Steering clear of ideological traps

I came across this persuasively argued piece in EPW which draws attention to the lack of granular data concerning private schools in India. While the author makes several eminently sensible arguments — effects of socio-economic factors on learning, bringing more nuance to the public school-private school debate, I found the overall construct of the article to be antithetical to its spirit. Let me explain.

The crux of the article seems to be the lack of nuance in the debate between public schools and private schools. This is a point that I agree with and have written about earlier. The author takes strong objection to the characterization of private schools as better compared to public schools. He then proceeds to argue his viewpoint, the most egregious of which I’ve attempted to rebut.

Sample this (on lack of private school data):

“This seems fairly odd considering the fact that the data on teachers, facilities in the school, and classroom observations provide an important overview of the school.”

This could have been the Education Minister of any state speaking — notice the emphasis on inputs. Yes, private schools are likely ramshackle. Yes, the private school teachers are likely under-trained and inexperienced. But it is an indictment of the public school system that these under-trained and inexperienced teachers perform better than the teachers in the public schools. To be sure, I am not apportioning all the blame to the actors within the system — public school teachers do perform well when taken out of the current classroom set-up, the bureaucracy is not autonomous. This, however, does not absolve the system itself and the self-defeating processes it perpetuates. Children do need to attend schools with essential infrastructure and the RTE is mandating precisely that for private schools as well, but giving centrality to inputs does disservice to the core function of any school — learning.

This is where the article, to me, turns ideological. The author makes very valid points concerning the effects of non-school factors on children’s learning. This has been borne out in several studies — both India and abroad. The whole crux of the US anti-reform movement sometimes appears to be the tyranny of socio-economic conditions. However, the author, while citing evidence from a recent longitudinal study by Karopady (which finds socio-economic conditions account for most of learning differential among public and private schools), glaringly misses out on the RCT conducted by Prof.Muralidharan in Andhra Pradesh that, conclusively and more rigorously, finds that there is, in fact, a significant value added by private schools to learning. The double-blind study dives into teacher time-use as well to paint a picture that is overwhelmingly in favor of private schools when it comes to efficiency.

And then there is this, in reply to a statement by Prof. Pritchett arguing against the monopoly of bureaucratically controllable inputs:

“This statement seems to altogether miss the point that the purpose of research is to enable an informed and multifaceted solution that would tackle the root of the problem. The binaries of identifiable– unidentifiable and quantifiable–unquantifiable are to be transcended by research and should not become the determinants that frame the problem or the presentation of the data, as seems to be the case with ASER 2014"

Sir Humphrey Appleby would have been proud of the above lines. I will not argue against this particular para because, quite simply, I don’t understand what it means.

Moving on, the author quotes:

“Nambissan (2012) writes that the research on private schools in India is extremely limited and fragmentary at best. Citing several studies that have looked at low-fee private schools, she notes that the teaching–learning processes are not very different and often the school infrastructure and facilities are abysmal.”

This is probably true. I’m not going to broach the infrastructure point again. As for the teaching-learning processes, of course they are the same — the private school teachers are being trained at the same schools as the public school teachers and there is not too much evidence pointing towards them receiving transformational in-service training. The question then becomes (assuming the validity of Prof. Muralidharan’s data) — what are private schools doing different with the same quality of teachers? It could possibly be better governance (as again suggested by Prof. Muralidharan) — something public systems in India uniformly lack. Even if you do not believe that private schools fare any better, and you believe that private schools are not good, benchmarking yourself against them is the definition of low expectations. Given the humongous resources at the public school system’s disposal, we should expect the public schools to show leadership in improving teaching quality as well as pedagogical practises — not suffer from a complex vis-a-vis private schools.

As I have written elsewhere, India can’t afford to polarize the education debate along ideological ground — a point, ironically, the author purports to make. My bias is towards building an excellent public school system which raises the bar for private schools. Denying the gap in performance between them serves no purpose. The least we can do is grant the parents rejecting the public schools to pay for private schools, some agency and reflect on why they are exiting the system.