SANEI: Education Research Initiative: Abstract

The Effectiveness of Private versus Public Schools in Bangladesh (and Pakistan)

At the centre of the recent debate on decentralization of education in developing countries lies the assumption of superiority of private schools over public schools. However, whether private schools are more effective than their public counterparts in the production of cognitive (and non-cognitive) skills remains unresolved in the literature. If individuals in private schools outperform otherwise similar individuals in the public schools, there could be some basis for decentralization. The objective of this research is to empirically test the effectiveness of private versus public schools using labour market earnings data for Bangladesh.

We shall use the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2000 (a nationally representative cross-section survey) data for our purpose. Private and public school graduate earrings will be compared to see whether there is any earning advantage for individuals educated in private schools. After controlling for differential human capital endowments of the individuals and selection into wage work and/or school types, any remaining earnings differential is taken as evidence of "school effectiveness". We will examine how the result varies across sub-samples (rural, urban, male, female etc.) and levels of education (primary and secondary). In addition, to provide a cross-country perspective to our analysis, we will use comparable household data from Pakistan to study the effectiveness of private versus public schools.