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Last Updated: Jun 20, 2009 - 7:38:50 AM |
University of Newcastle professor James Tooley journeyed to Hyderabad,
India in early 2000 at the behest of the World Bank, to study private
schools there. Or, more specifically, to study familiar private
schools—that is, those that served the children of middle-class and
wealthy families.
But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city’s teeming slums,
Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as
prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods.
Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run
educational enterprises. “Why,” he wondered, “had no one I’d worked
with in India told me about them?”
Ignorance was surely one reason. Most of Tooley’s colleagues, even
those who’d spent decades enmeshed in education policy, were simply
unaware that these back-alley private schools existed. But the hush
surrounding private schools for the poor also had murkier,
less-innocent origins. Breaking the silence, Tooley found, could
generate hostility. When he related his Hyderabad discovery at the
World Bank office in Delhi, for example, one staffer “launched into a
tirade”: such private schools, she said, were ramshackle and shoddy;
they ripped off the poor by charging money for worthless instruction;
their owners were motivated solely by profits; and their teachers were
unqualified, unskilled, and ineffective.
Her sentiments jibed with the larger development community’s notions
about private schools for the poor but not with what Tooley saw in the
slums of Hyderabad, where he returned several times to visit schools,
observe classes, and chat with students, parents, teachers, and owners.
The schools’ physical structures were indeed mostly ramshackle, but
they were assembled no worse (and often far better) than the homes of
the neighborhood children who learned in them. The owners seemed
responsible and often caring, the teachers engaged and capable. And the
parents Tooley met were adamant that the tuition they paid—between $1
and $2 per child, per month—was money well spent. They would never send
their kids to the local public schools, they said, where facilities
were fancier but teachers were truant.
These organic educational institutions captivated Tooley. Over the last
ten years, he has labored to learn more about them, to publicize their
existence and their successes, and to battle against the idea that they
are insignificant. He passionately recounts this decade-long study in
The Beautiful Tree, a book that should shake up adherents of
traditional wisdom on education.
“Development experts,” as Tooley calls them, have long believed that if
citizens of developing countries are to be educated, their governments,
helped by heaps of money from rich nations, must invest in free and
universal public schooling. If the resultant public education is
lousy—as it is in India, for instance—then it must simply be reformed
through more money and more regulation. Meanwhile, the poor must be
patient.
But the poor have run short of patience, Tooley found, and so they have
rejected the development experts’ failed syllogism and created one of
their own: You open a school, and we’ll pay you to teach our children.
If they don’t learn, we’ll stop paying. Therefore, you will ensure that
our children receive a solid education.
In slums around the world, from Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya to
rural villages in Ghana and China and places in between, Tooley has
discovered poor people opening small private schools that offer
alternatives to dismal or inaccessible public education. The schools
charge only pennies a day, and most also provide scholarships to
orphans or children of the indigent. One in five students in the
Hyderabad slums, for example, attends a private school on some kind of
need-based scholarship. Whether in Kibera (Kenya) or Gansu (China),
these schools all seem to boast committed and punctual teachers,
efficient and attentive owners, and satisfied parents.
Tooley visited numerous public schools in these far-flung places as
well, and they also share certain traits: a dearth of discipline;
teacher complacency; and classes in which students sit and chat instead
of learning. Development experts readily acknowledge the shortcomings
of public schools in less-wealthy nations. But Tooley expresses
bafflement at their proposed remedies—more regulation, more money,
better teaching training—especially when impoverished communities have
already improvised and created their own successful alternatives.
Just how successful? Do pupils in private schools for the poor actually
learn more than those in public schools? To find out, Tooley assembled
and trained research teams that eventually tested 24,000 fourth-graders
from impoverished areas who attended a range of schools—private schools
recognized by the local government, private schools not so recognized,
and public schools—in India, Nigeria, Ghana, and China. His findings
are stunning:
The results from Delhi were typical. In mathematics, mean scores of
children in government schools were 24.5 percent, whereas they were
42.1 percent in private unrecognized schools and 43.9 percent in
private recognized. That is, children in unrecognized private schools
scored nearly 18 percentage points more in math than children in
government schools (a 72 percent advantage!), while children in
recognized private schools scored over 19 percentage points more than
children in government schools (a 79 percent advantage).
As goes Delhi, so apparently go Hyderabad, Ghana, Nigeria, and China:
private-school students drastically outperformed their public-school
peers in every location. Through unannounced visits, researchers also
determined that the private schools had smaller class sizes and more
committed teachers than the public schools. (This proved true
everywhere but China, where class sizes and teacher commitment were
similar in all institutions.)
The data Tooley unearthed are fascinating. Not only do networks of
private schools for the poor exist across the developing world—networks
that emerged without any government- or NGO-sponsored help—but their
students learn far more than do those of government- and NGO-funded
public schools. These private schools for the poor are not only local,
entrepreneurial, and efficient: they work.
The Beautiful Tree could have explored one question more thoroughly:
when parents pay tuition, does it affect how they and their children
perceive education? Tooley does a fine job mining the ways in which
tuition creates school accountability, but might the payments not also
render a parent more likely to value his child’s schooling and,
therefore, to demand that his child be academically diligent? If so,
the wisdom of providing free public education might be more tenuous
than is generally assumed.
The Beautiful Tree is a refreshing aberration in the stolid ranks of
development literature. Tooley writes engagingly and obviously finds
the story he tells exciting. His enthusiasm is contagious. One cannot
help but think that Tooley has provided the rudimentary outline of how
education can be brought to many more millions of the world’s poorest.
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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