Your affluence, education affects your child's results: ASER report

If you are an affluent and welleducated Indian your children are likely to do better at school There seems to be a strong relation between affluence indicators and childrenrsquos learning outcomes according to the 2014 Annual Status Report on Education ASERldquoThe credit for a childrsquos education goes not just to the school but to the parents as wellrdquo Rukmini Banerji director ASER centre told IndiaSpend Affluence ensures that households tend to be smaller allowing parents to devote more attention to their children they can also afford to pay for supplemental learning aidsStudents in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh for example do relatively well at math and reading Himachal Pradesh being a state that reports high levels of affluence and parental education The same was true for Kerala and ManipurThe ASER report covered 577 rural districts across India and surveyed 16497 villages 341070 households and 569229 students The ASER centre is an autonomous body under the Pratham network which works across rural and urban areas to help children acquire basic skills in reading and arithmeticAn Indiaspendorg storyOverall the situation with basic reading continues to be grim in India with falling levels of learning Only a fourth of all children in Standard Std III can read a Std II text fluently a drop of more than 5 over four years With math a quarter of children in StdIII could not recognise numbers between 10 and 99 a drop of 13 over four years So is there any difference in outcomes between public and private schools The enrolment in private schools is going up as we explained in our earlier report on ASER 2013 Private school enrolment stood at around 187 in 2006 and has steadily increased to 308 in 2014The learning outcomes of private schools tend to be much better than public schools We can see that reading and math skills of students in private schools are much better than their counterparts in government schools Overall there has been a steady decline in math and reading skills since 2010 across private and government schoolsThe 2014 report shows that learning levels in government schools plummeted to a low of 411 in 2013 but recovered slightly to 422 in 2014 Learning levels in private schools remained more or less steady ndash 633 in 2013 and 625 in 2014A learning gap of 98 percentage points between private and public in 2006 doubled to 203 percentage points in 2014 Let us now look at the top five states with the best learning outcomes and the percentage of children enrolled in private schoolsA striking correlation is evident in learning outcomes in Manipur and Kerala where a majority of children 73 and 62 respectively is enrolled in private schools The exception is Himachal Pradesh which tops the list in reading ability but only has 35 of its students in private schoolsComparing learning outcomes of children in government schools with those in private schools may not be appropriate though since it is a fact that household and other characteristics of privateschool students are very different from those of children from governmentschoolsA study by ASER looking at factors affecting learning abilities came up with two key considerations the educational background of parents and affluence Affluence was measured by using proxies like mobile and electricityHimachal Pradesh where children do well in both math and reading also has 99 of its households connected to the power grid impacting learning outcomes in a positive manner We can also see the same outcome in Kerala and ManipurldquoWhen you control for factors such as parentsrsquo education and other facilities at home it has an impact on childrenrsquos learning outcomes and not just enrolment into private schoolsrdquo said Banerji ldquoSo while making policyrelated decisions all these other factors must be kept in mindrdquoIndiaspendorg is a datadriven publicinterest journalism nonprofit