Impact of Public-Private-Partnership Programmes on Students’Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Learning outcomes refer to the performance of the students inacademic tests pertaining to the respective grade level. In Pakistan,survey evidences from Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) show asignificant dispersion in learning outcomes of public schools ascompared with private sector counterpart. The perceived results oflearning outcomes in private schools very clear but less evidence isfound for educational outcome of schools run under public-privatepartnership programs. This becomes especially relevant when status ofcurricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities is comparedbetween public school, private schools, and schools run under publicprivate partnership. In recent literature, it is found that schoolstaken up by public-private partnership have been providing a betterlearning environment—Infrastructure Rehabilitation and Development,Administrative changes, Academic Innovation and Planning, Teacher Reformand Student Affairs—is perceived to have a positive impact on learningoutcomes. It is to investigate and document that the investments inthese areas are justifiable. To promote this fact, we conduct aquasi-experiment to examine the profiles of students in a public-privatepartnership school at Karachi (running under Zindagi Trust program) anda public school (as counterfactual) in the same neighbourhood. We alsorecorded the household and socioeconomic characteristics to create agood set of control variables. The propensity-score results show thatpublic-private school is performing better than that of comparison groupin attaining learning outcomes thus showing positive effects of PPP.Finally, the study probed into household and parental covariates ofstudent’s educational outcomes to enhance internal validity of results.JEL Classification: I21, C21, L32. Keywords: Educational LearningOutcomes, Public-Private Partnership, Quasi-experiment.