degree class; again this is true regardless of gender but is stronger among males. This is driven by a strong positive association among Black students and students of Mixed Ethnicity. Among Asian students, there is no association on average – but this conceals a strong negative association for those from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds.

Comparative Study and Understanding of Occupational Stress and Coping Level among Public School and Private School Teachers

Basically, research is based on randomly collected data among private and public schooling teachers by collecting their views and psychological testing to find out their stress and coping and adjustment level while working with same designation as a teacher but different work settings that is private and public.

The Public Purposes of Private Education: a Civic Outcomes Meta-Analysis

Since Plato and Aristotle, political theorists have discussed the important role of education in forming democratic citizens. They disagree, however, over whether public or private schools are more effective at nurturing citizenship. We conduct a statistical meta-analysis to identify the average association between private schooling and measures of four central civic outcomes: political tolerance, political participation, civic knowledge and skills, and voluntarism and social capital. Our search identifies 13,301 initial target studies, ultimately yielding 531 effects from 57 qualified studies drawing from 40 different databases. Using Robust Variance Estimation, we determine that, on average, private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 0.055 standard deviations over public schooling. Religious private schooling, particularly, is strongly associated with positive civic outcomes. The evidence is especially strong that private schooling is correlated with higher levels of political tolerance and political knowledge and skills. We discuss heterogeneities, robustness checks, and implications.

Public and Private Schooling and Religious Socialization in Secondary School Students

Religion is the main component of the Pakistani Education system. It is important to understand the role of schooling in religious socialization of the students. The study aimed to compare the role of public and private schooling in religious socialization of secondary school students. Quantitative research design was followed to achieve the objectives. Researchers developed a 36 items questionnaire to collect data from secondary school students enrolled in public and private secondary schools. The questionnaire consisted of 6 factors including curriculum, teacher, co-curricular activities, school management, class fellows and parents-teacher interaction. The share of the participants was equal for male, female and rural, urban students. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The results showed that public and private secondary schools played an important role in promoting religious socialization among students. However, there was a significant difference in the perceptions of male and female secondary school students about their religious socialization at schools.

The effects of private schooling on pupil achievement: a global systemic analysis

ABSTRACT Globally, the private school share of enrollment increased from about 14 percent in 2000 to about 18 percent in 2019. We estimate the systemic effect of private enrollment share on learning outcomes. Estimates of the systemic effect of private school enrollment capture any competitive effects as well as any differences between public and private schools in raising student outcomes. We use new data from the World Bank on harmonised learning outcomes for mathematics, reading, and science to produce an unbalanced sample of 120 countries from 2000 to 2017. We find that, all else equal, on average, a one percentage point increase in private enrollment is associated with null to at most weakly positive effects on country-level learning outcomes. Countries that increased private school enrollment experience as much or slightly more learning than countries with no change in private school enrollment.

Does private tuition crowd out private schooling? Evidence from India

The paper argues that private tuition to some extent crowds out private schooling. Ceteris paribus it compensates for the teaching quality deficiency in government schools. As long as the cost of private tuition is below a threshold, a household may prefer to send its child to a government school. Using the National Sample Survey 75th Round, 2017–18 data on education in India, we estimate a negative significant impact of the share of private tuition expenditure in monthly per capita expenditure of a household on government school enrolment of its child, who is in the 13–18 age group. With a lower cost of private tuition, the child is sent to a government school and private tuition, rather than to a private school. The result remains robust after controlling for district-level school-related variables. The paper also uses a theoretical model for explaining its empirical finding. The theory argues the empirical results derived in the paper provide hard-to-find evidence in support of the widely held view that on average the unaided private schools in India impart better teaching quality compared to the government schools. The results also help us to understand the likely impact of policies like the crackdown on private tuition as has happened in China recently on school choice and quality of education in a country.

The rights and wrongs of private schooling

AbstractThis is a discussion, from a largely global but partly British perspective, about whether private schools should be freely permitted, discouraged or abolished. This, it is claimed, depends on the kind of private school one has in mind. The paper moves on to three arguments against British private schools, especially prestigious so‐called ‘public schools’: that they promote social exclusiveness, have created a ruling élite, and are unjust. This latter claim, which also has global relevance, is explored in some detail. The meritocratic conception of society which it presupposes is then also discussed and criticised. The final section of the paper is about future perspectives on private schooling across the world. It looks at proposed and actual measures to abolish or curtail them; educational proposals to limit the power of meritocracy, including reforms to the school examination system. It also discusses how likely it is that suggested reforms of any of these kinds will actually take place.

Inside mathematics learning inequality: an analysis of Young Lives Survey data, India

ABSTRACT This paper studies mathematics learning gaps within Indian children at two points in time. Dividing them into two groups, better performing and the rest, we investigate the causes of the difference in the average learning gap between them at those two points. We explore this question using the threefold Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition at these survey points (collected over a gap of four years). We find that when the children were younger the private schooling effect was the core contributor towards this learning gap. When these children got older, the effect vanished and the gap in average years of schooling, which has magnified during this time between these groups of children, contributes most to this learning gap.

Variegated Roles of and Relationships Between Private Tutoring and Schooling: Insights From the State of Maharashtra, India

Purpose The relationship between private tutoring (PT) and mainstream education is among the complex themes characterizing PT discourses in the literature. This study examined the complications of practices and processes in tutoring and schooling to elucidate different roles played by PT and its relationship with mainstream education. Design/Approach/Methods This study used qualitative data from a diverse set of 37 PT providers from the State of Maharashtra, India, to delineate their roles and explore their relationship with schooling in this context. Findings The classification of PT providers’ roles into complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive ones demonstrated a diverse range of relationships between PT and mainstream education. Further analysis showed that these relationships are dynamic in nature, and the boundaries between them are blurred. Originality/Value Research in the field of PT has been consistently pointing toward a perplexing mixture of positive and negative outcomes resulting from its relationship with mainstream education. This study transcended the positive vis-à-vis negative binary approach by contributing to the deeper understanding of PT relationships. Furthermore, it exemplified how future studies can disentangle the complexities of such relationships by deploying flexible, context-specific theoretical approaches.

The Impact of Private Schools, School Chains and PPPs in Developing Countries

Abstract The private school sector has expanded with almost no public intervention to educate half of primary school children in many urban centers in Africa and Asia. Simple comparisons of test scores would suggest that these private schools may provide better quality than public schools, but how much of this difference is due to selection effects is unclear. Much donor and policymaker attention has proceeded on the basis that private schools do perform better, and focused on models of public subsidy to expand access, and investment in networks or chains to encourage expansion. We review the evidence of the effects of private schools on learning, and how that effect translates to public-private partnerships (PPPs). We also study the effects of private school chains. We conduct a systematic review for eligible studies, with transparent search criteria. The search resulted in over 100 studies on low-cost private schools and PPPs, with a large majority being on low-cost private schools. Our meta-analysis shows moderately strong effects from private schooling, although the limited number of experimental studies find much smaller effects than quasi-experimental studies. This advantage, though, is not nearly enough to help most children reach important learning goals. Turning to policy goals, we find that the private school advantage has not translated to public private partnerships, which have shown limited value in improving quality. They can however represent a lower-cost means of increasing access to school. We also find that private school chains perform little better than individual private schools and have little scope for achieving meaningful scale.

The development of the education system in Qatar: assessing the intended and unintended impacts of privatization policy shifts

ABSTRACT Qatar is caught in the struggle between reformation of its educational system to create a dynamic, local workforce and prepare their citizens for the competitive global market for higher education and jobs, whilst preserving the country’s values, tradition and language. This paper examines the recent policy shifts, hitherto underexplored, analysing the intended and unexpected impacts that influenced subsequent policy reform. It begins with a background on neoliberal educational policies followed by a historical account of the education system, with a focus on post-2011 where the government introduced a voucher system to further privatization. Using quantitative longitudinal analyses based on tabulating detailed government educational reports from 2010 onwards, it aims to investigate the impact of these post-2011 policies on the number of schools, students, gender and demographic composition in the government and private schooling sector. The data illustrates how a simple, linear trend of privatization has not occurred and that significant demographic changes have begun to surface between government and private schools. If these trends continue at the same rate across the next decade, this will likely result in transformative social changes and divisions in relation to identity, language, gender, cultural values, socio-economic status, higher education choices and job opportunities.

The Fiscal and Welfare Effects of Policy Responses to the Covid-19 School Closures

Based on data on school visits from Safegraph and on school closures from Burbio, we document that during the Covid-19 crisis secondary schools were closed for in-person learning for longer periods than elementary schools, private schools experienced shorter closures than public schools, and schools in poorer US counties experienced shorter school closures. To quantify the long-run consequences of these school closures, we extend the structural life cycle model of private and public schooling investments by Fuchs-Schündeln et al. (Econ J 132:1647–1683, 2022) to include private school choice and feed into the model the school closure measures from our empirical analysis. Future earnings and welfare losses are largest for children that started public secondary schools at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. Comparing children from the top to children from the bottom quartile of the income distribution, welfare losses are 0.5 percentage points larger for the poorer children if school closures were unrelated to income. Accounting for the longer school closures in richer counties reduces this gap by about 1/4. A policy intervention that extends schools by 6 weeks generates significant welfare gains for children and raises future tax revenues sufficient to pay for the cost of this schooling expansion.

What are the medium-term educational and labour market effects of private schooling?

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of private school attendance on a range of outcomes during adulthood. Students are followed for seventeen years after they enter the sixth grade. The effect of private schooling on educational and labour market outcomes is estimated using propensity score matching. Private schooling has a positive effect on the likelihood of obtaining the baccalauréat and a higher education qualification, as well as obtaining a higher wage, for both girls and boys. A series of robustness tests confirms these results.

Equality of opportunity: Social determinants of university expectation amongst school attending adolescents in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau

This research explores determinants of higher education (HE) expectation in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Survey data includes 2,039 randomly selected responses from school-attending adolescents, from June 2017. HE expectations were indicated by 77% of girls and 68.7% of boys, privately schooled adolescents more frequently (78.5%) than publicly schooled peers (67.6%). Akaike Information Criterion was utilised, modelling HE expectation. Logistic regression indicated that female gender (OR=1.569), private schooling (OR=1.747), perceived comparative school performance (OR=1.776), increased studying time (OR=1.436), greater parent valuation of studies (OR=1.526), and parental warmth (OR=1.092) predicted HE expectation. Student-teacher conflict (OR=.546) and school disenfranchisement (OR=.755) negatively predicted HE expectations. Comparison with previous research in socioeconomically distinct higher income settings suggests consistently predictive and contextually influenced determinants of university expectation.

The Determinants of Student Achievement in Government and Private Schools in Pakistan

This study is driven by some fundamental issues evolving in Pakistan’s educational set-up. In the past few decades, the country has been experiencing what can only be termed a dramatic revolution in education provision. There has been an explosion of private schooling mostly at the primary but at higher levels as well and, somewhat surprisingly, private schooling cannot be relegated the status of an urban èlite phenomenon alone [Andrabi, et al. (2002)]. This has taken the form of many poor households and those in rural areas opting to send their children to fee-paying private schools rather than the non-fee charging government schools. This transformation of the education sector has generated many concerns among which the ‘equity’ issue has been raised to the fore. The unprecedented growth of cheap private schooling has also raised questions regarding the role of these institutions in the delivery of education, the question of parental ‘choice’1 as well as the future of government educational policy.

Orienting all students toward justice: Cultivating social responsibility in privileged schooling environments

What is the obligation of schools in fostering compassion for others and a commitment to the greater good? In a year-long qualitative study, this research explores how one Northeastern private schooling environment aimed to cultivate social responsibility in adolescents through an egalitarian, discussion-oriented pedagogy. Guided by Westheimer and Kahne’s three-tiered conceptualization of citizenship, we explore what can be learned from one school’s emphasis on student-led discussions and how this approach influenced students’ commitments to others. We ultimately argue that students developed a profound sense of obligation to one another (e.g. to other youth of privilege), but fell short of extending this commitment to others beyond their elite institution. These findings raise questions about the role of privileged schooling environments in fostering beyond-the-self, justice-oriented citizens for the benefit of our democracy and questions, too, about the pedagogies leveraged to achieve such goals.

Factors influencing the choice of private or public schools: Evidence from Georgia

The existence and development of public schools is influenced by a plethora of factors. Through the creation of education policies, any state education system is striving to accomplish specific goals. Both informal and formal private schooling is taking the lead in all cultures and societies. Unmistakably, the distinction between private and public schools is evident. However, given the different circumstances, choosing the best alternative for a child is regularly a fervently discussed topic among parents. There is no universal answer to the question whether private schools are actually better than or superior to the public schools. Our research aimed to describe the school choice process, it focuses on unveiling the factors and their interrelation while the parent choosing between two types of schools—private and public. First of all, the research aims to describe the parent’s perception of achieving success at school, what is the base for such belief, what the sentence—“School—base of future success” actually mean. How important is so called social index? The significance of the reputation and prestige of the educational institution during school choice process—as a guarantee for future success. The key questions for the research were as follows: (1) How interested the parents are to be actively involved in school choice process and spend certain period of time for that? (2) What factors are considered by the parents during school choice and what is the source they receive information from? (3) Does the family’s socioeconomic condition and the kids gender have influence on the process? It’s worth mentioning that, generally the research results fully coincide with the school choice theory arguments and the research findings conducted in the similar field. All these are described and presented in the first part of the article. The probabilities listed on the base of the current data, that the information source, the parent’s information level, the parents’ engagement as well as the family’s socioeconomic and demographic status play integral role in the school choice process appeared to be genuine. Apparently, the parents are much interested to provide perfect future for their kids, though socioeconomic conditions, environment, poor educational system limits their choice. Once our results compared to the existing literature and theory, one can see that our study conducted in Georgia follows the trends of the developed countries, known as the “Heyneman-Loxley effect.”