Amita Chudgar

Associate Professor of Education Policy Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Amita Chudgar's long-term interest focuses on ensuring that all learners have equal access to high-quality learning opportunities.

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Michigan State University

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Biography

My current and recent scholarship has focused on: (i) teacher labor markets in developing countries, (ii) implications of growing educational privatization in low-income countries and (iii) promises and challenges of educating youth in resource-constrained environments. In each of these areas through a diverse portfolio of scholarly activities I have contributed to academic discourses and generated insights relevant to policymakers and practitioners. Informed by my experiences teaching several methods classes and aligned with my commitment to connect my research to practical challenges of policy and practice, I have also devoted increasing attention to (iv) exploring the strengths and limitations of large-scale administrative, national and cross-national databases for international education policy research. I serve as a co-editor at Comparative Education Review and greatly enjoy working closely with doctoral students on diverse research projects across the world.

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Education Policy
Comparative and International Education
Development and Education
Economics and Education

Education

Stanford University

Ph.D.

Economics of Education

2006

University of Cambridge

M.Phil.

Development Studies

2000

University of Mumbai

M.A.

Economics

1998

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News

The Jury Is Still Out

Outlook India  online

2017-10-09

The phenomenon of private schools expanding at an annual rate of 35 per cent naturally raises one question: are they better than state-run ones? One might also ask if India needs more private schools than public (government) institutions. It’s about time to clear the air over available data-based evidence on whether private schools are worth their money.

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Nine Students Receive Fulbright Grants

MSU Today  online

2015-12-08

The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded funding to two MSU doctoral students, Elizabeth Timbs and Alyssa Morley, to support their research under the fiscal year 2015 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program.

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MSU Study to Examine Education in Developing Countries

MSU Today  online

2015-08-25

Michigan State University researcher Amita Chudgar is leading an effort to better understand why students in developing countries don't attend and stay in school.

Chudgar received a $200,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the home and community life of youth in India, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

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Research Grants

Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education

MacArthur Foundation

2015
Principal Investigator
Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education
Improving access and retention in secondary education in PSIPSE countries: What can we learn from existing large-scale resources?

Study of Teachers for Children Marginalized by Social Origin, Economic Status or Location

The United Nations Children’s Fund

2012
Principal Investigator with Thomas F. Luschei Co-PI

The impact of contract-teachers on student learning in developing countries: A multi-level, multi-country analysis

National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation

2010
Postdoctoral Fellowship

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Journal Articles

Factors associated with private-public school performance: Analysis of TALIS-PISA link data

International Journal of Educational Development

Marcos Delprato, Amita Chudgar

2018

We use measures of competitive pressure, administrative autonomy and staffing practices to explain the private-public performance difference in Australia, Portugal and Spain using the TALIS-PISA dataset. We employ OLS regression and counterfactual decomposition analysis on matched sub-samples. These school factors do not explain the overall private-public performance gap in the three countries except at the higher-end of the distribution. In other words, these factors appear to benefit only the high-performers in private schools in Australia and Spain. The results point to the potential limits of adopting private school practices for improving learning across the performance distribution especially for low-performing students.

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Reaching and Teaching Marginalized Children

Teacher Distribution in Developing Countries

Thomas F. Luschei, Amita Chudgar

2016

Despite the “worldwide revolution” in educational enrollment during the twentieth century, a clear division continues to separate marginalized children from their peers: the quality of their teachers. Ample evidence from the United States and growing cross-national evidence demonstrate that children who are poor, who come from ethnic or racial minority groups, who have less educated parents, or who live in rural areas have access to less qualified teachers than their more advantaged peers. Given considerable evidence of the importance of teachers for children’s academic success, the teacher quality division between more and less advantaged children may be as influential in determining these children’s futures as access to formal education was one hundred years ago. In this chapter, we introduce our rationale for studying teachers of marginalized children and we describe the objectives, contributions, and organization of the book.

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How are private school enrolment patterns changing across Indian districts with a growth in private school availability?

Oxford Review of Education

Amita Chudgar & Benjamin Creed

2016

The private school sector in India has grown significantly but the equity implications of this growth are not well understood. Traditionally private schools have been patronised by more educated and better-off families. Evidence also suggests a preference for enrolling male children in private schools. With the growth in the private school sector it is unclear whether these conventional patterns of private enrolment are changing.

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