[Reader-list] Private education in Africa and India

[Yazad Jal]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2003
-01-18&id=2705

A LESSON FROM THE THIRD WORLD
James Tooley on the extraordinary success of private education in Africa and
India

By James Tooley

Schoolboy Worlanyo leaves his crowded home in the townships of Accra, Ghana,
early in the morning, smartly dressed in brown shorts and a bright but
frayed yellow shirt. He makes his way down filthy streets, but walks past
the run-down exterior of the government school, where a few children
forlornly wait for the doors to be unlocked. The government school teachers
won't be there for a few hours, some not at all today, or any day. Worlanyo
walks on past, turns off down the next alleyway and enters by the brightly
hand-painted signboard the crowded playground of 'De Youngster's
International School'.

The elderly Mr A.K. De Youngster looks on with pride as the children begin
their assembly with a hearty rendition of 'How Great Thou Art' at the school
he started from scratch in 1980. Then there were 36 children in a downstairs
room in his house, and he, an experienced headmaster, had opened his doors
after pleas from township folk, unhappy even then that government schools
'were not doing their level best' for their children. Now, 22 years later,
his chain of private schools has four branches, with 3,400 pupils. The fees
are £30 per term - affordable for many of the poor - and to the many who
can't afford that he offers free scholarships.

Seated in his office beneath a rickety fan that blows the sweat across his
forehead, he chuckles as he tells me that, at the age of seven, he wrote to
President Eisenhower from his village in West Ghana asking for help with his
studies. 'The Americans wouldn't help me,' he smiles, 'so I learnt to help
myself.' And now 45 per cent of Ghanaian children go to private school in
Accra, many of these from poor families like the ones he serves, also
'helping themselves'.

In the Horn of Africa, the same story is repeated. Professor Suleyman, the
vice-chancellor of Amoud University, the first private university in
Somaliland, drives me up impossible roads to a hill overlooking Boroma, a
city of 100,000 souls on the road to Ethiopia, and points out the location
of each private school, some only half built. Boroma has no water supply
(donkey carts deliver water in leaking jerricans), no paved roads, no street
lights and plenty of burnt-out tanks, remnants of its recent civil war. But
it has two private schools for every government school. 'The governor asked
me,' says Suleyman, '"Why are you putting your energies into building
schools? - leave it to the Ministry of Education." But if we waited for
government, it would take 20 years. We need schools now. Anyway,' he shakes
his head, 'in government schools teacher absenteeism is rife; in our private
schools we have commitment.' We visit one at the foot of the hill.
Ubaya-binu-Kalab school, with 1,!
057 students, charges monthly fees of 12,000 Somali shillings for primary
and 20,000 for secondary - that's about £3 to £6 per month. Again, 165 of
the students attend for free, the poor subsiding the poorest.

Across the Indian Ocean, one sees the same phenomenon. In the slums of
Hyderabad, the capital city of Andhra Pradesh, India, Zarina is packing away
her books into her satchel at lunchtime. She leaves Peace High School and
walks on to noisy Edi Bazaar, effortlessly dodging autorickshaws and
ox-carts. As she makes her way home with her sisters, they practise their
English together, the eldest coaching the youngest, who in turn teaches
their mother. The journey takes her past St John's High School on one
corner, Modern High School on another; past New Convent School newly opened
in the home of the proprietor, and past St Angel's Public School in a
converted chicken farm - all private schools in the slums.

There is a government school nearby, where the children can get free rice at
lunchtime, free books, and, of course, free tuition. But parents who care
would not dream of sending their children there. 'We want teachers who
teach, not who get our children to do domestic chores,' one veiled mother
tells me. 'And we want our children to learn English, but that's not allowed
in the government primary schools.' So parents pay their £1.50 per month,
scrimping and saving to find the rupees.

Such parents now make up the majority in Hyderabad. Official figures show
that 61 per cent of all students are enrolled in the private unaided sector,
and these figures are likely to overestimate the numbers in government
schools (because of corrupt over-reporting) and underestimate the numbers in
the private sector (because many such schools are unrecognised, therefore
not noticed).

In Africa and Asia the poor know that government schools won't serve their
needs. But they do not sit idly by, dispossessed and disfranchised -
adjectives used by the liberal elite to describe the poor - acquiescent in
their government's failure. Instead they vote with their feet, desert the
state schools and move their children to private schools set up by
educational entrepreneurs to cater for their needs.

The startling thing is that these schools are commercially driven and not
dependent on handouts from state or philanthropy. There is a spirit of
dedication within the schools. The comments of Mr Mohamed Wajid, director of
the Peace High School, are typical. When his mother was about to retire, she
took him to one side. 'She showed me pictures of the less blessed people
living here and reminded me that life must not be lived for oneself; life
must be lived for others. So I took over the running of her school.'

Even charging very low fees, the schools can make a healthy profit, which,
as in any good business, is ploughed back into the school. Part of the
reason they can afford to do this is that they pay teachers perhaps a
quarter of what they could get in the government schools, but the jobs are
not available because the teaching unions have pushed up wages beyond any
reasonable level.

The failure of state schools in parts of Africa and Asia is an open secret.
For instance, the Indian government sponsored the Probe Report, which gives
a disturbing picture of the 'malfunctioning' of government schools for
low-income families. When researchers called unannounced on their random
sample, there was 'teaching activity' in only 53 per cent of the schools. In
33 per cent the head teacher was absent. Significantly, there was a low
level of teaching activity even in those schools with relatively good
infrastructure, teaching aids and pupil-teacher ratios. Indeed, says the
report, 'it has become a way of life in the profession'. The Probe Report
concedes that the problems found in government schools were not apparent in
private schools serving the poor. In the great majority - visited
unannounced and at random - there was 'feverish classroom activity'. And
what's true for India is increasingly true for countries across Asia and
Africa.

What is the problem in state schools? The Probe Report put it succinctly:
accountability. Private schools, the report said, were successful because
they were more accountable. 'The teachers are accountable to the manager
(who can fire them) and, through him or her, to the parents (who can
withdraw their children).' There is no such accountability in government
schools, and 'this contrast is perceived with crystal clarity by the vast
majority of parents'.

In government schools teachers have jobs for life, and the security of this
has made them complacent rather than making them better teachers, as was the
intention. I talked to two veterans of private education, Mr Ranga Setty and
Mr D.A. Pandu, who run a chain of schools and colleges under the auspices of
the Rashtreeya Sikshana Samishi Trust in Bangalore. Mr Ranga Setty told me,
'In India we have a saying, "You can hire him, God only can fire him."' To
which Mr Pandu adds that, in fact, not even God can fire him.

Does any of this have relevance outside the development debate? I believe it
does. Stories of educational entrepreneurs in the slums and townships of
Africa and Asia battling against hostile government and poverty are not just
a source of inspiration for the school-choice movement in Britain and
America; perhaps, using evidence from developing countries, we can do for
the school-choice debate what E.G. West did for the same debate using
evidence from history. In his pioneering study, Education and the State,
West argued that before major state involvement in education in England and
Wales in 1870 school-attendance and literacy levels were more than 90 per
cent. Far from ensuring universal attendance and literacy, state
intervention merely reinforced a process that had been going on for some
time. The press-cuttings from the time of the first publication of West's
work show how this historical evidence began to transform the school-choice
debate in the UK and elsewhere, influ!
encing people such as the late Lord Joseph here and Milton Friedman in the
US. As the Times Educational Supplement put it then, 'If working-class
parents were prepared to back the choice they then possessed with money, why
should they be presumed unfit to choose today when they are so much richer?'

The evidence from India and Africa can do for today's school-choice debate
what West did for the same debate in the 1960s and 1970s. If the evidence
reveals that the poorest worldwide are achieving better educational outcomes
without the state, then this should inspire and buttress appeals for
increased school choice in rich countries. It also raises anew the question:
what on earth is government doing in education at all?

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James Tooley is directing a research and development project on private
schools for the poor in Africa and Asia.

(c)2001 The Spectator.co.uk