Learning outcomes refer to the performance of the students in
academic tests pertaining to the respective grade level. In Pakistan,
survey evidences from Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) show a
significant dispersion in learning outcomes of public schools as
compared with private sector counterpart. The perceived results of
learning outcomes in private schools very clear but less evidence is
found for educational outcome of schools run under public-private
partnership programs. This becomes especially relevant when status of
curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities is compared
between public school, private schools, and schools run under public
private partnership. In recent literature, it is found that schools
taken up by public-private partnership have been providing a better
learning environment—Infrastructure Rehabilitation and Development,
Administrative changes, Academic Innovation and Planning, Teacher Reform
and Student Affairs—is perceived to have a positive impact on learning
outcomes. It is to investigate and document that the investments in
these areas are justifiable. To promote this fact, we conduct a
quasi-experiment to examine the profiles of students in a public-private
partnership school at Karachi (running under Zindagi Trust program) and
a public school (as counterfactual) in the same neighbourhood. We also
recorded the household and socioeconomic characteristics to create a
good set of control variables. The propensity-score results show that
public-private school is performing better than that of comparison group
in attaining learning outcomes thus showing positive effects of PPP.
Finally, the study probed into household and parental covariates of
student's educational outcomes to enhance internal validity of results.
JEL Classification: I21, C21, L32. Keywords: Educational Learning
Outcomes, Public-Private Partnership, Quasi-experiment.
Privatization of School Education: Problems and Prospects
