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This paper, based on an empirical study of private schools (n=35) and families (n=105) in select localities (n=3), explores how diversified school market(s) operate in Alwar city in Rajasthan in India. It observes that private schools execute a range of strategies, both ethical and unethical, to influence parents and attract admissions. School strategies range from the most modern methods such as advertising through local television channels, WhatsApp, Facebook, roadside billboards, wall-paintings, door-to-door visits, etc., to the invoking of primordial affiliations such as kinship ties, caste, and religious identities to reach out to parents. Schools use promises like offering better English-medium education, ensuring the safety and security of children, strict discipline, and providing coaching to prepare students for admission to prominent government schools and the engineering and medical institutes of the country as marketing strategies to help them flourish in a competitive education market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper contributes to the important but small body of research on the role of private schools in Indian education. It uses a household dataset from India with a rich set of household covariates and student performance data on reading, writing, and mathematics. For both rural and urban India the results from regression analyses indicate that private school students perform better on tests controlling for covariates. In both contexts, however, the private school benefit becomes largely, statistically, insignificant after conducting multivariate analysis on data balanced using the propensity score matching technique. The paper also makes an initial attempt to identify ‘low-fee’ private schools; within the regression framework it finds that children in such schools may perform no better than their public school counterparts. The data and methods used in this paper are not without limitations; however these analyses call into question the claim that private school effect may be unequivocally positive and highlights the potential heterogeneity in private school performance in the Indian context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Overall, private school students have better learning outcomes than their government school counterparts in India. • Student's absenteeism in school and the time spent on homework after school are important determinants of their learning abilities. • The learning gap between private and government school students can be minimized by increasing their school attendance and time for homework. Do students attending private schools learn more and have higher cognitive abilities than their public school counterparts in India? Though some recent works have discussed this question, the empirical contours to address the issue remain unclear, particularly in a diversifying school education market in India. This paper examines the factors determining the inequality in children's learning outcomes (i.e., reading and math scores) in India using the second round of India Human Development Survey data. We examine the effect of a child's 'school absenteeism' and 'time spent for studying and doing homework' on learning outcomes, and how these explain the existing learning gap between private and government school children. We provide strong evidence that the children attending private schools have significantly better learning outcomes than their government school counterparts. However, this performance difference between private and government school-going children reduces with the increase in school attendance and the time spent in studying and doing homework by a child. The findings of the study implicate that the cognitive abilities of low performing government school students can be improved by reducing their absenteeism in schools and increasing time for studying and doing homework after school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]