We Never Did the Sums

Every Pakistani with an opinion on schooling has the same one. The government schools have collapsed, the private sector is rescuing what it can, and the sensible thing is to hurry it along. You hear it at every dinner table from Karachi to Lahore, and from that one uncle who has an answer for everything, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. You read it in newspaper columns, in donor reports, in the quiet sums parents do at kitchen tables. It is also, when you finally check, mostly a guess.

I have spent the better part of a year with the numbers instead of the opinions. Every year the Annual Status of Education Report tests hundreds of thousands of rural children, government and private, on the same plain tasks: read a story, do a sum. I lined up a hundred-odd districts and compared them. The result is not the one we all repeat. Across the districts where you can fairly compare the two, it is close to a coin toss, with government schools ahead in slightly more than the private sector. The confident private advantage everyone invokes turns out to live in a handful of places, not across the map. And in Punjab, the province we are fondest of writing off, government schools lead in roughly two districts out of every three.

That is not the same as saying they are good. Millions of children here cannot read a sentence or divide two numbers, and some of the worst places to be a child are still run by the state. The claim is narrower, and more embarrassing than a defence of anyone. The belief that private schooling is, as a rule, the better product is one we never actually established. We assumed it. Then we built policy, and a whole economy, on top of the assumption.

There is an easy objection, and a fair one. Private-school families tend to be richer, more literate, likelier to sit with a child over homework, so perhaps the schools are just riding the families. It is a real effect. But when Nadia Siddiqui and Stephen Gorard held family background steady, the gap between the two sectors all but dissolved. Whatever is failing here, it is not simply that the state cannot teach.

The people who hold the private-is-better line most fiercely are not the poor it claims to serve. They are us: the English-medium, column-reading, school-choosing class that left the government system a generation ago and never looked back. We did not discover that private schools were better. We stopped sending our own children to the other kind, and called our exit an analysis.

And it has been, really, a lucrative one. A whole industry runs on the worry we manufactured: the one-room school with the grand English name, the tuition centre on every second street, the coaching package a labourer buys on credit because someone who sounds as if he knows has told him the free school down the lane will fail his daughter. That father is not being irrational. He is trusting a consensus he had no reason to doubt, and paying for it in a currency he cannot spare.

None of this is the fault of the parents doing the paying. A mother choosing a fee she cannot manage over a free school she has been taught to distrust is making a sensible bet with bad information. The information is what we owe her, and it does not flatter the people who have been handing it out.

Admit this, and the question turns over. It stops being how to move more children into private hands, and starts being why some government schools, on the same budget in the same district, run so far ahead of the ones beside them. Because they do. The good ones are sitting right there in the data, unglamorous and unstudied, waiting for someone curious enough to look instead of assume.

That is the harder conversation, because it costs us a flattering story, the one where we are the clever ones and the state is the lost cause. Far easier to repeat the old line, confident as arithmetic, and keep selling it to the people who can least afford to buy.

So the next time someone tells you the government schools have failed, in that voice that leaves no room for doubt, ask them the question nobody thought to ask. Ask them how they know.