A comparative study of government and private schools in Jammu and Kashmir

Abstract

This paper used survey data from government and private schools in two districts of Jammu & Kashmir-Pulwama and Srinagar. To explore systematic differences between the two school types. Private school students have higher test scores than government school students. However, in both private and government schools the overall quality is low and learning gains from one grade to the next are small. There is large variation in the quality of both school types and observed school and teacher characteristics are weakly correlated with learning outcomes. Most of the variation in teacher effort is within schools and is weakly correlated with observed teacher characteristics such as education, training, experience. There is considerable sorting among students; those from higher socio-economic strata select into private schools. Private schools have lower pupil-teacher ratios and five to six times lower teacher salaries but do not differ systematically in infrastructure and teacher effort from government schools. After controlling for observed student and school characteristics, the private school advantage in test scores is not robust. Given the large salary differential, private schools would clearly be more cost effective even in the case of no absolute difference in test scores.