Daily Newsings: 30 April 2025

On private and public schooling

Daily Newsings are musings on the daily news.

The Delhi Cabinet passed a bill to regulate school fees and hikes in school fees in the state. This is applicable to all the private schools in the state.

The bill has provisions for committees at 3 levels — the school, the district, and the state level. These committees will be the regulatory authorities. The bill also introduces fines for schools that flout the rules and increase fees without approvals. And finally, the bill also gives the criteria based on which the fees will be set. These include the school's location, infrastructure facilities, and salaries paid to the staff.

This is a welcome move from the Government, providing relief to many parents who have been struggling under unreasonably high fees. There are also stories of students facing harassment at schools due to delayed payment of fees.

At the same time, one must also wonder why public, or government-run schools are no longer a valid option in India. In this newsing, I will be raising a lot of questions without any satisfactory answers. But I hope it gives us food for thought.

Studies have found that there is a perception among parents that learning outcomes are better for students who attend private schools as opposed to students who attend public schools.¹ This perception is also backed up by data from the Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER). One particular study also noted that parents send their children to private schools because the teacher is someone local, and the teacher has low absenteeism.² There are lessons for the Government from this. It is the Government's responsibility to provide affordable quality education for its citizens up to the age of 14. However, the fact that learning outcomes are poor, and parents feel that the quality of education at public schools is poor raises questions about what the Government needs to do to fix this.

Would a policy of hiring local teachers be better? Perhaps decentralizing the hiring process and handing over such responsibilities to the District Education Office or the Block Education Office?

Another practice that leads to poor learning outcomes in public schools is that Government employed public school teachers are often tasked with various administrative responsibilities that leave them little time for teaching-related duties. It is common to hear of Government-school teachers spending a lot of their time on election related or survey related duties.

All of this raises another question. Would many readers of this blog consider sending their children to Government-run public schools? Or would I, the writer, consider it? It is a scary thought. Is the reason for our answer being in the negative merely that the quality of education and infrastructure is poor in public schools? Or could the reason also lie in the composition of the students who go to these schools? If it is the latter, what does that say about our preference for the kinds of people we want to be associated with? Especially for those of us who claim to follow a Christ who identified with the weakest members of society and in fact, lived among them, is it conceivable for us to associate with the weakest members of our society in the choice of schools for our children?

One possible explanation for the really poor conditions of public schools in India is the fact that the privileged sections of society were able to send their children to private schools because they could afford it. This left the less privileged as the only beneficiaries of public schools. Would the quality of public schools have been better if even the powerful members of society had to go to public schools? If the children of the politicians and the people in power had to study at public schools, is it not likely that they would have pushed for better quality?

Does that then mean that the presence of private schools in India offers a way for the privileged members of society to offer a segregated schooling experience for their children — away from the less privileged children?

The final question that I want to raise has to do with the salaries of teachers in public and private schools. A study found that in 2014, in rural Punjab, the average private school teacher's pay was 3.2% that of the public school teacher's pay.³

Each citizen of the country is directly or indirectly paying for public education in the country (through income taxes or taxes on goods purchased). This enables the Government to pay public school teachers well. However, when public schools dropped their standards, instead of demanding better accountability from the government, the privileged families moved their children to private schools. A majority of these schools offer better quality education for the students. However since the income of private schools (through fees) is much less than that of the government (through taxes), it results in lower salaries for teachers in private schools. This also means that each of us is paying for the same thing twice. Through our taxes, we are paying for public education. And we are paying private schools directly for the same service.

As Christians, we are encouraged not to withdraw from the city but to seek the good of the city. (Jer 29:7) We are told not to be escapists (John 17:15) but to work towards the good of others. What does that look like when it comes to public education in the country? But would it be loving for us to send our children to public schools even after knowing that it would not be the best for them in terms of educational standards?

These are not easy questions to answer, but I hope we think deeply about these issues.

1. Kumar, Deepak, and Pradeep Kumar Choudhury. "Determinants of private school choice in India: All about the family backgrounds?." Journal of School Choice 15.4 (2021): 576-602

2. Kumar, Deepak, and Pradeep Kumar Choudhury. "Determinants of private school choice in India: All about the family backgrounds?." Journal of School Choice 15.4 (2021): 576-602

3. Kingdon, Geeta Gandhi. "The private schooling phenomenon in India: A review." The Journal of Development Studies 56.10 (2020): 1795-1817