OPINION:
“Education for all” was set as a worldwide priority by the United Nations in 1990, to be accomplished in 25 years. The deadline is upon us and billions of dollars later, UNESCO, the cultural arm of the U.N., says there are still 175 million children in the developing world who can’t read or write. This is taken as proof at the U.N. that governments must “intensify their efforts,” meaning they must “intensify” the spending of more money. The facts tell a different story.
While some bureaucrats think up ways to spend other people’s money, entrepreneurs are establishing low-cost private schools in surprising places. In some places, where government services are scarce and the services available are often not very good, these private schools are the only option for parents. Even in places where “free” government schools are available, these private schools have been flourishing.
Two education researchers, James Tooley and Pauline Dixon, have studied private schools in India, Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya over a period of two years, and conclude that “private schools are playing an important, if unsung, role in reaching the poor and satisfying their educational needs.” They traveled through the slums and shantytowns of the Third World and were astonished by how many private schools they saw. “There seemed to be [one] on every street corner.”
They examined two assumptions prevalent among educators: that private schools are only for the elite, that the very poor must rely on the government to educate children, and that low-cost private schools are by definition inferior to government schools. Government schools spend a lot more per student, and this, in the conventional view, naturally makes them better. The findings of the authors of the study dispute both assumptions.
Mr. Tooley and Ms. Dixon discovered that 60 percent of slum dwellers in the Indian cities of Hyderabad and Delhi send their children to private schools. Many are not recognized by United Nations agencies, which skews the statistics of how many children are actually in school. The numbers of the unschooled are probably highly exaggerated. The cost of these schools varies, but most average about $2 or $3 a month, usually making them available to the poorest of the working poor.
The study found that both students and teachers in private schools score consistently higher on testing, across a variety of subjects, than their government counterparts. “Why are parents paying fees to go to private schools when they could get government schools for free?” asks Mr. Tooley. “[When] parents pay fees, they demand more of the schools, [while] the schools themselves are accountable to the parents.” One mother in Kenya observes that “if you are offered free fruit and vegetables at the market, you know they will be rotten. If you want fresh produce, then you have to pay for it.” The government schools may not be rotten, but the parents, poor or not, know that they get what they pay for.
Pleasing the customer forces private schools to improve, and the researchers observe that many teachers in the government schools, secure in their jobs whether they please parents or not, rarely concern themselves with making improvements. They observe one teacher asleep in the classroom, though it must have been difficult to sleep while the students were noisily doing what unsupervised children do best.
Though the United Nations has fallen short of reaching the goal of “education for all,” a goal all applaud, the situation may not be as bad as the U.N. makes it sound. Millions of children who are counted as being out of school are actually getting an education in less expensive and unrecognized schools. The market works, and this should be a lesson learned.
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