It’s not that I didn’t believe James Tooley’s books and articles asserting that an astonishing number of poor children in developing countries are being decently (and sometimes superbly) educated by a little-noticed army of lowbudget private schools, which receive no government support and, indeed, are paid for by those kids’ own parents.
But it hadn’t really sunk into my consciousness, perhaps because others scoffed at these claims. Big “foreign aid” and education funders generally ignored this entire education sector; journalists and analysts paid it scant heed; and governments (perhaps embarrassed by their own failure to do right by these youngsters) acted as if it didn’t exist.
Now, however, I’ve seen examples of this phenomenon firsthand in the slums of Hyderabad, India, where Tooley (a British education scholar on leave from the University of Newcastle) is both learning more about it and trying to strengthen it via his Aristotle project, backed by a New Zealand–born, Singapore-based tycoon.
I confess I was impressed—and slightly sheepish, too, considering I have lived and traveled in India and other Third World countries over many years and worked in the education field forever. Yet until now I had allowed my gaze to pass over these many schools without really noticing them, much less seeking to understand how they work.
In America, my efforts to widen education options and promote school choice for poor kids, like the efforts of most U.S. reformers, have always assumed that ultimately the government must foot the bill. Perhaps that’s true in the Western world, perhaps it’s not. But elsewhere on the planet, I can now attest, poor families are paying for educational progress themselves and entrepreneurs are responding to their demand (and their governments’ failure) by starting, managing, and expanding such schools.
Most such schools occupy sketchy facilities, without playgrounds, labs, libraries, or fancy technology. Many teachers are themselves only high school graduates. The students bring their own lunches. Parents provide transportation and go to the bazaar for textbooks and uniforms. Sports and extracurricular activities are scarce to nonexistent. Neither schools nor families have any money to spare.
But teaching and learning are occurring in those cramped, sometimes ill-lit classrooms. Eager youngsters, prodded by determined parents, are drinking in whatever knowledge and skills their books and teachers can provide. And although besting nearby government schools on state tests is no high accolade in places like India’s Andhra Pradesh, most of these private schools are doing so at astonishingly low cost.
Tuitions in the Hyderabad schools I recently visited range from $2 to $6 per child per month (that is, about $25 to $75 annually)—and historically that tuition has been the schools’ sole source of revenue. (Those joining the Aristotle project are now getting some help with teacher training, an English- language curriculum, and computer labs.)
On some blocks, once Tooley trained my eyes to see them, I spotted two or three such schools, maybe half a dozen in a single slum neighborhood. His research team counted 1,000 of them in just one section of Hyderabad, and he estimates that India’s villages and cities contain easily 300,000. Nor is India alone. Tooley has found the same phenomenon in China, the Philippines, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and many other lands.
BUSINESSES, PARENTS FILL THE GAP
What accounts for it? Four elements are key. First, a vacuum created by government’s failure to deliver acceptable free schooling to millions of poor children. Second, entrepreneurs willing to take the risk of launching such schools and navigating the shoals that could sink them (red tape, competition, and so on). Third, parents who care enough about their sons’ and daughters’ futures to dig into their meager pocketbooks to find those few rupees every month. And fourth, instructors in need of the work and willing to teach these kids for monthly wages that range from $35 to maybe twice that.
Let me not romanticize the schools that result. Besides scant resources and cramped facilities, they labor under multiple handicaps. Although some are led by awesome education builders, at the helm of others are uninspiring folks for whom the school is no more than a small business.
In India, at least, the government curriculum—which one must master to have a shot at passing the exams that control access to further education and decent jobs—is dreary beyond belief, so devoted to rote, recitation, and formula as to turn even this traditionalist into a visiting constructivist.
Given their salary levels, the schools can’t hire many teachers with the training and gifts to transform a wan syllabus into exciting lessons. Classes are sometimes large. The absence of laboratories makes it hard to teach science. And the dearth of libraries, technology, and connectivity makes it difficult to link these youngsters to the planet’s boundless knowledge.
Still, lots of needy kids are getting a decent education at an astoundingly low cost despite their governments’ failure to provide anything of the sort. And among philanthropists and investors there is mounting interest in turning this indigenous phenomenon into something bigger and better.
In Hyderabad alone, at least three projects besides Tooley’s are seeking to develop these schools, sometimes as a charitable endeavor, sometimes as a potential business opportunity leading to large chains of schools— equipped with more resources and educational capacities than today’s schools—and sometimes as a step toward a franchise model, not unlike “education management organizations” in the United States.
Among the backers of such ventures we find the globe-girdling William Jefferson Clinton—yes, the forty-second president, husband of the secretary of state and founder of Clinton Global Initiatives, which has almost 200 “commitments” in the education field scattered about the planet, including a joint venture with Deutsche Bank (and Grey Ghost Ventures and New Globe Schools) to develop low-cost private schools in Kenya and India, beginning with Hyderabad.
THRIVING ON LACK OF ATTENTION
I’m struck by how all this is happening almost without reference to public policy. These education entrepreneurs, both small and large, mainly want government to continue ignoring them.
At the primary level, so far as I can tell, at least in Andhra Pradesh (of which Hyderabad is the capital), it isn’t even necessary to get a government license to open a private school, nor does one’s school receive any kind of aid. It’s different at the secondary level, where getting one’s school “recognized” by the state is advantageous to graduates and expected by many parents. The approval process entails jumping through multiple regulatory hoops. But, as always in the developing world, there are ways around that, too.
Even as the “international competitiveness” literature and U.S. political and economic debates abound with talk of how the stellar education systems in countries like India are endangering future U.S. prosperity, these lands (like ours) actually have several education systems operating at once.
At the high end, the fancy private schools attended by upper-class kids and the intensely competitive top-of-the-line postsecondary institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology are indeed first-rate. (IIT admissions make getting into Harvard look easy.) For the poor, however, educational opportunities are dismal and government schooling, though free, is often dreadful—even when the teachers bother to turn up.
But rather than abandon hope for their kids, millions of poor parents are turning to the private sector, which is responding in at least two ways. The first, unveiled to incredulous Western eyes by Tooley a decade or so ago, is indigenous and widespread, although small in scale. The second, which is just getting started and is fascinating to behold, is sophisticated and multinational and could turn out to be very large indeed.
