The Public School System in Sindh: Empirical Insights

AbstractThis paper presents descriptive statistics on the government school education system in Sindh. The data are obtained from the latest administrative annual school census in Sindh (2011/12). The province's schooling system comprises 48,932 schools of which 47,000 are primary, middle, and elementary schools, giving Sindh one of the densest public schooling systems in the world with almost 1.8 schools for every 1,000 people in rural Sindh. The functional schooling capacity, however, is low, with less than 15 percent of these schools having at least two teachers and access to basic facilities such as toilets, drinking water, electricity, and boundary walls. Against this backdrop, we examine key trends in education outcomes using the Pakistan Living Standards and Measurement surveys for 2004/05 and 2010/11. We find that the net enrollment rates (NERs) at primary, middle, and secondary level in Sindh stagnated, at best, during 2007-11 after a sharp increase registered in 2006; this trend is similar to that of the rest of Pakistan. Gains in NER vary significantly across districts with some performing exceptionally better than others. Finally, we cross-validate these statistics using independent household- and school-level census data on 300 communities, collected as part of an ongoing impact evaluation study in three districts of rural Sindh.Keywords: Patronage model, administrative data, PSLM, net enrollment rate, student achievement, public education, Sindh, Pakistan.JEL classification: I21, I28, O20.1. IntroductionPakistan's economy experienced a remarkable turnaround in the early 2000s after reaching the verge of economic collapse in 1998. Its national GDP grew at an impressive average rate of 6 percent between 2000 and 2006. This cycle of episodic growth dissipated shortly as a result ofunaddressed long-term structural constraints such as a low tax-to-GDP ratio, untargeted subsidies in the power sector, losses by state-owned enterprises, and dismal performance on human development indicators. These factors, accompanied by the global economic crisis, major floods in Sindh and Punjab, and overall deteriorating security conditions, have taken a toll on Pakistan's economy.To steer the economy back onto a higher growth path and harness the potential of its vast human resource base for more robust and sustainable growth, the country must accelerate its progress on human development indicators. Currently, it ranks 163rd (out of 177) on the United Nations' index of education systems. Overall, the country's performance in school participation and completion is poor relative to its regional counterparts and to developing countries with a similar level of per capita income. That said, Pakistan did witness improvements in school participation rates between 2004 and 2007, but this promising trajectory of growth in human development was reversed with the slowdown in economic activity (see Figure 1).The province of Sindh is no exception as far as the poor state of education in the country is concerned. With a population of approximately 42 million people-roughly one quarter of the country's total population- the province has a net enrollment rate (NER) of 62 percent, which drops to 54 percent in rural areas. The proportion of uneducated youth (aged 15-19) in Sindh is 31 percent compared to 27 percent nationally, which, in turn, is almost double the proportion of uneducated youth in any economy with a comparable per capita income. Overall, the percentage of uneducated females in Pakistan is disproportionately larger than that of males, but as illustrated in Figure 2, the shrinking of the uneducated population in the last decade can be attributed mainly to higher school participation rates among females compared to males. Sindh follows similar patterns.In March 2013, the legislative assembly enacted the Sindh Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, which makes education mandatory for all children aged 5-16 years. …