Religious school enrollment in Pakistan: A look at the data

Comparative Education Review

Volumn 50, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 446-477

  Andrabi, Tahir ^a   Das, Jishnu ^a   Khwaja, Asim Ijaz ^a   Zajonc, Tristan ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748552354     PISSN: 00104086     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/503885     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. See, e.g., George W. Bush, "President Bush Welcomes President Musharraf to Camp David," Office of the Press Secretary, White House, Washington, DC, June 24, 2003 (available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2003/06/20030624-3.html) ;
2. Pervez Musharraf, "Remarks by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf," Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, February 12, 2002 (available at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/index. cfm?fa = eventDetail&id = 458&&proj = znpp,zsa);
3. Colin Powell, testimony, "House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Holds Hearing on FY2005 Appropriations," FDCH Transcripts, March 10, 2004;
4. Hillary Rodham Clinton, "Addressing the National Security Challenges of Our Times: Fighting Terror and the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction," speech presented at a Brookings leadership forum, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, February 2004 (available at http://www.brookings. edu/comm/op-ed/ 20040225clinton.htm);
5. and National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), also available at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm.
6. Shahid Javed Burki, "Basic Education in Pakistan and Afghanistan: The Current Crisis and Beyond," transcript of presentation at the Brookings Forum on Universal Education, December 2001 (available at http://www.brookings. edu/comm/transcripts/20011217.htm);
7. Peter W. Singer, "Pakistan's Madrassahs: Ensuring a System of Education Not Jihad," Brookings Analysis Paper no. 14 (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, November 2001);
8. International Crisis Group, "Pakistan: Madrassahs, Extremism and the Military," ICG Asia Report no. 36 (International Crisis Group, Islamabad/Brussels.July 2002), available at http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/ index.cfm?id = 1627&l= 1.
9. For a discussion of the U.S. aid package for education reform to Pakistan, see K. Alan Kronstadt, Education Reform in Pakistan, CRS Report for Congress (Order Code RS22009, December 23, 2004), available at http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RS22009.pdf.
10. See Zahid Hussain and Daniel McGrory, "British Businessmen 'Are Funding Schools That Breed Terror,'" The Times (London), August 10, 2002, for the 10 percent figure.
11. C. Kraul, in "Dollars to Help Pupils in Pakistan," Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2003
12. cites the aforementioned International Crisis Group, "Pakistan: Madrassahs, Extremism and the Military," for the 33 percent number. Table Al in app. A provides a list of articles on the madrasa that appeared in major international newspapers in the time frame of December 2000 to June 2004.
13. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, sec. 12.2, 367.
14. The 9/11 Commission Report, 367 Ibid.
15. See Mohammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
16. Tariq Rahman, "The Madrassa and the State of Pakistan: Religion, Poverty and the Potential for Violence in Pakistan," Himal Southasian, online journal published and distributed by the Southasia Trust, Lalitpur, Nepal (February 2004), available at http://www.himalmag.com/ 2004/february/essay.htm;
17. Jessica Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture," Foreign Affairs 79, no. 6 (2000): 115-26.
18. Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture," 119;
19. Singer, "Pakistan's Madrassahs," 2.
20. Zaman, Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 126, table 1
21. cites Asif Shazad, "Over 250,000 Students in Punjab Seminaries," The Dawn, January 22, 2002, available at http://www.dawn.com/ 2002/01/22/ nat44.htm.
22. Rahman, in "The Madrassa and the State of Pakistan,"
23. cites "KARACHI: 11,000 Foreigners in Sindh Madaris," The Dawn, January 16, 2003, available at http://www.dawn.com/2003/01/16/ local6.htm.
24. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 89.
25. Singer, "Pakistan's Madrassahs," 2.
26. We follow the principle of "additionality" of the Pakistan Ministry of Education in this definition. Most private schools that wish to teach computer programming or any other subject that is not part of the government curriculum will be counted as a general educational institution (and not a vocational institute), as long as they teach these subjects in addition to the prescribed curriculum. One type of school that could be mistakenly counted as a madrasa is a mosque school. These are schools housed in mosques that teach the normal state curriculum using regular education department teachers. These were started in the sixth 5-year plan (1983-88) under the Junejo government as a cost-effective way to use mosques; however, the program was not picked up later and is now gradually dying out. There are 8,000 or so mosque schools in Punjab. The Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad houses a comprehensive data series on Pakistan education; this is available at http:// www.aepam.edu.pk/Education.htm.
27. See Paul Glewwe and Michael Kremer, "Schools, Teachers, and Education Outcomes in Developing Countries," in Handbook of the Economics of Education, ed. E. Hanushek and F. Welch (New York: Elsevier-North Holland, 2006), chap. 16.
28. Government of Pakistan, Statistics Division, Population Census of Pakistan, 1998; Federal Bureau of Statistics, Census of Private Educational Institutes in Pakistan, 2000. The 1998 Population Census, conducted by the Population Census Organization, was complemented with the Census of Private Educational Institutes of Pakistan, which was carried out by the Federal Bureau of Statistics in 2000 to provide statistics on private vs. public enrollment. See Federal Bureau of Statistics reports (various years). Information on both surveys and the reports is available at http://www.statpak.gov.pk.
29. The Pakistan Integrated Household Survey (PIHS) is the equivalent of the widely used Living Standard Measurement Surveys that is implemented in various countries. Extensive notes on the 1991 PIHS are available at http://www.worldbank.org/lsms.
30. This census was conducted in three districts of Punjab; villages were chosen randomly based on the criterion that each village must have at least one private school. Typically, this means that the villages lie somewhere between fully urban and fully rural populations and are not representative of the districts in which they lie.
31. Population Census of Pakistan, 1998; Federal Bureau of Statistics, Census of Private Educational Institutes in Pakistan, 2000.
32. Boys are more likely to be enrolled in madrasas compared to girls. The census reports that there are only 43 females enrolled in madrasas for every 100 males. This imbalance is significantly greater than the 68 enrolled females for every 100 enrolled males in overall education. For both boys and girls, madrasa enrollment starts off at the same age cohort between 5 and 9 years, but girls' enrollment drops off sharply while boys' enrollment jumps for children between 10 and 14 years old and then tapers off for the cohort in their mid-twenties. That there are fewer females in madrasas is not surprising, but the similar number of girls as boys in the youngest age category is somewhat unexpected. Interestingly, for children between ages 5 and 9, the enrollment sex ratio is slightly higher in madrasa than in general education (76.9 vs. 75.6 percent) but drops off at a much faster rate in the madrasa as children become older. The usual disclaimers about the numbers being too small to draw finer comparisons still apply.
33. We could also compare these numbers to enrollment across countries. See Eli Berman and Ara Stepanyan, "How Many Radical Islamists? Indirect Evidence from Five Countries" (unpublished manuscript, University of California, San Diego, February 2004, available at http://www.econ.ucsd.edu/ ~elib/funfert.pdf). They compare a number of countries, including Pakistan (albeit based only on the Pakistan Integrated Household Survey). The comparison is fraught with difficulties, since they sometimes use stocks and sometimes use flows and the data are sometimes at the household level and at other times at the individual level. Nevertheless, using their numbers, as a percentage of total enrollment, madrasa enrollment in Pakistan is roughly equivalent to that in Bangladesh and Côte d'Ivoire and much less than dial in India (two states only) or Indonesia. Interestingly, madrasa enrollment in Pakistan corresponds closely to census estimates of home rather than religious schooling in the United States-the former ranges from 1 to 2 percent, while the latter is closer to 8 percent;
34. see Kurt Bauman, "Home Schooling in the United States: Trends and Characteristics," Working Paper Series no. 53 (Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, August 2001), available at http://www.census.gov/ population/www/documentation/twps0053.html;
35. National Center for Education Statistics, "Private School Universe Survey, 1999-2000," National Center for Education Statistics Analysis Report (Washington, DC: NCES, August 2001), available at http://www.nces.ed.gov/ pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid = 2001330.
36. For a description of similar problems in estimating home schooling in the United States, see Bauman, "Home Schooling in the United States."
37. In our own analysis, we found die quality of the data generated by the Federal Bureau of Statistics in Pakistan to be consistently high. We used the 2000 Federal Bureau of Statistics Census of Private Schools (PEIP) to guide our fieldwork and feasibility study for LEAPS and found that it tallied with the situation in the field quite well, even in remote villages.
38. The percentage of enrolled children going to a madrasa will only be affected if the share of orphans going to madrasas is higher than the share of orphans going to regular schools.
39. Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) Task Force, Pakistan Religious Educational Institutions: An Overview (Islamabad: IPS, 2002).
40. Shahzad, "Over 250,000 Students in Punjab Seminaries";
41. "KARACHI: 11,000 Foreigners in Sindh Madaris."
42. Ali presents some indirect evidence that the distinction between part-time and full-time students is important. He finds the number of resident and nonresident students in madrasas to be roughly equal. His study, however, is subject to some of the same criticisms of establishment-based surveys and is limited only to Islamabad and one other tehsil (equivalent to a county) out of a total of more than 300 in Pakistan. See Saleem H. Ali, "Islamic Education and Conflict: Understanding the Madrassahs of Pakistan" (paper presented at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, June 24,2005), available at http://www.uvm.edu/ envprog/madrassah/resources.html.
43. This cohort-based analysis assumes that changes in madrasa enrollment will be picked up 10-14 years after the birth of the relevant cohort. That is, a sudden increase in 1980 would correspond to an increase in the stock of individuals reporting religious education for the cohort born between 1966 and 1970.
44. Differences in madrasa enrollment could be driven by differences across villages rather than by differences across households, i.e., in some villages all of the children go to madrasas, while in others none of the children attend. Most of the variation in madrasa enrollment (in the set of enrolled children) is within rather than between villages. For example, the difference in enrollment ratios in a village at the ninetieth percentile of madrasa enrollment and one at the tenth percentile is only 3.4 percent. This also holds at the more disaggregated settlement level (some villages have more than one settlement), although less strongly, with more variation stemming from within than between settlements.
45. Berman and Stepanyan, "How Many Radical Islamists?"
46. Berman and Stepanyan, "How Many Radical Islamists?" Ibid.
47. The significant difference between madrasa and non-madrasa households in terms of income arises only when we use Rs7,500 as the monthly income cutoff to distinguish poor and nonpoor households; alternative cutoffs of Rs2,500 or Rs5,000 show no significant differences between poor and nonpoor households. Importantly, 97 percent of all households earn below Rs7,500.
48. Recall that the LEAPS sample was taken from a list of villages that had at least one private school. To look at schooling choices under these three scenarios, we divided villages into settlements and plotted enrollment shares in each type of settlement. These settlements are often far from each other and thus act more as self-contained units than the administrative definition of a village. In the LEAPS data, there are 112 villages but 253 settlements, generating considerable variation for this exercise. These findings are robust in a multivariate regression context.
49. For robustness, we also conducted a multivariate analysis of madrasa enrollment using household head education, household wealth, household land holding, availability of outside schooling options in the settlement, child gender, and child age. The above findings remain unchanged. The range of schooling options in the settlement matter, and it is only when no outside schools are present that madrasa enrollment shows sensitivity to income. These regression analysis results are not reported here as they do not add anything to what is provided in fig. 3.
50. Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja, "Students Today, Teachers Tomorrow? The Rise of Affordable Private Schools" (unpublished manuscript, World Bank, Washington, DC, November 2005), available from the authors.
51. Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim I. Khwaja, "Private Schools: Limitations and Possibilities?" (unpublished manuscript, World Bank, Washington, DC, October 2005), available from the authors.
52. National Center for Education Statistics, Private School Universe Survey, 1999-2000: National Center for Education Statistics Analysis Report (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2001), available online at http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.aspppubid = 2001330.
53. Kraul, "Dollars to Help Pupils in Pakistan";
54. International Crisis Group, "Pakistan: Madrassahs, Extremism and the Military."
55. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent State (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
56. The data from the LEAPS census asked about ethnic and caste identity, and households that classified themselves as "Pathan" or "Afghani" were used to represent Pashtun households. In line with the usual residential patterns of individuals with Pashtun backgrounds, most of these households are in the district Attock, located in the north of Punjab.
57. In a largely Islamic country, it is difficult to find good measures of religiosity. No data on religiosity were collected as part of the census, and a more recent and detailed household survey that includes information on time use elicits little variation - everyone reports high mosque attendance and regular prayers. An alternative, suggested by David Evans at Harvard University, which we pursue here, is to use recent developments in the use of "names." Research by Fryer and Leavitt demonstrates the increasing use of names to define race identity in the United States. We postulate that households that named (at least) one child "Osama" (also spelled Usamah, Usamma, or Usama) are more likely to favor a radical brand of Islam. The use of the name Osama was minimal until 1998 and then peaks in 1998 and 2001, following disruptive events. Of course, the naming of the child may reflect name recognition rather than ideology, and this must be kept in mind. To the extent that naming a child "Osama" is a good indicator of radical religiosity, we find no evidence of this effect in the data. See Ronald G. Fryer Jr. and Steven Levitt, "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names," Quarterly Journal of Economics 119, no. 3 (2004): 767-805.
58. Once again, this finding still holds in a multivariate analysis (not reported) of madrasa enrollment using household head education, wealth, land holding, availability of outside schooling options in the settlement, child gender, and child age.
59. Emmanuel Jimenez and Jee-Pang Tan, "Decentralized and Private Education: the Case of Pakistan," Comparative Education 23, no. 2 (1987): 173-90.
60. Das et al., "Private Schools."
61. Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture";
62. Pamela Constable, "Growing Islamic Activism Challenges Pakistan; Religious Groups Offer Social Services That Help Spread Beliefs," Washington Post, September 20, 2001.