Motivations to set up and manage low-fee private schools in India

Abstract

Low-fee private schools (LFPS) educate some of India’s poorest children. They have grown dramatically over the last decade in India and have changed the country’s educational landscape (Srivastava, 2016), yet there is little conclusive evidence that the schools significantly help their students. Our study aims to better understand why and how the schools have grown, and we use a social entrepreneurship theory – the push and pull theory – to guide our research questions. We interviewed eight owners and asked: “what are the motivations of individual actors in setting up low fee private schools?” and “how do these actors justify continuing their work when presented with empirical research on these schools’ mixed impact on the quality of education they provide? There were more pull than push factors. Owners’ distrust of government schools, and the characteristically low-income nature of the communities drove them to choose the low-fee private school model. They justified their work despite evidence of these schools’ mixed impact, arguing that their schools were different from the regular LFPS and that there is high parental support for their schools. We recommend policies to better support such individuals and provide them with an awareness of alternative paths to contribute to improving education.

Teaching–learning process in low-fee-private schools: perspectives of parents and school management

“…LFPSs are defined by the amount of fee that is charged by them, which is significantly lower than private schools meant for rich people (Kingdon 2020;Mond and Prakash 2019). Other characteristics include relatively lower salaries for teachers; their location in or near underserved areas and a relatively higher percentage of students from lower social classes.…”

“…LFPSs are for-profit private enterprises maintained by private parties, NGO 4 or a local community (Philipson 2008, pp 1). Besides, other factors which increased demand for LFPS in low-income zones like slums or rural areas are largely driven by the failure of government schools to provide quality learning experiences (Mond and Prakash 2019;Harma 2011;Tooley and Dixon 2006). Moreover, the easy availability of educated unemployed youth plays an important role in this rapid growth (Muralidharan and Kremer 2006;Mehta 2005), reasonably because it enables them to hire teachers at lower salaries, reducing the overall cost of schooling (Kingdon 2007).…”

Globalization, privatization, marginalization: Mapping and assessing connections and consequences in/through education

“…Third, teachers themselves are marginalized through LFPS because staying in business often means cutting or "sacrificing" the salaries of teachers (Balarín, Fontdevila, Marius, & Rodriguez, 2019, this issue). Yet what is fascinating is that LFPS operators do not see themselves as contributing to marginalization (as noted by Mond & Prakash, 2019, this issue), even though they are frequently former public-school teachers or principals themselves (see Edwards, Okitsu, & Mwanza, 2019, this issue), because they believe they are providing a valuable alternative to low-quality public schoolseven when they are shown evidence that LFPSs do not produce better results (Mond & Prakash, 2019). Fourth, and finally, LFPSs likewise contribute to the marginalization of public schools because they often siphon off the relatively more privileged students, except in those cases, such as the Philippines, where public schools have been able to maintain a good reputation and where they respond to the preferences of middle class families (Termes, Edwards, & Verger, forthcoming).…”