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

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.