EW India Budget Private School Rankings 2022-23

Left academics and intellectuals excoriate them as profiteering enterprises exploiting the poor and gullible. Yet India’s unique budget private schools which provide low-priced education to children of aspirational lower middle and working class households have played a very important role in the half-hearted national development effort, writes Dilip Thakore IN THE LEXICON OF LEFT academics and intellectuals whose inorganic ideology has ruined post-independence India’s high-potential econ­omy, they are vilified as profiteering enterprises, exploiting the poor and gullible. Yet India’s unique budget private schools (BPS) which provide low-priced education to children of aspirational lower middle and work­ing class households have played — and continue to discharge — a very important role in India’s half-hearted national development effort. BPS receive negligible media cov­erage — mostly negative because the media is dominated by Left liberals who think with their hearts instead of heads. But they are a significant force in K-10 education. The Centre for Civil Society (estb.1997), a Delhi-based think tank, estimates their na­tionwide number at 400,000 with a massive aggregate enrolment of 60 million children, a number equivalent to the entire population of imperial Great Britain. Therefore, disregarding media fashion, your editors have always accorded high respect to budget pri­vate schools eulogised by Dr. James Tooley, vice chancellor, University of Buckingham (UK), in his best-seller The Beautiful Tree (2009). In this deeply researched book which has been ignored, if not suppressed, by the Indian establishment, Prof. Tool­ey highlighted that BPS, promoted by enlightened education entrepreneurs, are a common phenomenon in third world countries, particularly India. For modest tuition fees they provide aspirational underclass households an alternative to free-of-charge govern­ment schools notorious for crumbling infrastructure, under-qualified staff, chronic teacher truancy, multigrade classrooms and rock-bottom learning outcomes. “Poor parents send their children to private schools because they are better. They are better than public schools with regard to higher teacher commitment and smaller class sizes. They are better on the vast majority of school inputs. They are better in academic achievement even after con­trolling for background variables. And not only are they better in all these re­spects, they are cheaper to run at least in terms of teachers’ salaries,” writes Tooley in The Beautiful Tree. This seminal book’s title is derived from a lament by Mahatma Gandhi to the effect that India’s ancient gurukul system of education based on the peer-to-peer learning model under supervision of a guru — “a beautiful tree” — was uprooted and replaced by the Macaulay factory-style cramming for exams model in 1835. According to State of the Sector Report: Private Schools in India (2020) of the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation (estb.2012), the total number of private (including government aided) schools in India is 450,000 with an aggregate enrolment of 120 million students. The great ma­jority of them are BPS whose number is estimated at 400,000 by the Centre for Civil Society (cited above). That 89 percent of private schools which have nurtured post-independence India’s 350 million strong middle class are BPS, underscores the critical role they discharge within…