ABSTRACT
The research and discussion on quality in Indian education has been disproportionately shaped by the government schools vs private school war and focused on primary schools for the ‘poor’. We have little or no formal knowledge of the vast and growing private sector of schools. Surveys and studies tend to take a segmented view – either focusing on the middle-class segment akin to market surveys or exclusively focusing on the schools catering to the lower socio-economic segment, where learning outcome and parental choice have dominated understanding issues. These studies tend to ‘plug into’ and add grist to the government vs private schools war with assumptions on how quality is produced by the state (bureaucracy) vs the market, highlighting features such as teachers’ accountability and cost efficiency/value for money or what is to be valued as an education outcome.
This chapter is based on a survey of all 85 schools in one education block of the city of Hyderabad. It addresses questions such as: what types of institutions exist, how diverse are they, and what part of this diversity is of educational consequence in terms of meriting attention and providing explanations or having explanatory potential. What are their education qualities, what is the diversity in these qualities and why? The chapter takes an ‘ecosystem’ approach to understanding the diversification, in relation to the changing role of the state as a provider of schools, the role of charities, trusts, and societies, and more recently the market catering to socio-economic class. It also provides a new approach to understanding pedagogic forms. A typology of school management is developed which is found to be useful in understanding how they develop and adapt aims of education and translate them into institutional forms within an education market. Schools are found to be highly segmented, with homogeneity in clientele reflecting either socio-economic class or religion or disability. Charitable institutions are found to be key in the education of the poorest of the poor.
