Test score gaps between private and government sector students at school entry age in India

Abstract

To cite this article: Abhijeet Singh (2014) Test score gaps between private and government sector students at school entry age in India, Oxford Review of Education, 40:1, 30-49, Various studies have noted that students enrolled in private schools in India perform better on average than students in government schools. In this paper, I show that large gaps in the test scores of children in private and public sector education are evident even at the point of initial enrolment in formal schooling and are associated with previous attendance in private and public preschools. Children in the sample were aged between 4.5 and 6 years at the time of the survey and were tested on receptive vocabulary and quantitative skills. Most (albeit not all) children in the sample had attended private and/or government preschools and at the time of the survey, about 44% had made a transition into formal schooling. Attending private preschools is associated with substantially, and significantly, higher test scores relative to attending public preschools. A considerable portion of this difference can be removed by controls for parental background and selected child characteristics but the gap remains significant. Possible implications of these results are discussed.

Do Preschools Add ‘Value’? Evidence on Achievement Gaps From Rural India

“…Another study using Young Lives data from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, India, demonstrates that test score gaps between children in schools exist even at the school-entry age, and this gap can in part be attributed to attending a preschool and type of preschool attended (Singh, 2014). However, the author mentions that drawing causality is beyond the scope of his paper and is at most able to establish correlations.…”

“…Most of these studies in India and beyond (with the exception of Singh & Mukherjee, 2017;Singh, 2014), have focused only on primary schools without any reference to prior preschool education. Given the widespread recognition of the importance of early childhood factors on future cognitive outcomes, this omission is a major limitation to the literature as it stands today.…”

Investing in school readiness: A comparison of different early childhood education pathways in rural Indonesia

“…In contexts like these, it is useful to compare different early education service experiences or pathways to understand how they predict children's transition into primary school and subsequent academic achievement. In one of the few studies that examine early childhood education type and children's early learning outcomes in a developing setting, Singh (2014) observes that in the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, enrollment in private preschools is associated with significantly higher test scores at the beginning of primary school relative to those in public preschools. The results highlight the fact that early education experiences can influence the emergence of test score gaps at school-entry.…”

Private school effects in urban and rural India: Panel estimates at primary and secondary school ages

“…This is due to to the way preschools are arranged in the two sectors: whereas kindergarten classes are frequently integrated in private primary schools and focus on learning, government preschools (anganwadis) are more akin to daycare centres without a clear focus on learning and in typically other surroundings than the school environment. For greater detail on the preschool to school transitions in the Young Lives data, please see Singh (2014) and Woodhead et al (2009). 40 The specification implicitly imposes a common coefficient on each year of private or government schooling regardless of the timing of the treatment: thus, for example, attending a private school in 2007/8 or in 2009/10 are taken to have the same effect on test scores in 2010.…”