Measuring the Dynamics of the Achievement Gap Between Public and Private School Students During Early Life in India

Ian K. McDonough (), Punarjit Roychowdhury () and Gaurav Dhamija ()
Additional contact information
Ian K. McDonough: University of Nevada
Punarjit Roychowdhury: University of Nottingham
Gaurav Dhamija: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

Journal of Labor Research, 2021, vol. 42, issue 1, No 4, 78-122

Abstract: Abstract It is well documented that private school students outperform their public school counterparts in India. However, researchers have only focused on the achievement gap in levels without considering the underlying dynamics of how students move through the distribution of achievement over time. We bridge this gap here by exploring the dynamics of the public-private school achievement gap in India by applying nonparametric measures of distributional mobility to panel data on math and Peabody Picture Vocabulary test scores from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that public school students are at least as mobile as private school students during early childhood. During preadolescence, however, public school students, relative to private school students, are significantly less upwardly mobile while at the same time more downwardly mobile through the distribution of test scores. These mobility patterns, taken together with the level gap in test scores, suggests one would expect to see very little convergence in achievement between private and public school students during the middle and high school years of schooling.

Keywords: Directional rank mobility; Private schools; Public schools; Staying probability; Test scores; Transition probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12122-020-09307-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jlabre:v:42:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s12122-020-09307-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12122

DOI: 10.1007/s12122-020-09307-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Labor Research is currently edited by Ozkan Eren

More articles in Journal of Labor Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().