Private school Education for poor in India is apparently under a crisis. While piecemeal reforms of public education have only repeatedly reinforced its inadequacies on access, enrollment, quality and retention parameters, even private provisioning does not fair any better. With little or no differentiation, the value-addition of these private institutions to the economically backward is a glaring question mark.
Rationally speaking private schools will only mushroom in places where there is a sizeble catchment. Prior existence of a public school in a region is one market signal to an entrepreneur. So by design there would always remain areas, especially in far-flung tribal lands, where private schooling in the near vicinity will remain a distant possibility. As the numbers indicate, there are 9,50,000 government schools and an estimated 3,00,000 private schools in India (including the thousands of unrecognized private schools which are not recorded in any government registry).However 25% of our villages still have no access to public schools and only 28% of rural children have access to private schools in their own villages.
The quality aspects of private schools have not been as much scrutinized as that of public schools. It is largely been relegated to the market forces in which illiterate and ignorant customer can only make a price-quality inference. A recent survey from a prominent NGO shows that teacher attendance, teaching activity and student attendance, is far superior in private school vis-a-vis a public school, but the effectiveness of private schools in imparting reading ability to the poorer strata is not significantly better than that of public schools. It is unemployed youth from the local community, with mostly just secondary education, who join such schools as they cannot find an alternative employment and are unwilling to resort to agriculture. Drawing a mere 1/5th of the salary of their counterparts in public schools, they are only motivated to take teaching as a short-term career. With the school management making no provision for better equipping teachers through periodic trainings, private schools tend to be worse than some "good" government schools.
It is futile to even discuss about, let alone formally assess, "value education" provided by private schools. Functioning at a subsistence level, entrepreneur has hardly any incentive to innovate. Instead, private schools tend to focus on mechanized education that is commissioned to churn out students who possibly can only fare better on "achievement" tests. Driven mainly by commercial motives, with few exceptions, these private institutions are run to benefit the "servers", rather than the "served". This brings to question the purpose these privatized industrialized disseminators of information and instruction serve as compared to public schools. All they probably do best is mass produce seemingly intellectually worthwhile, but esthetically equally barren individuals.
If such is the sad state of fee-charging private provisioning of education then what is the role of private sector? What good can "voucher system" be in a world of Hobson's choice? Do we entrust the responsibility on the market to eventually rational out in the long term? Is it not far too simplistic to believe that increased competition will eventually create exemplar institutions of educational delivery? If private education as a "substitute" of public education is farse mimicry, is it best designed as a "supplementary" channel?
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