Research Highlight: Private Schools outperform Public Schools, at a Lower Cost

The Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools (LEAPS) is a comprehensive four year survey of primary schools in Punjab that is being carried out by a team from the World Bank, Pomona College and Harvard University in collaboration with the Government of Punjab. The survey report for the first year has recently been published. The report measures learning outcomes of students, in grades I to III, by administering detailed exams on English, Math and Urdu. A major finding of the report is that the students in private schools perform better in all three subjects as compared to the students attending public school. The performance advantage holds even if factors such as literacy rate of parents and the educational qualifications of the teachers are taken into account. The public-private schooling gap is large, according to the LEAPS report. Children in private schools score significantly higher than those in government schools even when they are from the same village. Overall, the gap between public and private schools is 8-18 times that gap between different socio-economic backgrounds. It takes around 1.5-2.5 years for a child attending public school to catch up to their counterparts in private schools.

One would think that the difference in performance is due to private schools having greater resources and better qualified teachers. Surprisingly however, this is not true according to the report. Educating a child in a median rural private schools costs only half as much as a public school to the society. The teachers in private schools have lesser salaries and on average have inferior educational experience as compared to public school teachers. So, whats is the reason for the dismal performance of public schools? In a nutshell, the lack of accountability of public school teachers!

Compensation for teachers in the government sector focuses on inputs and in the private sector on outcomes. Teachers in government schools are hired based on education and training and compensation is mostly driven by age, experience, and training — it has little to do with effort or actual performance on the job. In the private sector, teachers are paid more when they exert greater effort and produce better outcomes. Not surprising effort, as evidenced by higher absenteeism rates, is lower in government schools. The test scores of children in private schools suggest that less-educated teachers making greater effort can outperform more educated and better trained government teachers.

The Leaps report suggests a number of solutions to improve the performance of public school teachers. These include,

• Having a probationary period to identify and retain good teachers.
• Making sure that the public school teachers are only required to teach and not perform additional services such as vaccination drives, attending management meetings or political gatherings.
• Rewarding/penalizing teachers on their performance. The performance can be based on inputs such as attendance or outcomes such as student learning.

In my opinion, it will be difficult to carry out direct evaluations of teachers in a government run setup in Pakistan. I think that a good way to evaluate public school teachers is to tie teachers’ performance directly to students’ performance in standardized assessment tests. These standardized assessments should be carried out at each grade level from grades I to V (Please note that, in Punjab, standardized assessments of students in public schools are carried out at the 5th and 8th grade level by Punjab Examination Commission). Directly rewarding or penalizing the public school teachers based on the performance of students will ensure that a greater effort is spent on student learning in public schools.

Overall, LEAPS is a very comprehensive and thorough report of primary education in Punjab, and it highlights a number of important shortcomings of the public and private schools in Pakistan. Now, the big question is, will the government use this report to improve the education policy, or will the report be ignored like so many others in the past.