The Beautiful Tree (25 page)

Early on in my research, I was in Hyderabad with Pauline Dixon. Her PhD research focused on the regulatory environment, and so we had an appointment with the district education officer with authority over schools in Hyderabad, in his new government offices still under construction. He told us that he had only three inspectors working under him (and he himself didn’t do inspections) for the 500 or so recognized private schools, plus the similar number of government schools. So how on earth could he get around to all these schools and ensure that they comply with every detail? So in practice, he allowed his team to simply ignore the vast body of legislation, and instead adopt the “rule of thumb” that private schools should comply with only four regulations in order to gain recognition and remain recognized. They needed to have, he told us, a playground of the correct size, a 50,000 rupees (around $1,100) fund in a joint school-government bank account, all teachers properly qualified with government teacher-training certificates as a minimum, and a library.

This type of “regulation-lite” might seem more realistic. Possibly it would even be the kind of regulatory regime that the development experts have in mind, rather than the arcane detail of the actual legislation, when they argue for the need of proper regulation?

But here’s the rub: once we’d heard about his pared-down approach, Pauline quickly investigated about a dozen private unaided schools in Hyderabad whose managers I knew fairly well. None of them complied with more than two of the regulations even on this new slimmed-down list. All had the endowment fund, but only two had a proper library. None had a playground of the correct size, although most had a playground of some description. Not one had all teachers correctly qualified, although most had some of their teachers up to this level. Yet every one of these schools was recognized! And I found exactly the same story in Nigeria. A casual visit to 10 recognized private schools in the local government district of Kosofe in Lagos State, where my teams were doing the study, revealed that, according to the government regulations, only three of them should have been recognized. The remainder met few, if any, of the specified regulations.

So what’s going on? How can schools be recognized when they clearly don’t meet even a subset of regulations, let alone the full monty? Just as my taxi driver at the beginning of this chapter could pass through the police roadblock, which had been specifically set up to look for offenders of the road safety code, when his vehicle was in flamboyant violation, recognition is not acquired by meeting regulations. There are tried and trusted mechanisms in these countries that easily circumvent the need to meet regulations. Becoming recognized simply means bribing the inspectors with money. If you pay, you get recognized, and can stay recognized. If you don’t, you won’t. It’s simple.

It’s all quite remarkably open. On my journey, I was amazed at how candid government officials were about this aspect of their work. At the meeting with the district education officer in Hyderabad, after we’d been told about the problem of few inspectors, many schools, and almost unlimited regulations, I thought I’d try my luck with a question I assumed would get no answer at all. Prompted by what some private school managers had told me, I asked him, “Do the schools try to bribe the inspectors?” He turned to my assistant and asked for a translation of what I’d said. They spoke in Telugu, he perhaps buying time to think of the answer. But then he offered, quite openly: “Everyone gets bribes. Sometimes the inspectors give me bribes, sometimes the schools. And I know that if I don’t give them what they want, then they will go above my head and bribe someone else—a politician, my boss, whoever—so I might as well take the bribe and give them what they want.”

Bribery is endemic. It’s the way the system functions smoothly. Pauline explored this further with some of the school managers in Hyderabad. Again, they were entirely up-front about the situation. One told her: “Everything is possible if you offer the right amount of bribe. . . . In fact, if we follow the proper channels, every path will be closed.” Another said that all government officials can be bribed and that “an official will not be able to sleep at night if he doesn’t ask for bribes.” She asked them what happened when the school inspectors called. Only one said that the inspector came to “visit the classrooms and give suggestions.” But even she added, “And at last takes the bribe.” Most commonly, they said that the inspector was only interested in bribes. One offered: the inspector comes “to collect the bribe and sign the register to show the government that he has visited the school for inspection.” Another said that the inspector comes and does “nothing in particular; he inspects only the records and goes with filled pockets.”

Indeed, the system has become more or less formalized, with roughly set amounts required to pass through certain stages of the recognition process. If an inspector asks for too much, these set amounts can be referred to and offered instead. So in Nigeria, for instance, the school proprietors told me that the registration process first requires a name search, to ensure the chosen name is not already in use. The official fee costs 5,000 naira (around $40)—about the annual cost to parents of school fees in unregistered schools, or just over the monthly salary of a teacher in these schools. But in addition, the proprietor must pay “gratifications” of about 1,000 naira (about $8) to the officials. Then there are the requisite inspections before the registration process is completed. At least two are required, costing, officially, 5,000 naira, paid to the Ministry of Education at the payment office of the Lagos State government. But again, the proprietor must also bribe the inspectors “as gratification to the inspectors if he wants a favorable report.” These extralegal fees range from 5,000 naira to 15,000 naira ($40 to $120) depending on the number of inspectors that come and the proprietor’s bargaining skills. According to the proprietors, “We know that this money always reach the top,” that is, the Ministry of Education officials themselves.

To be registered, the schools should have a sickbay, with a full-time nurse—an impossible expense for these schools—and a one-acre playground—inconceivable in the slums and shantytowns. The school grounds should also have a full-time gatekeeper. None of the low-cost private schools have these. To overlook these omissions, the inspector receives a bribe of 5,000 naira. The same goes for failure to employ fully trained teachers (5,000 naira to the inspectors for noncompliance).

And so it goes. At every stage of the registration process, there are official fees to be paid; and at every stage, bribes for the inspectors to overlook noncompliance.

So I wasn’t balking at the regulation of private schools because I was against regulations per se; I just couldn’t actually see how they could work given the reality on the ground. And it seemed to me that the development experts hadn’t thought it through at all.

Budget private schools—even the recognized ones—are, in practice, largely unregulated by, and hence unaccountable to, the state. But there is not a lack of regulations, as the development experts seem to imagine. Regulations are simply ignored as long as bribes are paid. On the face of it, the parents are the losers: for government regulation might have given them a way to sort out whether one school is better than another—if it is recognized by the authorities, it must be better. But clearly, government recognition conveys no information about school quality; it only indicates the school’s ability to afford bribes. So it would seem that parents suffer as a result of this system—not only because they are deprived of one source of valuable information but, in fact, because they are positively misled by the information that is available. And since the revenue that schools use to pay the necessary bribes is derived from tuition paid by poor parents, regulations have in fact become a regressive tax on the consumption of education—working precisely counter to the goal of “education for all.” Rather than being exploited by unscrupulous school proprietors, parents are, indirectly, being exploited by unscrupulous inspectors.

Of course, the development experts might counter that the whole system could be reformed. It’s not this type of corrupt regulatory system they have in mind when they seek to impose “strong” regulations on budget private schools. Instead, they want something that works well, just like they might say regulations do back at home. True, it will require slow and painstaking reform of the very fundamentals of government and society. And the poor, meanwhile? Well, they must be patient, until these reforms have been introduced. For how else can these poor “citizens” be protected against “exploitation” by for-profit providers?

Actually, as I journeyed and researched, it occurred to me that there might be another way—and it was curious to me that the development experts didn’t catch on to this possibility. Indeed, it’s more or less what government officials in Hyderabad told Pauline and me. In a sense, they weren’t too bothered about whether the private schools met their regulations because the schools had a much stronger sense of accountability to people who could be relied on to make sure things were working well. The district education officer in Hyderabad put it succinctly: “The teachers in the private unaided schools are accountable to the parents. The parents insist on quality. The teachers in the private unaided schools are faced with the sack if they do not perform. . . . They can easily be removed. . . . The parents are rational and so the schools are accountable.” Another government official in Hyderabad reiterated the same claim: “In the private schools, the manager watches the teachers all the time. In turn the teachers watch the children.”

Wasn’t this different kind of accountability significant? Couldn’t the development experts be satisfied that it would, at least to some powerful degree, help protect parents against any unscrupulous providers?
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Near the center of the coastal city of Accra, Ghana’s capital, is the shantytown of Baden Powell, called thus because you reach it by passing Baden Powell Centenary Memorial Hall. Here along the rocky shoreline ran open sewers between corrugated-iron-roofed huts, with views across the ocean that might cost millions elsewhere. There are more African-sounding shantytowns too, such as Agbogbloshie and Neema. There’s also Jamestown. One hot, humid October day, I visited these shantytowns with Emma Gyamere, my team leader in Ghana. It had been a very long day; we’d been out traveling since 7:30 a.m., checking on schools taking part in the testing for the comparative survey. Our car had no air conditioning, and I was feeling exceedingly hot; my right arm was very sunburned from sticking out the window all day. Feeling weary and a little sun-stroked, I hope I can be excused for what happened next.

We walked through the slum. Children pointed excitedly at the “white man” and practiced, as they did in every other African country I visited, their “how are you’s”; some chanted “how are you, how are you, how are you!” delighting in their own mastery. Older men smiled and greeted us in the customary fashion. We located the school we were looking for, Sunrise Preparatory School. The proprietor was standing outside her tiny office, talking to a very thin, unkempt older man. She motioned us to sit outside and wait. The wooden chairs were small, but at least in the shade, although it was still uncomfortably humid. After a while, I looked at my watch. We’d been waiting 20 minutes while the proprietor engaged in discussion with this man. “She’s very rude,” I said to Emma, who agreed. Accepted was the fact that a visiting white man should be given priority, even though he had called unannounced. After another five minutes, I suggested that we leave. Emma readily agreed, and I got up to tell the owner.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but this is a parent.” She said it in a way that for her demanded no more explanation. Of course, she couldn’t stop her conversation with a parent, one of the really important people in her world, no matter who had come to visit her.

The proprietor of Sunrise Preparatory School understood that different kind of accountability well. Of course she was accountable—not to the government inspectors, who would be more interested in bribes than educational standards. She was accountable to parents—the really important people—and through them to the students in her school. If parents withdrew their children and thus their fees, she would go out of business. She knew that very clearly and would do all she could to prevent it.

This alternative idea of accountability didn’t seem to get much consideration in the development experts’ writings I reviewed. However, I read tantalizing glimpses that some were at least aware of it—but frustratingly, they didn’t make anything of it at all. For instance, I’d read a report by Save the Children that had as one of its major themes the need for greater regulation of private schools for the poor. However, it had an interesting aside that raised the alternative route to accountability. Save the Children had interviewed a 12-year-old boy, Jhazeb, in a private slum school in Karachi, Pakistan, one that they had disapprovingly noted didn’t provide a playground and so fell short of its regulatory requirements. However, the boy was not concerned with this supposed failure: “Though the school is small and does not have any ground for sports, Jhazeb said they are contented playing in the fields and the streets by their houses and he would rather see the school bring in more computers and offer computer classes to their students.”
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Young Jhazeb was aware of the opportunity cost of providing a playground, and thought that his school should have other priorities. Save the Children used this anecdote to note that private schools “are already responding to parental preferences, within the context of market forces (‘If we offer computers and classes rather than playing fields and equipment we’ll have higher enrolments.’).”

Again, just as my experience at Sunrise Preparatory School suggested, doesn’t this example from Pakistan also show, at least in some small way, private schools being accountable, perhaps more accountable than government, to the parents and children they serve? Government says that all private schools must provide a playground, which would be very expensive, given the price of land in the slums and the revenue of the schools, and may not even be possible, given the scarcity of available land. The children know better. They think they have enough play areas, thank you, and that scarce resources are better spent on other things, such as computer education, that will help them get on in life. The private schools respond to this demand and offer what children, and parents, want.