How difficult is the maths?

Education policy in India has got to be among the most bizarre ever seen. Private education costs a lot less, delivers better results, and yet politicians talk about increasing government education -- one of the focus areas of the 11th Plan is to universalise the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan through more government schools.

More important, it's not as if the so-called "aam aadmi" is not moving towards private education; so the inability of politicians to see the writing on the wall is truly baffling -- after all, if voters are tired of government schools, surely planning more such schools isn't a great idea?

While anywhere between 60 and 70 per cent of urban Indian students are located in private schools, the shift is quite large in even rural India as the latest Pratham survey shows -- while 16.3 per cent of rural children were in private schools in 2005, this increased to 18.8 per cent in 2006, which implies an increase of over 15 per cent in terms of the number of children.

It's not difficult to see why this is happening. In urban India, a study in Delhi by James Tooley of the University of Newcastle (Tooley directed the well-known global study of investment opportunities for private education in developing countries for the International Finance Corporation) a couple of years ago showed, children in private schools scored around 70 per cent more than those in government schools in maths, while for English the difference was between 2.5 and 3 times!

This, when private teachers got paid around half what the government ones got, once you correct for the number of students they teach. By the way, even once you take into account the difference in backgrounds of those attending government and private schools, Tooley's study shows, the difference remains significant.

The latest Pratham report shows similar orders of magnitude for rural areas as well. Over 41 per cent of Class 1 children in government schools, Pratham reports, could not even recognise letters of the alphabet -- the figure was 27 per cent in the case of their private counterparts. Just 2.3 per cent of Class 1 students could read a full story in government schools versus 3.8 for private ones.

For Class 5, it was 52 per cent versus 61 per cent. In the case of maths, just 14 per cent of those in Class 3 in government schools could do simple division versus 21 per cent in the private schools -- the difference between the two scores, it is pertinent to add, is not 7 per cent but actually 50 per cent.

The story, by the way, gets worse when it comes to individual states like Punjab, for instance. The proportion of Class 5 students who could divide was around just over 35 per cent versus over 51 per cent in private schools.

Given this, it's hardly surprising there's been a rapid shift in the number of children going to private schools in rural Punjab, from under 25 per cent in 2005 to over 40 per cent in 2006.

For Haryana, which saw the private share of rural schooling rise from 35 per cent to 45 per cent in the same period, though, the quality of government teaching is better than it is in Punjab -- here, 62 per cent of government school-educated children in Class 5 could do division versus 80 per cent for their private counterparts. It would be interesting to see how voters react, in the coming Punjab assembly elections, to politicians who offer to set up more government schools to educate children whose parents want them to shift to private schools! (For some curious reason, Pratham hasn't put the findings on the difference in learning skills between private and government schools in its report.)

Maybe government schools are of a poorer quality (there are exceptions, of course), and this is probably the last refuge of desperate politicians, but the poor cannot afford to go to private schools and so, the state needs to do its bit.

That's an appealing thought, but irrelevant. For one, the government can still pay for schooling but let parents decide if they want to give these vouchers to government schools or to private ones. Second, on a per capita basis, the poorest 40 per cent of the country's population spends around 30 per cent of the all-India average on education -- since government schooling is free, this means they're either spending on tuition or are sending their children to private schools.

Perhaps it's time politicians realised the ground is shifting from beneath their feet.