Descrizione del progetto
Migliorare le strategie di integrazione scolastica in India
L’India vanta il più grande sistema scolastico del mondo, che tuttavia registra notevoli disparità. Per risolvere questo problema, la legge sul diritto all’istruzione del 2009 (Right to Education Act) impone alle scuole private di riservare un quarto dei posti a studenti provenienti da contesti economici e di casta svantaggiati; a tali scuole il governo rimborsa poi le tasse scolastiche. Ma qual è stato l’impatto di questa nuova politica? Il progetto EDINCLUSION, finanziato dall’UE, troverà la risposta a tale interrogativo, valutando le ripercussioni della politica indiana in materia di integrazione scolastica e identificando metodi per migliorarla ampliabili su scala. In particolare, valuterà gli effetti sugli attuali beneficiari, individuerà gli approcci utili per incoraggiare la presentazione di domande di ammissione da parte degli studenti idonei più poveri e permetterà di comprendere i mercati delle scuole private in modo sistematico.
Obiettivo
Social and economic stratification of schools can hurt both the equity and effectiveness of education systems. These concerns are exacerbated in settings where private schools account for a significant share of enrolment, as is the case in India - where nearly half the population attends a fee-charging private school. The EDINCLUSION project proposes an ambitious research agenda focused on understanding and improving school integration in India - which is the world’s largest school system, and also among the most unequal. The agenda focuses on studying and improving the impact of India’s landmark school integration policy, under the Right to Education Act 2009, which mandates that 25% of places in private schools should be reserved for students from disadvantaged economic and caste backgrounds (with the government reimbursing fees). This is likely the world’s largest-ever school integration initiative, affecting several times as many children as school desegregation initiatives in the US in the 1960s. Yet, despite its importance, there is remarkably little research on either the impact of this policy or on ways to improve its effectiveness.
The proposal features three work packages to address these gaps: (a) an assessment of effects on current beneficiaries, identified using the lottery-based allocation of seats in oversubscribed schools, (b) identifying approaches to encourage applications from poorer eligible students, evaluated through two multi-armed randomized control trials, and (c) a systematic understanding of private school markets using innovative survey design methods, panel data and exogenous policy-induced variation for identification. The results of this research program will generate ground-breaking evidence on (i) the effectiveness of this large school integration program (ii) identify scalable ways to improve its effectiveness and (iii) generate fundamental insights about the functioning of urban school markets in developing countries.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Istituzione ospitante
SE11383 Stockholm
Svezia