Bangladesh

Despite the acknowledged importance and large scale of rural-urban migration in many developing countries, few studies have compared education outcomes of migrants to those for people born in the city. This paper uses recent data from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, Vietnam, to examine educational expenditure and children’s grade attainment, with a focus on poor households. It finds that rural-urban migrant households have fewer assets, live in worse housing conditions and in areas less well served by public schools, have fewer social connections in the area where they live, and contain adults with lower educational levels than for urban native households. Even conditional on these household characteristics, educational expenditure and grade attainment were both lower for children from migrant households than urban natives. The findings are consistent with migrant children’s education being impeded by bureaucratic obstacles such as the household registration system in Vietnam. The paper concludes by noting that expansion of urban school systems sometimes fails to keep pace with population movements. While the barriers to education of recent migrants in these two contexts are in many ways similar to those of other poor urban households, they are among the most severely disadvantaged but do not always benefit from existing programmes such as school fee waivers. Specific policies may be needed to address the multiple causes of educational deprivation for this group.

Children living in urban slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh, often have poor access to school and attend different types of school than students from middle class households. This paper asks whether their experiences in school also disadvantage them further in terms of their learning outcomes and the likelihood of dropping out. It is based on interviews with 36 students aged 11-16 from both slum and middle-class backgrounds, in 2012. Most of the participants were in private schools, and learning was overwhelmingly geared towards assessment and the memorisation of set content. Though teachers were sometimes hard-working in preparing their students for examinations, ultimate responsibility fell to the students. Ranking and labelling of students kept their examination performance salient at all times. Teacher-student relationships varied from the supportive to the abusive. Beating and humiliating punishment were common in all types of school, despite a recent legal ban on the former. Lessons were sometimes dry, irrelevant to students’ lives, and with little scope for active student engagement. A new emphasis on ‘creative learning’ in curricula and teacher training had, at the time of the study, yet to filter into the classroom. Students were subject to the risk of violence both outside and inside the school, whatever their background. However, it was much easier for middle class students to change school when they ran into problems, or to employ private tutors if they needed more help with their lessons. Their way of talking about school reflected a strong sense of inevitability that they would at least complete secondary education, whereas students from slums were limited to one or two local options and even there, their places in the classroom were precarious. The paper discusses how these experiences in school are likely to heighten the risk of dropping out for slum students, analyses the results in terms of de-facto privatization and school accountability, and recommends better regulation of private tuition, and teaching styles that are less obsessed with examination results.