AN ASSESSMENT OF QUALITY ATTAINMENT BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN UYO LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF AKWA IBOM STATE

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study
In Uyo local government area of Akwa Ibom State, about 12% of 15 year old attend a private secondary school; define as a school under the control of a private entity. Though government may subsidize some of the costs, parents still have to pay more to send their children to private schools. There is a considerable interest in the differences in quality attainment of students who attend private secondary schools and public secondary schools and particularly in the factors underlying these differences for instance, if quality attainments such as (academic outcome, behavioural and social outcomes) are indeed better among students from private schools, to what extent?. Is this attributable to the characteristics of students and their families or to schools and their components?

However, many studies have attempted to answer this question, and these are described in detail in the literature review. For the most part, researchers have data sets containing forty comprehensive information on students, but little information about schools. Consequently, these studies have typically accounted for student characteristics and interpreted any remaining differences in educational attainments as the result of school characteristics and approaches towards it.

Nevertheless, this study advances the literature by using a data set that contains information not only about students and their parents (including aspects of their home life), but also about school resources and practices. Information about student’s peers is also available. This level of detail allows for a more comprehensive attainment of the roles of student and school characteristics in explaining differences in empirical test of the degree of quality attainment in reading and mathematical performance of individual students in public and private secondary school. Secondly, we will try to explain these differences in quality attainment according to the differing characteristics of schools.

Thirdly, we will test whether or not these differences in quality attainment are equal in 10 secondary schools samples for these analyses.