The Beautiful Tree (42 page)

How? I
buy trusted brands
. I have a Sony computer and digital camera and Microsoft software; I use Google for my computer searches, fly by British Airways or KLM/Air France, use Northern Motors to maintain my Nissan, and shop at Tesco and Marks & Spencer for food and clothing. (Some might argue that these brands only function because of government regulation. I doubt that it is the fear of health and hygiene inspectors that keeps Tesco from offering me rotten fruit and vegetables. I think they fear losing my custom far more, and that’s why they offer fresh produce.) Buying trusted brands would be another way of overcoming the information problem for poor parents wanting the best education for their children.

Assisting the market in the creation of educational brand names that will help parents make more informed decisions is another possible area for outside action—for philanthropy, investment, and aid if required to satisfy investors of the viability of the market, or to provide technical assistance on legal and financial matters to educational entrepreneurs. One possibility would be for investors to assist expansion-minded proprietors in accessing loan capital, in the way already outlined above. Or it could involve creating a specialized education investment fund to provide equity to education companies that run chains of budget private schools. Suitable exit strategies could be worked out for the investment fund, perhaps by giving advice on how to list on local stock exchanges or to get other investors on board.

A further possibility could involve investors’ engaging in a joint venture with local educational entrepreneurs to set up a chain themselves. Investment in initial research and development would be required to create the standards for a demonstrable and truly replicable model of education for the poor. This might be best accomplished within existing schools that would then demonstrate the efficacy of the model to parents, investors, and potential franchisees—if a franchise model was deemed appropriate—and be used to train new school managers and teachers.

Such research and development would explore the technology, curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher-training requirements for the successful
educational
model, and the quality control, financial, and regulatory requirements for the brand-name chain. Establishing a chain of “budget” private schools, serving poor communities, would seem an extraordinarily exciting and innovative project for investors and philanthropists to engage in.

Why would private school owners wish to become part of a chain of schools, either as franchise holders or managers? Competition would be a chief spur: School proprietors realize a key problem now is the powerful competition from other private schools—from the roof of one school in the slums of Hyderabad, seven other private schools are visible, all competing for the same children. School proprietors are eager to differentiate themselves in this market, and a key concern of parents is educational quality. By becoming part of the brand name, managers could show that they emphasize quality more than their competitors and so would attract more children.

Parents would prefer that their children attend a brand-name school because it would solve their information problem in a neat way. Children, too, might prefer to be in a brand-name school to benefit from the improved curriculum, pedagogy, technology, and teacher training. They would be part of a much larger organization and would benefit from the networks and opportunities that creates. And as the brand name became well-known, prospective employers and higher education institutions would trust where children have been educated, giving the pupils an edge for the future.

What of schools that don’t become part of the chain? In the short term, they could suffer, perhaps even go out of business—but only as a result of parents’ shifting their children to the school that they perceive as having higher-quality education. But in the dynamic market of education, two things would likely happen. First, individual educational entrepreneurs would seek to improve what they offer in order to retain children or win back those who have left. Second, most fundamentally, if the financial and educational viability of an educational brand name was demonstrated, others would soon enter the market, establishing competing brand names that offer quality education at a low cost.

Prahalad observes that the founder of Aravind Eye Care System—which provides cataract surgery for large numbers of the poor—was “inspired by the hamburger chain, McDonald’s, where a consistent quality of hamburgers and French fries worldwide results from a deeply understood and standardised chemical process.”
⁹
There seems every reason to think that a similarly “deeply understood and standardised” learning process could become part of an equally successful model of private school provision, serving huge numbers of the poor.

And perhaps you don’t even have to start with the poor. I’ve a friend who’s starting a chain of private schools in China for the middle classes. Just as mobile phone and computer technology all began with the advantaged, and eventually diffused, lower and lower, into the socioeconomic substrata, so too might educational brand names.

This kind of brand experimentation in the market could even take on what is currently strongly felt to be the justified monopoly of the state—the examination and assessment system itself, and the associated curriculum leading up to it. In information technology, NIIT Ltd. started out offering courses to a few people who thought they might be beneficial. In time, it has emerged to create its own brand of certification. A graduate of NIIT—a GNIIT—is now accepted as possessing an internationally recognized qualification. Search through the matrimonial pages in the
Times of India
(a sort of “lonely hearts” section in which parents seek matches for their children) and you’ll see that being a GNIIT is as much a signifier of quality in a potential partner as the possession of other, better-known standards in the West, such as a BA or MSc. And this is so even though these standards have emerged totally independently of government—and even against government’s wishes: I had a particularly harrowing afternoon in the office of the deputy director of the All-India Council for Technical Education. During our interview, a large and malevolent-looking rat ran around the office; at one point, I had to lift my feet as it passed under me. The deputy director called in his secretary and told him to set the traps that evening. As the rat continued its peregrinations around his office, he told me, “I sometimes get phone calls from ministries around the world, in Dubai or Saudi, asking about NIIT qualifications.” Presumably, potential employees had these on their resumés, and the authorities were wondering about their value. “I tell them they are not worth the paper they are written on” because they were not accredited by his organization. But whatever he thought from his rat-infested office, that’s not what millions of employers in India and elsewhere think of NIIT certificates. The brand name has become so well-known and respected that, just as Americans often ask for a Kleenex after sneezing, referring to a facial tissue, or make a Xerox when they mean a photocopy, or offer to FedEx an urgent document when they mean send it by courier, so Indians talk of doing an NIIT, when they mean undertaking a computer course, even when they do it at one of NIIT’s top rivals.

Just as NIIT has conquered the world of computer education certification, so I believe there is nothing to stop some educational entrepreneurs, perhaps assisted by forward-looking philanthropy, in creating brand-name certification for budget private schools that will signify quality and relevance to employers and higher education admissions officers. Of course, just as NIIT did, the Searchers could start small and find what suits parents, children, employers, and college and university registrars, conducting market research and testing what they’re offering customers. But as the brand grew, there seems to be no reason at all—apart from government regulations that could outlaw it—that the new education certificate could not become nationally and internationally respected, providing an alternative for budget private schools to offer that would satisfy all those using them. Importantly, such a brand name could go a long way toward solving the problem of overloaded and irrelevant curricula, using outmoded pedagogy, that currently bedevil public education systems in developing countries.

Private schools for the poor are burgeoning across the developing world. In many urban areas they are serving the majority of poor schoolchildren. Their quality is higher than that of government schools provided for the poor—perhaps not surprisingly given that they are predominantly businesses dependent on fees to survive and, hence, are directly accountable to parental needs. Those worried—like Easterly—about how to extend access to education for the poor could usefully look to the private education sector as a way forward. By increasing what private schools for the poor already offer, such as additional free and subsidized places for the poorest, sensitively applied targeted vouchers could broaden access on a large scale. Crucially, because the private schools serving the poor are businesses, making a reasonable profit, they provide a pioneering way forward for investor involvement too. Investing in microfinance-style loan programs so that private schools can improve their infrastructure is one way forward. Providing investment for innovation in curriculum and learning, which, if successful, could be rolled out on a commercial basis, is a second possibility. And investing in a chain of schools—either through a dedicated education investment fund or through joint ventures with educational entrepreneurs—could help solve the information problem for poor parents and improve the existing educational opportunities. Educating Amaretch is a solvable problem. The Searchers who have created private schools for the poor are hungry for investment; investors can assist them in pursuing their central role in providing quality “education for all.”

Does this discussion have any implications for education in the West? I don’t mind if it doesn’t, apart from the implications for aid and development that I’ve already discussed. But I’ve often been pressed on this when lecturing in America or Britain, especially to sympathetic audiences. Does it have any relevance for us? In this concluding section, I’ll point to two possible ways in which the evidence might be relevant.

First, I think the evidence presented in this book can help us deal with what has been called “middle-class angst” in the West: when their children reach school age, middle-class parents are faced with the dilemma of sending their children to the assigned state school or a private alternative. For many, this decision brings a terrible moral dilemma. In Britain, we’ve been inundated in recent years with pundits milking this one for all its worth. Fiona Miller—the girlfriend of then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former adviser Alistair Campbell and herself a former adviser to Cherie Blair—argued in a Channel 4 documentary that pushy middle-class parents who were abandoning the local comprehensive state school were the biggest threat to public education. And Teacher of the Year Philip Beadle took the same line in a 2006 Channel 4 documentary, “We Don’t Need No Private Education,” even manipulating the words, in my view, of an upwardly mobile black father to suggest that the quality of private schools in Britain was inferior to those of state schools. Stealing this particular limelight above all, Oxford don Adam Swift made his name telling middle-class parents that sending their children to private school damaged the egalitarian project of public education in his book
How Not to Be a Hypocrite.

The title of his book conveys the dilemma facing parents. For if you send your children to private school, you are saying that the state system is not good enough for your children—it must be thus, for the state system is free, but you have to fork out considerable sums to send your child to the private alternative. But by saying this, you are removing yourself, an educationally concerned middle-class parent, says Swift, from the state system and, hence, consigning it to a vicious cycle of mediocrity. But of course if you choose to follow what you believe to be morally right, by supporting the state schools that the majority must attend, then you run the risk of jeopardizing your own dear child’s future. So what to do?

Swift’s dilemma—of middle-class angst—may seem minor compared with those problems facing parents in poorer countries. But I think the solution that poorer parents have embraced can help soothe the consciences of middle-class parents too. The evidence from around the world shows us, first, that most people, poor as well as rich, care deeply about their children’s education; there is no middle-class monopoly on this. And second, because of the universality of parental concern, there’s nothing intrinsically socially divisive about private education either. It may be true today that private education in the West is patronized largely by the middle and upper classes. But they do so for a mixture of reasons, including the intervention of strong government over a period of a hundred years or more. It wasn’t always the case—before the state got involved (in Britain in 1870), provision was, of course, overwhelmingly private. Indeed, the
less
middle-class parents patronize private education, the
more
socially divisive they allow it to become. Conversely, the more middle-class parents stop worrying and use private education, the more chances there will be of effective
chains
of private schools emerging. And the more these brand names emerge, the greater the chance of a larger number of people being able to free ride on the informed choices of the middle classes, as competing chains lower fees, making their schools accessible to a still larger number of children. Moreover, when more parents begin using private education, the politicians and opinion makers are more likely to face up to the idiocy of parents’ paying twice for their children’s education—once through taxes and again through private school fees. The more policymakers are forced to confront this double payment, the greater the likelihood of reforms also emerging in the West, like tax credits for school fees and targeted vouchers for those who can’t afford private education. Thus, such reforms would lead to the end of the less-well-off having to acquiesce in state inferiority.