Forum: Why and How the Public vs. Private Schooling Debate Needs to Change

Missing from this debate is a detailed empirical picture of what the growth of private schools means for education markets more broadly and what the functioning of the market tells us about the demand for schooling and the ability of public and private schools, in turn, to respond to that demand. [...] They find that the variation in SVA is so large that, compounded over the primary school years, the average difference between the best and the worst performing school in the same village is similar to the difference in test scores between low- and high-income countries. [...] The red band shows the average quality of public schools in the village—increasing because the figure is arranged in ascending order of average public-school quality in the village—and the black band shows the average quality of private schools in the village. [...] But, to emphasize the main point, which is that if a government is choosing to own and operate schools because it wants to control socialisation, it will often be the case that the people with the highest demand to switch into private schools (and the first supply of private schools) will be those who most object to (have the largest hedonic 18 Forum: Why and How the Public vs. [...] In the end, the relations between the organs of the state and the schools are characterised similarly: to placate the government official and to get him or her to go away, money must change hands.