21. Table 3 shows the strong statistical significance and large magnitude of the privategovernment gap, at the aggregate level as well as within each gender and rural/urban subpopulation, which indicates that the aggregate pattern is not driven by any particular subpopulation. However, even within each socio-economic subpopulation identified in Table 3, it may not necessarily be the case that unaided private schools provide higher student achievement than government schools, as factors other than the type of school and its features may matter. For example, the previous section on school enrollment shows that private school students tend to come from wealthier households (we are not able to provide this information reliably using the student achievement datasets), and may therefore be better nourished and prepared, receive more family support and motivation, and be more likely to attend pre-school than government school students, thus faring better at primary and secondary levels. There may also be other impacting factors that are not observed in the data, such as the quality of the relationship between parents and children, and between parents themselves, or social networks.

22. To what extent may the government-private school difference in performance be attributable to observed student and household characteristics? A number of studies on India, Nepal, and Pakistan have attempted to use rigorous econometric tools to answer the question. For example, Muralidharan and Kremer (2007) find that the score gap between government and unaided schools in India on a short grade-4 test is reduced by 0.07 standard deviation but stays at 0.5 standard deviation after taking into account parents’ education and literacy, household infrastructure, and children’s uptake of private tutoring. In Punjab, Pakistan, Andrabi et al. (2007) find no change in the LEAPS score gap after controlling for child characteristics (gender, age, height-for-age, parental perception of intelligence and self-reported health status), and a reduction of 20% of the gap after adding controls for family characteristics (education, wealth and availability of books/media at home). Desai et al. (2009) and Goyal (2009) report that the household’s rural-urban location and parents’ educational and socioeconomic status are statistically significant determinants of children’s test scores in India. The consensus across studies is that observed student and household characteristics play an important but modest role in explaining the private school advantage in student achievement.

23. Factors at the student and household levels that are not observed in the data could also play an important role. Accounting for these factors, one study highlights that an insignificant government-private school achievement gap remains, while other studies show that a nontrivial gap remains. Chudgar and Quin (2012) use the propensity score matching method on the India Human Development Survey data and report test score differences that are largely statistically insignificant between unaided and aided/government schools. By contrast, analyzing the same data, Goyal (2009) applies a new econometric methodology proposed by Altonji, Elder and Taber (2005), and finds unobserved bias in selection accounts for only about 10% of the gap. Andrabi et al. (2010) instrument for child selection into private schooling using a relative measure of distance to a private school, and find that, in rural Punjab, Pakistan, private schooling brings a test score advantage of 0.82 standard deviation in English, 1.15 standard deviations in Urdu and 1.11 standard deviations in math. Basu proposes a hypothesis in his critique of Desai et al. (2009) that parents may choose private schools due to their branding as generally better than government schools, and so that their children can network with better-off peers for later career and social benefits. This may help explain low achievement levels at private schools, which may be due partly to low intrinsic motivation.

24. Summarizing the evidence up to this point, making the hypothesis that students enrolled 19