The Beautiful Tree (32 page)

As we part, I ask them the obvious question that somehow I’d forgotten to ask in the euphoria of being released, “Why did the security chief let me go?” Joy says perhaps they believed that I was a friend of Zimbabwe; and the regional Zanu-PF chairman has his daughter in her school. Of course, he was the chairman of her parent-teacher association, I recalled, he would have had a child in her school. “So he doesn’t send his daughter to a government school?” I ask. Joy laughs: “Our school is better. They all know that.” And then adds: “They weren’t going to harm you, not with me there. They were just trying to frighten you.” With Joy beside me, I could be safe.

We part, and Leonard and I hitch a ride back into Harare; six of us crammed into a small, very slow private car. Just outside of Marondera, our car is stopped at the police roadblock, only ours, all the others in the traffic queue are allowed through. My heart sinks; has Zanu-PF radioed ahead to have me arrested? Without Joy next to me, am I no longer safe? But nothing untoward happens; the driver shows his papers, pays his dues, and we are off, back to Harare.

That was the only time I ever really felt threatened while doing my research. But it wasn’t the only time I ruffled feathers. When I presented the results of my endeavors to academics and development experts, I felt that if they could have detained me in some dank cellar, they would have been happy to do so. Some accused me of imperialism, racism, and colonialism, just as the Zanu-PF interrogator had done. And although I never again felt that horrible tingling fear at the base of my spine, there were some uncomfortable times ahead.

My colleague at Newcastle Professor Sugata Mitra—whose work in India has shown how poor children can learn through the Internet without the assistance of teachers—once told me that if ever he felt apprehensive before giving an important lecture, he would look at a photograph of children his work was helping, and that would inspire him to get on with his talk and ignore his nerves and any potentially hostile audience. I have a photograph of me with Joy, and with Reshma too, a Muslim woman whose private school serves poor children in Hyderabad, which I use to the same effect. If Joy and Reshma can endure all that they must go through, overcome all the odds to help the poor benefit from a decent education, then I can get on with telling people what I’ve found.

Not long after I flew home from Zimbabwe, I presented some of my findings at an important education and development conference in Oxford. I presented the results to many academic conferences; this one was typical. I outlined my findings about private schools serving the majority of schoolchildren in poor areas of Africa and India. China too had interesting lessons to tell. I described how, after testing many thousands of children, and observing a few thousand schools, these private schools seemed superior to government schools with regard to inputs and pupil achievement. And they were doing it all for a fraction of the cost. And that free primary education might not be as beneficial as many believed, because it seemed to have the effect of crowding out existing private schools that were better serving the poor. At least in Kenya. . . .

As I finished my PowerPoint presentation and the chair invited questions, one professor, metaphorically flinging down my notebook onto the table in front of me, dismissed what I’d said, “Tooley is plowing a lonely furrow, long may it remain that way.” Another stood up to condemn my approach: “Tooley’s work is dangerous, in the wrong hands it could lead to the demise of state education.” “You’ve painted a glowing picture of markets in education,” said another, “but have you never heard of market failure?” Sighing deeply, another said: “It doesn’t matter what your evidence shows. Statistics, statistics, statistics, who cares about your statistics? Private education can never be pro-poor.” Development experts are all pro-poor. I, by celebrating poor families’ decision to use private education, was not: “The poor must have state education because they mustn’t pay fees.” A young woman near the front was equally as dismissive: “You obviously know nothing about human rights. Free and compulsory education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration!” An elderly Indian professor, more kindly than the others, nevertheless had disagreed with all I’d said: “You’re trying to pull the ladder up behind you,” he smiled, “the only way your country developed was through free government schools. Why are you trying to deny it to the rest of us?”

They were all united in dismissing my findings. Why was I ignoring the many good reasons that we all know why private education cannot be part of any solution to “education for all”? Why was I ignoring the many good reasons why markets are inappropriate for education—that the short route to accountability I explored in the last chapter had to be abandoned in favor of the political long road? Why was I being so perverse as to ignore the years of accumulated wisdom to this effect?

After I’d given my paper, the conference chair, a professor at one of England’s top education departments, took me aside. He was trying to be helpful: “You’re silly, very silly, saying all of that. You’ll never get another job. Be sensible, old chap.”

What are these good reasons? Each of the objections given above summarizes one of the major reasons the development experts have for rejecting private education for the poor as part of any solution—apart from the issue of low quality, which we’ve already looked at. I read of these reasons as I studied on my journey, talked them through with whomever I could, and weighed them against what I was seeing for myself. The more I saw, the less convincing I’d found them.

The first reason seemed easiest to dismiss. It was what one attendee was getting at when he said my ideas were “dangerous”—that, if taken up by the wrong people, they could lead to “the demise of state education.” I’d read it in several places. The PROBE Report said that if poor parents support private education, this “carries a real danger of undermining the government schooling system.”
¹
Kevin Watkins, the author of
The Oxfam Education Report
and now director of the United Nations Development Programme, wrote that parents should not “withdraw their children from the public education system and put them in private schools,” for this “reduces parental pressure to improve government schools.” It was what I had heard way back when Sajitha Bashir challenged me after my first visit to the slums of Hyderabad. If poor parents continue to flee public education en masse, the experts fear, the very existence of public education itself is threatened.

But to me this seemed to be what the Americans call a no-brainer. If the education of the poor is what we desire, why should we care whether they get it in public or private systems? If private schools could be made available to all, including the poorest and most excluded, and to girls—and there could be ways of ensuring this (see below)—and if their quality, already higher than the government alternative, can be improved through judicious support (again, see below), then from the poor’s perspective, why would it be relevant whether this would undermine the state system, providing that education for all was achieved? As the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once observed: “Who cares if the cat is black or white? It’s a good cat if it catches the mouse!” Why should the poor mind what color their cat is?

The second major reason why private education wasn’t the way forward for the poor had to do with “market failure.” Development experts tend to use this term synonymously with education being a “public good,” and there being “externalities” of education that need to be taken into account. At issue here, perhaps surprisingly given the complex way it is often described, seems something rather simple. The UNDP puts it like this: Governments should “finance and provide” primary education because “market prices alone” would not capture its “intrinsic value and social benefits.” Why not? Because basic education “benefits not only the individual who gains knowledge, it also benefits all members of society by improving health and hygiene behaviour and raising worker productivity.”

The basic idea, then, is that there are social benefits to be had from people being educated. If a parent educates his child, this child, so the theory goes, will contribute to society by being healthier, by being more productive at work, by being literate, and so on. But these
public
benefits, it is claimed, are not reflected in the market price of education, so there will be “market failure.” That is, in the absence of the state’s providing and financing education, not enough people will buy enough education, of the right sort, to provide these social benefits. That’s what the conference critic was claiming about my position.

I’ve wrestled with this, and it seems to me that it’s not as powerful an objection as the development experts imagine it to be. Suppose we’re in a system where there is no public provision and financing of education. A poor parent is deciding whether to educate her child. Private schooling costs a certain amount, and her resources are very limited. She certainly values the benefits that education brings to society generally. She values low incidence of disease, the benefits of democracy, and social cohesion—in very practical terms. Disease hits her hard, for instance, and may have already killed some of her children. A lack of democracy leads to corrupt bureaucrats who pester her and her family for bribes. A lack of social cohesion leads to communal riots, which adversely affect her family and livelihood. Clearly, she would benefit from every child, including her own, being educated.

But, weighing it all, she decides not to educate her child because she chooses to allocate her resources to different ends. She can “free ride” on others getting educated, so some social benefits may come her way. But every other person will be in the same boat and will make the same calculations, so in fact society won’t get educated at all, and so no one will benefit. That’s the perceived problem of collective action that so troubles most development experts.

But is it really that problematic? Surely not: because the poor parent also knows that there are
private
benefits from being educated—especially for a poor person, as precisely the development experts also argue, it’s one of the best routes out of poverty. And the child will not only be able to get a middle-class job with education but will also likely assist her parent as she gets older. So instead of the pessimistic conclusions reached by the development experts, a much more favorable outcome emerges: Because these
private
benefits are so great, she’ll pay fees to educate her child, even if it means sacrificing other goods. But so will many other parents, and so all will enjoy the social benefits this brings, even though they weren’t a significant part of their initial decision to educate their children.

The key points seemed to be the cost of schooling and the value of the private benefits. It is a mistake to blithely assume that the cost of schooling will be so high, and the private benefits so low, that parents will decide not to educate their children. The only way to address the issue is not in the abstract, as the UNDP and my conference critic had, but by looking at the evidence and seeing whether poor parents are actually willing to spend on education, and so produce the desired social benefits.

The evidence adduced in my research demonstrates quite categorically that poor parents
are
prepared to pay for schooling, for this is in fact what they are already doing. In slum areas, the vast majority of parents
are
prepared to pay, and are paying. It seemed to me then—and still seems now—that this evidence is enough to refute the “market failure” argument. Poor parents have shown that there is no problem of collective action and no grounds for assuming that the externalities of education will lead to market failure. The perceived private benefits are enough to make them pay for education and, hence, obtain the social benefits that arise from that decision. Furthermore, I’d found that the price paid for schooling also includes an element to cover scholarships for the poorest in society—that’s another way of looking at the fact that school owners admit up to 20 percent of their children free of charge or at a concessionary rate. So not only are parents willing to pay for private education, they are also apparently willing to subsidize the cost to others who are not as fortunate as they. Furthermore, since the quality of education in parent-funded private schools exceeds that provided by the government sector, the corollary social benefits of education would be commensurately greater as well. And because private schools are locally owned and funded—not dependent on foreign aid as are most public schools in the countries I studied—they generate self-sustaining domestic economic activity that public schools do not. Since indigenous, self-sustaining economies are the ultimate goal of developing countries, private schooling intrinsically represents a larger step forward on the path of development. Private schools, in other words, appear to be
superior
to government schools in the creation of public goods. All this, I believe, indicates that the second “good reason” not only fails to pass muster but in fact puts things precisely backward.

The third reason comes out of the “pro-poor” idea. Of course it arises from a well-meaning desire to ensure that no child is left behind. So state financing is the only way to provide equality in education, for if poor people must find fees for schooling, some may be unable to “use them—making it difficult to escape poverty.” Again, that all seems plausible in theory. But the same development experts who argue this seem to have no difficulty admitting that current
government provision
is itself inequitable, in general benefiting the wealthier in developing countries rather than the poor. Government education provision is unfair too. The key question is, could private provision be made fairer and actually turn out to be fairer than government provision?

The main reason given by the development experts as to why it can’t be made more equitable is simply that private education requires tuition fees to be paid.
The Oxfam Education Report
was clear about this: Private education “does not offer a route to universal primary education, because poverty often excludes the poor from private markets.” Even though private education is “filling part of the space left as a result of the collapse of State provision,” its potential “to facilitate more rapid progress towards universal basic education has been exaggerated.” Why? Because poor parents cannot afford private education. The PROBE Report made the same objection: “Private schools are out of reach of the vast majority of poor parents.”