Education for the World's Poorest
on Margaret Campbell's Rambles (India), 01/Jul/2009 17:52, 34 days ago
 Finished reading James Tooley's book on private education for the world's poorest this morning (The Beautiful Tree, published by the Cato Institute, natch.) Against strong opposition from the international development community, Tooley was able to discover and document a thriving movement of independent schools in the poorest regions of India, Ghana, Nigeria and China which was seemingly unbeknownst to government education ministries and officials. What starts out as rather a mystery story evolves into a quest to evaluate these schools against their state school competitors. Being, as I am, the produce of largely private education I am not surprised that Tooley finds value in these entrepreneurial approaches; my own mother founded a school, after all. But what fascinated me is the degree to which government education is failing its people in the cases described. One study found that teaching was occurring only 40% of the time classrooms were audited in India. It's well known that teachers are often derelict in their duty there (I remember vividly the early childhood scenes fromThe White Tiger- if you haven't read that and are interested in India, you must!) Frankly, what I have read about the failure of education in India is quite unbelievable, but Tooley undertakes a project to test 24,000 students in private and public schools and presents his data convincingly. The private schools outperform the public schools in student achievement in every case, oftentimes by astonishing margins. The only dimension that public schools typically fare better on is their physical assets: playgrounds, latrines and the buildings themselves. Tooley's arguments stem from the theme that market forces shape educational options and the incentives are all wrong in the public education sphere. For example, in India public school teachers are not accountable to school principals and enjoy something akin to employment for life. Private school teachers, though lacking in certifications and receiving mostly ad hoc training, serve at the pleasure of their customers - the parents - who have an intense interest in the educational outcomes they're paying hard-won school fees for. There's much more here - I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in education. James Tooley is now head of a $100 million fund for education provided by Orient Global that is supporting several private school projects, including an effort to create a chain of private schools in Hyderabad, India. I hope to meet him.