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State of Elementary Education in Public Schools of Gujarat: A Study of Schools Run by the Bharuch Municipality
Abstract
In India the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments have given powers and responsibility of achieving the goal of Universal Elementary Education (UEE) to the local body governments. The present study has examined the situation of elementary schools run by Bharuch municipality. The evidence show that the situation of elementary education is unsatisfactory and in bad shape. The number of schools has declined rapidly, the learning levels of students are miserable, community participation is almost non-existent, private cost of so called free municipality education is high; and the state of the mid-day meal scheme looks very grim. Municipality schools are loosing ground in Bharuch city.
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Using a national household survey data on rural India, the article estimates coefficients of elasticity to examine two important questions on the nature of household expenditure on education: how do households behave in spending on education, given a change in their levels of economic development; and whether households complement or substitute public efforts in spending on education? The results indicate that there is a complementary relationship between household and government expenditures on education; and that household expenditures respond favourably but less than proportionately to changes in household incomes.
This monograph, which has been prepared as a Research Report to the New Zealand (New Zealand) Treasury, undertakes three main tasks: (1) describing the various forms of tangible and intangible human capital, their relationship to "capabilities" affecting human well-being, and the channels through which they may contribute to economic growth; (2) reviewing the major theoretical and empirical findings on the microeconomic determinants, and macroeconomic growth effects of investment in human capital; (3) reviewing salient general implications for policies affecting human capital, and indicating measures specifically germane to the situation of the New Zealand economy. For these purposes, the concept of human capital is defined comprehensively, so that it embraces capacities for interpreting flows of sensory data and structured information required for goal-directed individual actions and inter-personal transactions, and for providing various physical labour service- inputs in ordinary production processes. More conventionally, it subsumes the creative faculties for generating new scientific and technological knowledge, the cognitive basis of entrepreneurship, and the competences for managing market and non-market production as well as household consumption activities. The report is organised in three main Parts that address the three major objectives, taking each in its turn. A detailed Table of Contents and an Executive Summary precede the text, which is followed by extensive bibliographic references. A unifying conceptual framework is developed to (a) identify the micro-level processes involved in human capital formation; (b) implicitly aggregate the resulting qualities and capabilities of individuals belonging to successive population cohorts; (c) trace the interrelated influences that the forms of human capital have upon macroeconomic performance. The review of empirical evidence at the macroeconomic level features a discussion of the deficiencies of data and methods in many of the international cross-section studies, and contrasts recent econometric findings on the role of education in economic growth among the developed economies with the conclusions derived through more detailed analyses of their historical experiences. Significant policy implications do emerge from the modern macroeconomic growth literature, but these are very broad in nature and not particularly germane to the situation of small, open economies that may lack a substantial industrial base or the extensive human and institutional infrastructure required to generate the knowledge-base needed for their peoples' well-being and their firms' competitive success in international markets. Nor does the received literature adequately treat the implications of such economies' potential to rapidly alter their respective human resource endowments through differential population migration. Consideration of human capital policies geared more closely to the specific challenges and opportunities facing New Zealand's economy leads to the formulation of a number of novel proposals. These would reform tax treatment of education and training investments by residents and immigrants alike; subsidise new voluntary institutions developing on-the-job training programs under industry sponsorship; undertake public information infrastructure investments in order to reduce the costs of effective access to global knowledge bases in science and technology. Proposals also are considered for integrated government programmes to accelerate the closing of persistent socio-economic disparities within New Zealand society, such as those between Maori and non-Maori.
The idea of positive educational externalities is that the benefits of individually acquired education may not be restricted to the individual but might spill over to others as well, accruing at higher aggregation levels, in particular at the macro-economic one. We offer an extensive summary and a critical discussion of the empirical literature on the impact of human capital on macro- economic performance, with a particular focus on UK policy. Key findings include: (1) Taking the studies as a whole, there is compelling evidence that human capital increases productivity. Although there is an important theoretical distinction between the augmented neo-classical approach and the new growth theories, the empirical literature is still largely divided on whether the stock of education affects the long-run level or growth rate of the economy. A one-year increase in average education is found to raise the level of output per capita by between 3 and 6 percent according to augmented neo-classical specifications, while it would lead to an over 1 percentage point faster growth according to estimates from the new-growth theories. (2) Over the short-run planning horizon (4 years) the empirical estimates of the change in GDP for a given increase in the human capital stock are of similar orders of magnitude in the two approaches. (3) The impact of increases at different levels of edu-cation appear to depend on the level of a country’s development, with tertiary/higher education being the most important for growth in OECD countries. (4) Education is found to yield additional indirect benefits to growth (in par-ticular, by stimulating physical capital investments and technological development and adoption). More preliminary evidence seems to indicate that type, quality and efficiency of education all matter for growth. The most pressing methodological problems are the measurement of human capital; systematic differences in the coefficient of education across countries (in particular between developing and developed countries) and reverse causality. We also make recommendations for future research priorities.
Direct measures of labor-force quality from international mathematics and science test scores are strongly related to growth. Indirect specification tests are generally consistent with a causal link: direct spending on schools is unrelated to student performance differences; the estimated growth effects of improved labor-force quality hold when East Asian countries are excluded; and, finally, home-country quality differences of immigrants are directly related to U.S. earnings if the immigrants are educated in their own country but not in the United States. The last estimates of micro productivity effects, however, introduce uncertainty about the magnitude of the growth effects.
A new and flexible approach to the schooling of children of the urban poor is imperative. Field studies in Mumbai and Delhi have yielded the insight that the reason for so many slum children not being in school has less to do with their families' economic circumstances than with the school system's shortcomings. The available evidence also suggests that the amount of learning the average slum family pupil in India acquires in primary school falls far short of what may legitimately be expected.
Historically, most attention in public programs has been given to the resources devoted to the activity, and resources have been used to index both commitment and quality. Education differs from other areas of public expenditure because direct measures of outcomes are available, making it is possible to consider results and, by implication, to consider the efficiency of provision. Early interpretations of the evidence, emanating from popular interpretations of the Coleman Report that “schools do not make a difference”, are incorrect, but the basic evidence behind the statement suggests serious performance problems of government supply, because purchased inputs to schools are not closely related to outcomes. This paper reviews that evidence along with providing an evaluation of the various controversial aspects including issues of causality, consumer behavior, and estimation approaches. Two detailed policy areas are discussed in terms of the evidence on performance: public versus private provision and the financing of schools.
Hanushek and Kimko (2000) concluded that, for a sample of nearly 80 countries, the quality of the labour force is significantly positively related to economic growth rates for the period 1960-1990 and is more important that mean years of schooling. In this paper, we further test the robustness of their result by firstly including in the original model a proxy for labour force health, and secondly by re-estimating the model for a later sample period. We conclude that the findings of Hanushek and Kimko are not robust to these changes. In particular, their measure of labour force quality is significantly but negatively related to economic growth rates for the later sample period.
This paper summarizes and tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much microeconometric evidence suggests that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries. At a national level, however, recent studies have found that increases in educational attainment are unrelated to economic growth. This discrepancy appears to be a result of the high rate of measurement error in first-differenced cross-country education data. After accounting for measurement error, the effect of changes in educational attainment on income growth in cross-country data is at least as great as microeconometric estimates of the rate of return to years of schooling. Another finding of the macro growth literature--that economic growth depends positively on the initial stock of human capital--is not robust when the assumption of a constant-coefficient model is relaxed.
How Free is 'Free' Primary Education in India? Economic and Political Weekly, Part-1 and Part
- J B G Tilak
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Part-1 and Part-2(31), 257-282 and 355-366.