Quality and equity in preservice teacher education in India: analysis of teacher eligibility test (TET) data from one state

There is increasing interest in the possibility that private institutions may be able to meet the growing need of preservice teacher education in the Global South, yet there is little or no data on impact on quality and equity. In India, at 90 % provisioning, the private sector dominates preservice teacher education (PSTE). Although theorising and empirical data on markets in higher education suggest that privately provided programmes in non elite institutions is likely to be of low quality, in the case of PSTE, policy takes an undifferentiated view, that the whole sector is of low quality and there is regulatory failure to check for quality or malpractice. In this paper, using data from the ‘teacher eligibility test’ from one Southern Indian state, comparisons are made between the public funded and private teacher education institutions. Candidates’ performance on the test is used as a proxy for quality of the preservice teacher education they received. Public funded institutions are found to perform far better than private ones on a number of metrics including proportion of candidates who qualify in the TET, differences in mean scores between candidates(statistically significant), and across all social categories and by gender. By proportion of candidates from a given institution qualifying in the TET, public funded institutions are found to be more efficient than private ones. A very large proportion of private institutions offering primary teacher education are found to be underperforming. The paper draws from available literature to reflect on reasons for differential performance and policy implications are provided.