Private schools and student learning achievements in Kenya

We examine the effect of private school attendance on literacy and numeracy skill acquisition among children mainly drawn from lower primary grades in Kenya. The empirical analysis is based on novel household data that involved a large-scale assessment of children in numeracy and literacy skills. We use the household fixed effects model to control for unobservables at the household level. We find substantial gains from private school attendance on both language (literacy) and math (numeracy) scores. Our results show that private school attendance is associated, on average, with an increase in maths and language scores of 0.12 and 0.13 score standard deviations, respectively.