# **Section IV: The Pragmatic Approach Applied to Education Policy**

When we started working in Pakistan in 2002, the country was regarded as an educational pariah in international circles. Enrollments were low; girls’ schooling was particularly poor and it was widely believed that a historic neglect of state education had led children to migrate in droves to religious schools ( _madrassas)_ . The picture on the ground was very different. While educational outcomes were indeed poor in terms of enrollment, the main option to poor state schooling was not religious schooling, which accounted for between 1 and 1.5% of all enrollments, but private schools. In a series of papers, we have documented five main features of the Pakistani education system (see Appendix for further details):<sup>30</sup>

1. The educational landscape of Pakistan is changing rapidly with the arrival of low-cost private schools, although such schools are not evenly distributed through the country.

2. The system in 2002 was characterized by both low enrollment and low learning. We predicted that while enrollment was likely to increase, learning would be harder to change and would indeed become the key learning issue in years to come. In fact, enrollment has increased quite rapidly since then, while learning levels continue to remain low.

3. Attendance in private schools was associated with higher learning, and to the extent econometric methods could address selection bias in observational data, this learning difference was causal.

4. Per-student costs were lower in private schools. The bulk of these cost differences arose because teachers were paid 5-6 times more in the public sector. Reducing these wages made no difference to educational outcomes.

5. Parents were highly active in the schooling system, spending substantial portions of their budgets on educational expenditures and making active schooling choices.

The critical observation with regard to Pakistan’s educational system is that along key dimensions—the low learning, the use of private schools, public teachers’ wages and parental involvement—it is very similar to several low and middle-income countries. For instance, Pakistan learning levels are similar to those found in India, Peru and Ethiopia through the Young Lives Project. The contextual factors of increasing private schools, high public teachers’ wages leading to lower cost-per-student in private schools, and some private school advantage in test-scores—have been replicated in a number of other settings, from India to Ghana. Of course, this is not to claim that Pakistan looks like all other low-income because people are poor?” After all, the average spending on a private school is $3 a month and anywhere in the world it is unlikely that you can provide a world class education at the monthly cost of a cappuccino in an upmarket café. And if the driving force behind poor education is poverty, the main policy conclusion is to make people less poor, rather than a specific focus on education. This can be done either through higher income growth for the poor or through redistributive policies. But in either case, no judgment is required on how the poor should allocate this additional money across equally compelling claims— poor housing, poor health, poor food or poor clothing. Similarly, when confronted with apparent discrimination say towards girl children, one need not immediately assume and attempt to rectify biased parental preferences. Rather, an examination of market failures can reveal situations – such as the inability of parents to write long-term contracts with children – that could produce similarly distorted investments but where the policy response might be to help alleviate these failures rather than attempt to “re-educate” parents about how to value their girls.

> 30 See Das, Pande and Zajonc (2012), Andrabi, Das, Khwaja and Zajonc (2006, 2011), Andrabi, Das and Khwaja (2008) and Andrabi, Bau, Das and Khwaja (2014b).

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