The Beautiful Tree (23 page)

All the problems above were reported for those children “lucky” enough to be in government schools. But this, I read, was just the tip of the iceberg. For national governments, the development reports concluded, had singularly failed to ensure that all their citizens received an education. The United Nations Development Programme reported that 115 million (that is 17 percent of the 680 million children of primary school age in developing countries) did not attend school. Three-fifths were girls. In India, 40 million children were not in primary school. A report from Save the Children said that an estimated 56 million children in South Asia were out of school and that states “continue to struggle in the universal provision of an education which is of a sufficient quality.” The World Bank said that “many governments are falling short on their obligations, especially to poor people.”
⁵

The development experts I read appeared unanimous about the problems of public education for the poor. The World Bank called it “government failure,” with “services so defective that their opportunity costs outweigh their benefits for most poor people.” Action Aid didn’t mince its words either. Government basic education “in many of the world’s poorest countries” is “a moral outrage, and a gross violation of human rights.”
⁶

The only possible reaction to this litany is anger. That’s what I felt the more government schools I visited on my journey, and the more development experts’ conclusions I read. Of course, the disappointment and frustration of these development experts were palpable, too. So what should be done? This is where my reading left me frankly baffled. The proposed solution, in exactly the same sources, was, well . . . more of the same. Of course, the development experts didn’t put it like that—this time, there would be the
right kind
of public education, as opposed to the
wrong kind
that had been such a disaster for the poor. This time they’d get it right—usually by throwing additional billions of dollars at the problem. But the same governments and the same development agencies would still have to be entrusted to do this. Why did they believe that they would get it right this time? It was not as if they’d been starved of resources in the past. It was not as if they hadn’t already published ream after ream of papers on improving the system, on abolishing corruption, on ways of really delivering resources to the poor, concluding that the poor really must be served this time. Somehow, this time, it would be put right. All I could think, the more I read, was how?

Action Aid set out this position unambiguously.
⁷
Despite public education’s being a “moral outrage” and a “gross violation of human rights,” the solution was clear: “in many—if not most—developing countries, the state remained the most effective, and often the
only
, agent capable of mobilizing the technical and financial resources to bring education to all.” The “appropriate response” to “state failure” was not to look elsewhere, but instead was “to strengthen state capacity.” The World Bank just as strongly concurred: Although “public provision has often failed to create universally available and effective schooling,” this “does
not
imply that the solution is a radically different approach.”

The solution for the development experts was clear. More and better
public
education was required. The World Bank, however, cautioned us not to expect too much, too soon: “The challenge is formidable, because making services work for poor people involves changing not only service delivery arrangements but also public sector institutions. It also involves changing the way much foreign aid is transferred.” Above all, the poor “
should be patient
.” This need for fortitude appeared so important that they repeated the phrase: “
There is no silver bullet.
. . . Even if we know what is to be done, it may be difficult to get it done. Despite the urgent needs of the world’s poor people, and the many ways services have failed them, quick results will be hard to come by. Many of the changes involve fundamental shifts in power—something that cannot happen overnight. Making services work for poor people
requires patience
.”

To soften the blow, the World Bank report wrapped it all up with a joke about a French general, a gardener, and a tree. (It’s not so funny that it’s worth repeating.) But was it really a joking matter for poor people?
Why
should they be patient?

Of course, they might have to be patient if there were really no alternative. But the question that shouted out for an answer the more I traveled, the more I saw, the more I read, was, what about the alternative of
private
education? If public education is so dismal, and it is so difficult and time-consuming to reform it, to make it better for poor people, why should the poor wait for these “fundamental shifts in power” before they can get decent services? Why should they wait for changes in the way foreign aid is transferred? Why should they wait until their governments get their acts together? Why wasn’t anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution? The longer I spent on my journey, the odder it seemed that none of the development experts considered private education a possible alternative.

Actually, they did give some reasons. The World Bank summarized the position clearly: “The picture painted so far may lead some to conclude that government should give up and leave everything to the private sector.” No, no, no! “That would be wrong. . . . The extreme position is clearly not desirable.” Why not? “For
various good reasons
,” the World Bank concluded, “society has decided that [education] will be provided not through a market transaction but through the government taking responsibility.” And these reasons remain, whatever the disaster public education brings for the poor.

I’ll come back to some of these “good reasons” later. But the simplest reason that emerged time and again from the development experts is pretty easy to grasp: private education is no solution because when it comes to services for the poor, the quality is
even lower
than that found in government schools. I took time out from my field trip and read up on what the development experts were now saying about the quality of private schools for the poor. It didn’t make for happy reading.

However bad the government schools are, the private schools for the poor
are even worse
. As I read the work of the development experts, it became clear that Mary Taimo Ige Iji, the Nigerian education administrator, was not alone in her assessment of the low quality of private education for the poor. But by extension, it seemed, the development experts must also share Mary’s views that poor parents are “ignoramuses”—for how else could they explain poor parents’ choices? Of course, they didn’t put it like that; they were far too polite or perhaps politically astute to do so. But the more I read, the more convinced I became that there was no other explanation for the dim view they took of poor parents’ choices.

I read a couple of reports by the development charity Save the Children. It was quite clear: in Pakistan and Nepal, poor parents’ demand for private schools was “not due primarily to a shortage of government schools,” but was based on the perceived
low quality
of the government schools.
⁸
They even reported what poor parents identified as the inadequacies of the public schools, which came as no surprise given what I’d already read: “irregularity, negligence and indiscipline of the teachers, large class sizes and a lower standard of English learning.” Conversely, Save the Children also listed what parents told them was “better”—they put the word in “scare quotes”—about low-cost private schools: they had greater contact hours and much smaller class sizes than public schools, allowing for individual pupil attention, and teacher attendance was regular.

But these parental preferences be damned! Save the Children knows best: the “assumption that the quality of private schooling is higher than that provided by government schools” is simply not true for the private schools that poor parents can afford: “A significant number of families are therefore paying for private education delivery which is offering an extremely low standard of education,” lower than that in the public schools. Poor parents “
may perceive
private schools to be superior to those in the public sector,” but these parents are, let’s not mince words as Save the Children tries to,
ignoramuses
, because “the new generation of private schools which cater to poorer children in urban and rural areas commonly employ a high proportion of untrained teachers and offer a poor service.”

I read and reread these sentences in Save the Children’s reports to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood them. I hadn’t. Let’s spell it out: poor parents say private schools are better than public schools and can catalog the reasons why. The development experts at Save the Children say they are wrong. Did they have any evidence for this? The only evidence they offered was that in their case study, in private schools “almost none of the teachers have teacher training qualifications and, furthermore, little interest in obtaining these.”

Hmm. I mused that perhaps it was true that teacher-training qualifications made for better education. But surely you can’t just assume this, when set against the weight of parental preferences that judge that it did not? Poor parents, after all, with limited resources and much to lose by sending their children to private school, must be pretty
stupid
to make that difficult and expensive choice if the private schools really are of inferior quality to the public schools they are abandoning. Perhaps poor parents think that untrained teachers are more committed, have better subject knowledge, or at least turn up regularly? None of these possibilities appeared to be explored by Save the Children.

I read the same refrain with the same bewilderment whenever I turned to other writings of the development experts. It was there in former British prime minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa report. The
only
mention of private education is the following short paragraph:

Looking up the references given for this sweeping assertion of poor quality in low-cost private schools, I found only one. It was from Pauline Rose at the University of Sussex, whose conundrum I’ve already discussed. The Commission for Africa certainly had read her conclusions correctly: poor parents, she wrote, need to “be protected from the poor quality private provision which is becoming increasingly prevalent.” Poor parents must be saved from the private schools, which they are forced to attend “by default (or despair) rather than by design.” Again, let’s not mince words: for Rose and the Commission for Africa, it had to be that poor parents were ignoramuses, who must be saved from the consequences of their hopeless choices. I couldn’t read them in any other way.

But, bafflingly, going back to her report, it seemed that Rose didn’t have any real evidence for her assertion; at least nothing more than the observation that in Uganda for instance, “teachers are often less qualified, and more poorly paid” in the private than the public schools, so “the quality of education received is debatable.” It was just the same assumption again that high educational standards need trained and well-paid teachers. Again, was it
true
? If high wages and teacher training lead to the kind of government teachers whose absenteeism and general neglect is a well-documented cause of concern, then perhaps—just perhaps—lower-paid and untrained teachers who at least turn up and teach will lead to better outcomes? It didn’t seem that anyone else was willing to countenance this possibility.

I followed up the work of Dr. Rose to see if she came up with anything more substantial later—I really wanted to know if there was evidence out there that would show that poor parents were misguided. If they were, I wanted to help expose this as much as anyone. It didn’t seem reasonable, unless poor parents really were ignoramuses, but I could be wrong and if so, this would have huge consequences for the poor. Rose was one of the authors of a study commissioned by the British aid agency DfID, specifically looking at low-cost private schools in Nigeria.

Well, actually, that wasn’t what they called them. They called them “nonstate providers,” complete with its own new acronym—NSPs—to add to the development alphabet soup. That in itself struck me as odd. Why would anyone want to invent a cumbersome phrase like that when a perfectly respectable phrase already existed, and was already in use by ordinary people? So I tried it out in the slums of Lagos. Nonstate providers? No one had a clue what I was talking about. They were quite comfortable with the notion of “private school” in English, however. For that fit in with how they described them in their own languages. In Nigeria, the Yoruban word for school is
ile-iwe
—literally house of learning. A private school is
ileiwe aladani
, literally “self-assisted school,” and
aladani
is precisely the word used to describe anything private. A public school is
ile iwe ijoba
. I asked for the literal translation of nonstate school. It would be
ile iwe ti kinse ti ijoba
. But no one ever uses this language; they are quite happy, thank you very much, with private school.

Or in the Nigerian language of Igbo, a school is
ulo akwukwo
, again literally “a place of learning.” A private school is
ulo akwukwo akankpa
, with
akankpa
literally meaning “personal or belonging to me,” the word used precisely to describe “private.” The same was true in Ghana: in the Ga language, a school is
nii kasemhoe
(again, “place of learning”). A private school is
nii kasemhoe ankrankrong
, literally meaning “school of an individual.”