James Tooley has spent years documenting how private education can work wonders for low-income students in international settings. [For coverage of his fascinating recent report on private schools in India, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=4#42.] Now, from the Indian government itself comes new data on the explosion of private spending on education in that country, especially among the 40 percent of the population that lives below the poverty line. While private spending on education has grown 10.8 times across the country as a whole, spending among the poor rose 12.4 times between 1983 and 1999. Along the way, Muslims and low-caste Indians have pulled near to parity with the Hindu majority in the number of years spent in school, and the gap between the number of years girls spend in school compared to boys has fallen, from 30 percent to 10 percent. Still, high school age students in India have spent, on average, just over six years in school, far less than the U.S. and four years less than Indian law requires.
"Poor are spending more on education," by Sunil Jain, Rediff.com, July 22, 2003