Segmented Schooling: Inequalities in Primary Education

This paper utilizes a newly collected nationally representative survey data from over 41,550 households to examine social inequality in children’s educational outcomes. The focus is on 8 to11 year old children’s reading and mathematical skills. As expected, the paper documents substantial differences in reading and arithmetic skills between children from different caste, ethnic and religious backgrounds in India. However, these differences persist even after controlling for current school enrollment, grade completion and parental socio-economic status. This suggests that the differences in educational attainment between people of different social strata are not simply due to difference in enrollment rates. Even when children from disadvantaged groups attend school, they fail to learn as much as their peers. These findings have important policy implications. Much of the current discourse has focused on the importance of constructing schools or encouraging parents to send their children to school. Very little attention has been directed towards what happens in schools. Our results suggest that even holding school enrollment and grade attainment constant, children from disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to attain lower levels of reading and arithmetic skills. Since low performance at primary levels is likely to result in lower academic performance at subsequent levels, improving school quality and reducing discrimination may be the next challenge facing Indian educational policy.