A Dime a Day: The Possibilities and Limits of Private Schooling in Pakistan
(Joint with J.Das, DECRG World Bank, A.Khwaja, Harvard)
Comparative Education Review, vol. 52, no. 3, August 2008.
This paper looks at the private schooling sector in Pakistan, a country that is seriously behind schedule in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Using new data, we show that the main response to the stresses faced by the Pakistani educational system is not religious schooling but a phenomenal rise of secular, market based low cost private schools. We show that an increasing segment of children enrolled in private schools are from rural areas and from middle-class and poorer families. The key element in their rise is their low fees-- the average fee of a rural private school in Pakistan is less than a dime a day (Rs.6)! They hire predominantly local, female and moderately educated teachers who have limited alternative opportunities outside the village. Hiring these teachers at low cost allows the savings to be passed on to parents through very low fees. This mechanism—the need to hire teachers with a certain demographic profile so that salary costs are minimized—defines the possibility of private schools—where they arise, fees are low. It also defines their limits. Private schools are horizontally constrained in that they arise only in villages where there is a pool of secondary-educated women. They are also vertically constrained in that they are unlikely to cater to the secondary levels in rural areas, at least until there is an increase in the supply of potential teachers with the required skills and educational levels. The Pakistani case has implications for addressing the global teacher shortage faced in reaching the MDGs. By focusing on the supply of educated women, it also highlights an important dynamic complementary linkage between government and private schools.
Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data
(Joint with J. Das, WB; A. Khwaja, Harvard; and T. Zajonc, Harvard)
Comparative Education Review, Vol, 50, No. 3, August 2006.
Winner of the George Bereday Award for outstanding article published in the CER for the year 2006
Bold assertions have been made in policy reports and popular articles on the high and increasing enrollment in Pakistani religious schools, commonly known as madrassas. Given the importance placed on the subject by policy makers in Pakistan and those internationally, it is troubling that none of the reports and articles reviewed based their analysis on publicly available data or established statistical methodologies. This paper uses published data sources and a census of schooling choice to show that existing estimates are inflated by an order of magnitude. Madrassas account for less than 1 percent of all enrollment in the country and there is no evidence of a dramatic increase in recent years. The educational landscape in Pakistan has changed substantially in the last decade, but this is due to an explosion of private schools, an important fact that has been left out of the debate on Pakistani education. Moreover, when we look at school choice, we find that no one explanation fits the data. While most existing theories of madrassa enrollment are based on household attributes (for instance, a preference for religious schooling or the household's access to other schooling options) the data show that among households with at least one child enrolled in a madrassa, 75 percent send their second (and/or third) child to a public or private school or both. Widely promoted theories simply do not explain this substantial variation within households.
News Coverage of the Paper
The Economist, May 19, 2005, (scanned pdf)
Foreign Policy InBox, May /June 2005
Madrassa Metrics: The Statistics and Rhetoric of Religious Enrollment in Pakistan.
(Joint with J.Das, DECRG World Bank, A. Khwaja, Harvard and T. Zajonc, Harvard).
Forthcoming in Beyond Crisis: A Critical Second Look at Pakistan, Routledge.
(Joint with M.Ghatak, LSE and A. Khwaja, Harvard)
Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 79, Issue 2, (April 2006).
We develop a simple model of flexible specialization under demand uncertainty. A buyer faces multiple suppliers with heterogeneous types to supply customized parts. The more specific a seller's assets are to the buyer, the higher is surplus within the relationship but the lower is the seller's flexibility to cater to the outside market. Higher quality suppliers have a greater likelihood of selling outside and so this cost is greater for them. Therefore even if a buyer typically prefers high types, some low type suppliers might be kept as marginal suppliers because of their greater willingness to invest more in assets specific to the buyer. We then examine a primary dataset on contracts between the largest tractor assembler in Pakistan and its suppliers and examine how the extent of asset specificity affects contractual outcomes such as prices and distribution of orders and find evidence that the more dedicated suppliers are indeed of lower quality.
Railways and Price Convergence in British India
(Joint with M. Kuehlwein, Pomona)July 2008
(revise and resubmit to Journal of Economic History)
The period 1861 to 1920 witnessed sharp price convergence in British Indian wheat and rice markets. Previous authors have assumed that since a vast railway system was built during that time, railways were probably the main cause of that convergence. But tests examining relative price differences between individual districts provide surprisingly weak support for that hypothesis. Railways clearly mattered, but even controlling for the effects on nearby districts, railways seem capable of explaining only about 20% of the decline in grain price dispersion. The modest estimated effect fundamentally derives from the fact that prices were converging during this time almost as rapidly between districts without railways as with railways. Our fixed effect estimation using yearly dummies points out that the pattern of price convergence between a given district pair was no different before they got railways than after they got the rail. One reason for this may be that India was already a well established, partially integrated economy at the time of the railroad expansion. Some lines were built along existing trade routes where there was already significant commerce between districts. The impact of railroads on districts not obviously linked by trade was shown to be about five times larger than the impact on previously well linked districts. There was also considerable heterogeneity of the railway effect depending on whether districts were already close to railways or not.
Do Value Added Estimates Add Value? Accounting for Learning Dynamics
(Joint with J. Das, WB; A. Khwaja, Harvard; and T. Zajonc, Harvard)
March 2008
Value-added estimates - estimates based on the evolution rather than level of achievement - are viewed by most researchers as more reliable than cross-sectional comparisons since they ostensibly "difference out" the influence of omitted fixed inputs, such as wealth and ability. We show that the restricted value-added model, which assumes that past achievement carries over with no loss, is clearly rejected by the data, and that the more flexible lagged value-added model is biased by measurement error and omitted heterogeneity that enters each period. Using dynamic panel methods that address these biases and data on public and private schools in Pakistan, we find that the restricted value-added model yields wildly biased estimates for the private school effect, sometimes even flipping the sign. The lagged value-added model performs better due to countervailing measurement error and heterogeneity biases. More generally, rapid and potentially heterogenous achievement decay or "fade-out", which evidence suggests underlies our results, has broad implications for experimental and non-experimental program evaluation, and value-added accountability systems.
Keywords: education, value-added model, Pakistan, panel data methods
JEL codes: I2, C52, C23
Students Today, Teachers Tomorrow? The Rise of Affordable Private Schools
(Joint with J. Das, World bank and A.Khwaja, Harvard)
Private Schools are typically thought of as an “up-market” phenomenon. Pakistan 's experience during the last decade is the opposite, with a mushrooming of for-profit private schools and a 300 percent increase in private sector enrollments. This paper links the growth of private schools to the presence of schools in the public sector. We show that private schools are set up in villages where there are pre-existing girls' secondary schools. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that the presence of a private school increases the probability of a private school by 35 percentage points. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between private school existence and pre-existing girls' primary or boys' primary and high schools. Our results support a “women as teachers” channel: pre-existing high schools increase the supply of local skilled women and, in an environment with low female mobility, this lowers wages for women and lowers teaching costs for private schools in these localized labor markets. These findings highlight an important constraint to schooling–the supply of teachers–and suggest that one cannot ignore the role of higher education in achieving universal primary education.
April 2008
Test Feasibility Survey
PAKISTAN: Education Sector
(Joint with J. Das, WB and A. Khwaja, Harvard)
This report presents a feasibility study conducted for testing educational achievement of primary school children and is aimed at building the needed knowledge and capacities to conduct more extensive educational testing. We first summarize previous assessments of primary education undertaken in Pakistan over the past two decades and then detail the justification behind conducting the present study. We then provide an overview of the assessment instrument, discussing both the test design and content and also cover the procedural and implementation issues faced during the administration of the test instrument and a diverse range of concerns related the interpretation of the results. Finally, we presents a detailed assessment of the testing instrument using methods derived from Item-Response Theory to examine the validity of each question (henceforth item) as well as the precision of the test taken in it's entirety. We conclude by outlining the kinds of results that can be studied with such a testing exercise. However, we strongly caution against the use of the results presented here for drawing any conclusions about learning outcomes in Pakistani schools given the non-random nature of the sample and the small sample size of 245 test takers. Thus, this report serves as a composite review and test validation base for future assessment work in Pakistan.
The Rise of Private Schooling in Pakistan: Catering to the Urban Elite or Educating the Rural Poor?
(Joint with J. Das, WB and A. Khwaja, Harvard)
Using a new census of private educational institutions in Pakistan together with the population census, we present evidence that private schooling, particularly at the primary level is indeed a large and increasingly important factor in education in Pakistan both in absolute terms and relative to public schooling. While the rural-urban gap still remains, the growth trends showed a marked improvement in rural areas. Contrary to expectations, private schools are not an urban elite phenomenon. Not only are they prevalent in rural areas but also are affordable to middle and even low income groups. Private schools have lower student-teacher ratios than public schools and while teachers were largely untrained and less experienced, their education level matched those in public schools. Fees respond in predictable ways to measured school inputs, suggesting that parents can infer quality variation between schools. Private schools are mainly coeducational, have a high percentage of girls' enrollment and a majority of the teachers are females. Looking at just the rural areas at the patwar circle level, we find that those areas that have a greater supply of educated women are able to respond very effectively to the growing demand for education by formation of schools and by increased enrollment.
Report Cards: How a Developing Country Educational Market Reacts to Exogenous Information
(Joint with A.Khwaja, Harvard, and J.Das, DECRG World Bank)
What Do Educated Mothers Do Differently? Evidence from a Developing Country
(Joint with A.Khwaja, Harvard, and J.Das, DECRG World Bank)
How Effective are Parent-Teacher School Councils? Experimental Evidence from a Developing Country
(Joint with A.Khwaja, Harvard, and J.Das, DECRG World Bank)
Information and Choices: Parental School Choice in Rural Pakistan
(Joint with A.Khwaja, Harvard, J.Das, DECRG World Bank, and J. Montalvo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Does School Type Matter? Learning Differences between Private and Public Schools in Rural Pakistan
(Joint with A.Khwaja, Harvard, and J.Das, DECRG World Bank)