A Dime a Day: The Possibilities and Limits of Private Schooling in Pakistan

By T. Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja. Comparative Education Review, 2006

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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, the authors document the phenomenal rise of the private sector in Pakistan and 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 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 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.

Subfields: Demography, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/acf0cea9f6376fc13632365459ca4e2b08643e40

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In Demography

1. S. Heyneman

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1. Harry Anthony Patrinos *
2. Felipe Barrera-Osorio
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Citations in the corpus

• The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education (2009, background): “A recent report by the education NGO Pratham found that rural private schools in India enrolled around 20 percent of all students in India in 2007 (Andrabi, Das, and Khwaja 2006; Srivastava 2007).”
• The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers (2017, unknown): “Using an Oaxaca-decomposition exercise, Andrabi et al. (2008) argue that controlling for observed characteristics explains little of the wage gap between public and private school teachers, but there is currently little direct evidence on the link between pay and productivity in the public sector.”
• Low-cost private schools for the poor: what public policy is appropriate (2014, background): “teacher absenteeism and smaller class sizes were some of their greatest assets (Alderman et al., 2001; Andrabi et al., 2008).”