The Beautiful Tree (5 page)

Following Sajitha Bashir’s lead, I turned to the work of Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. He’d coauthored a substantial volume,
India: Development and Participation
, which gave tantalizing glimpses of something remarkable concerning education and the poor. But this was totally ignored in his conclusions. I read the conclusion to the chapter on education and found nothing to upset what everyone knows: “Universal elementary education is a realizable goal,” he had written, if only it is made “a more lively political issue.”
¹
More government spending is needed, I read, and government must be more actively involved in “opening more schools, improving the infrastructure, appointing more teachers, simplifying the curriculum, organizing enrolment drives, providing free textbooks,” and so on. And he also trotted out the standard line on private education, that the “privileged classes” are “the main clients of unaided private schools.” All standard fare—private education is about the elites and has nothing to do with universal primary education, which is the stuff of governments and politics. Nothing to upset the development applecart there.

But then wedged between these two quotes, I found not only an extraordinary description of the basic failings of public education but also the observation that many of the masses, including the poor, are now using private schools! I read that, even by 1994, the latest statistics he was using, in
rural
—that is, predominantly poor—India, enrollment in primary private schools was already above 30 percent, and there was “a further acceleration” of the numbers by the late 1990s, “especially in areas where public schools are in bad shape.” In urban areas, the trend was even more startling, with the proportion in private schools estimated at 80 percent or more. As I read this, it seemed hard to reconcile these statements with the notion that private schools were patronized mainly by the elite—for it was surely stretching the definition of the privileged to include more than 80 percent of urban and more than 30 percent of rural people! What was going on?

Rather than further explore their choices, Sen criticized poor parents for making them: in villages in Uttar Pradesh, he wrote, poor parents’ response to nonfunctioning public schools was “to send their sons” to study in “private schools.” He’d used this comment to castigate parents’ misguided preferences for educating their boys, rather than their girls. But as I read it, it seemed that he’d missed the most important point;
in passing only
, he’d thrown out a comment about the poor using private schools, only to ignore it in his later discussion! How odd was that?

The significance of this evidence was lost entirely in his subsequent comments and conclusions. Only a few pages later, he supported concerns about growing educational inequality with the warning of a “distinguished educationist” that public education “is crumbling everywhere because proliferation of private schooling has siphoned off the concern of the educated and vocal middle class.” Again, surely it wasn’t the “educated and vocal middle classes” that were the “problem,” but from the evidence he’d already given, the less educated and politically inarticulate masses? It’s as if a 500-pound gorilla was in his living room, but he didn’t want to offend anyone by mentioning it. Why didn’t he see the significance of his own evidence? Or was I the one who was reading too much into these passing references?

A major source of Sen’s evidence was the
Public Report on Basic Education
(the PROBE Report), a detailed survey of educational provision in four northern Indian states. Sajitha Bashir from the World Bank had also given me a copy of it. I read it with growing amazement. It too was clear that “even among poor families and disadvantaged communities, one finds parents who make great sacrifices to send some or all of their children to private schools, so disillusioned are they with government schools.”
²
Here was another source pointing to the phenomenon of private schools for the poor—why weren’t they better known then? The PROBE team’s findings on the quality of public schools were even more startling. When their researchers had called unannounced on a large random sample of government schools,
in only half
was there any “teaching activity” at all! In fully
one-third
, the principal was absent. The report gave touching examples of parents who were struggling against the odds to keep children in school, but whose children were clearly learning next to nothing. Children’s work was “at best casually checked.” The team reported “several cases of irresponsible teachers keeping a school closed or non-functional for several months at a time”; one school “where the teacher was drunk”; another where the principal got the children to do his domestic chores, “including looking after the baby”; several cases of “teachers sleeping at school”; and one principal who went to school only “once a week . . . and so on down the line.” The team observed that in the government schools, “generally, teaching activity has been reduced to a minimum, in terms of both time and effort.” Importantly, “this pattern is not confined to a minority of irresponsible teachers—it has become a way of life in the profession.” But they did not observe such problems in the private schools serving the poor. When their researchers called unannounced on their random sample of private unaided (that is, receiving no government funding) schools in the villages, “feverish classroom activity” was always taking place.

So what was the secret of success in these private schools for the poor? The report was very clear: “In a private school, the teachers are
accountable
to the manager (who can fire them), and, through him or her, to the parents (who can withdraw their children). In a government school, the chain of accountability is much weaker, as teachers have a permanent job with salaries and promotions unrelated to performance. This contrast is perceived with crystal clarity by the vast majority of parents.”
³
Accountability was also the factor highlighted by Amartya Sen. Low teaching standards “reflect an endemic lack of accountability in the schooling system.”
⁴

Other books that I was pointed to offered the same peculiar sense that something significant was being unaccountably downplayed. I read the summaries at the beginning and end of
The Oxfam Education Report
, a standard textbook for development educationalists, and again I found only the accepted wisdom that governments and international agencies must meet the educational needs of the poor. The introduction states that there is an educational crisis because governments and international agencies have broken their promises “to provide free and compulsory basic education.”
⁵
Then in the conclusion, I read that there is hope, but only if countries, rich and poor alike, renew their commitment to “free and compulsory education.” As long as national governments spend more, and richer countries contribute billions more in aid per year, then we can achieve universal primary education by 2015. There is nothing exceptional about that, I thought as I read.

But then again, hidden away in a chapter titled “National Barriers to Basic Education,” was the extraordinary (but downplayed) observation: “The notion that private schools are servicing the needs of a small minority of wealthy parents is misplaced. . . . It is interesting to note that a lower-cost private sector has emerged to meet the demands of poor households.” Indeed, there is “a growing market for private education among poor households.” The author of the report, Kevin Watkins, pointed to research indicating large proportions of poor children enrolled in private schools and commented, “Such findings indicate that private education is a far more pervasive fact of life than is often recognised.” I put the book down and thought, that’s unexpected, isn’t it? Something as surprising as large numbers of the poor using private schools is surely worthy of comment in the conclusions, isn’t it? Not a bit. The fact that the poor are helping themselves in this way was deemed unworthy of further mention in the introduction or conclusions. It was all a nonissue as far as the
Oxfam Education Report
was concerned.

The consensus on this surprising phenomenon, coupled with the consensus that it lacked any real significance, struck me as incredible after my first visit to Hyderabad. That poor parents in some of the most destitute places on this planet are flocking to private schools because public schools are inadequate and unaccountable seemed to me to be hugely significant territory for development experts to concede. The more I read of this evidence, the more it appeared that development experts were missing an obvious conclusion: If we wish to reach the “education for all” target of universal quality primary education by 2015, as agreed to by governments and nongovernmental organizations in 2000, surely we should be looking to the private sector to play a significant role, given the clear importance of its role already? Couldn’t we be trumpeting parents’ choices, rather than simply ignoring what they were doing?

Curiously—at least to me—this was
not
a conclusion reached by any of the development experts. The
Oxfam Education Report
was typical. Let me repeat: it was quite explicit that private schools for the poor were emerging in huge numbers and that these schools were more accountable to parents than government schools for the poor. Notwithstanding any of this, its position was that “there is no alternative” but blanket
public
provision to reach education for all. The PROBE Report also showed that private schools existed and were doing a much better job than government schools, but it nevertheless concluded that we must not be misled into thinking that there is a “soft option” of entrusting elementary education to private schools. It conceded that, although it had painted a “relatively rosy” picture of the private sector, where there was a “high level of classroom activity . . . better utilisation of facilities, greater attention to young children, responsiveness of teachers to parental complaints,” this definitely did
not
mean that private education was an answer to the problem of providing education for all.

Why not? For the past eight years, I have devoted myself to exploring this conundrum that something the poor were doing for themselves seemed to be systematically ignored by development experts and those with power and influence in these areas. Inspired by my first encounters with private schools for the poor in Hyderabad and my sense that the people working within them did not resemble the caricatures painted by development experts, I realized that I had to do some research for myself. I acquired a modest grant from the British education company CfBT for a small-scale project in the slums of Hyderabad, investigating 15 schools to find out more about their educational and business models. It was indicative, but couldn’t really answer any of the challenging questions, and I couldn’t convince people like Sajitha Bashir at the World Bank that I was really on to something. Fortunately, Jack Maas of the International Finance Corporation gave me additional consultancies in a range of developing countries; now when I visited a country, I took time off from my evaluation of posh private schools and colleges whenever I could and went into poorer areas to see if I could find the same thing I’d witnessed in Hyderabad.

In Ghana, taking time away from evaluating a proposed computer training franchise, I met the elderly but sprightly Mr. A. K. De Youngster, who looked on with pride as the children in De Youngster’s International School began their day with a hearty rendition of “How Great Thou Art,” in 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, opened his doors after pleas from township folk, unhappy even then that public schools “were not doing their level best” for their children. When I met him, 22 years later, he had four branches to his school, with 3,400 children, charging fees of around $50 per term, affordable for many of the poor. And for those who couldn’t afford it, he offered free scholarships. Seated in his office beneath a rickety fan that blew the sweat across his forehead, he chuckled as he told me that at age seven he had written to President Eisenhower from his village in West Ghana asking for help with his studies. “The Americans wouldn’t help me,” he smiled, “so I learned to help myself.”

And I flew to Somaliland, the bit of northwestern Somalia that has declared independence from that troubled state but is recognized by no international agency. In stark contrast to my first trip to India, I traveled from Dubai in a 1950s’ vintage battered Russian snub-nosed, four-propeller plane, which had to stop to refuel in Aden. Outside the battle-scarred town of Boroma, a city of 100,000 souls on the road to the Ethiopian Highlands, I met with Professor Suleyman, the vice chancellor of Amoud University, the first private university in Somaliland. Boroma had no water supply (donkey carts delivered water in leaking jerry cans), no paved roads, no street-lights, and apparently no way to dispose of the numerous burned-out tanks left over from its recent civil war. But it did have two private schools for every public school.

From the top of a rocky hill, Professor Suleyman pointed out the location of each private school in the town below. He told me: “The governor asked me, ‘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 continued, “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 1,060 students, charging monthly fees of 12,000 Somaliland shillings, about $5. The owner told me that 165 of the students attended for free, the poor again subsidizing the poorest.

These were all useful insights into something that seemed remarkable to me happening around the world, but I needed more evidence. I needed to do a larger, global study to explore the nature and extent of private schools for the poor. Who would possibly be interested in funding this work? I submitted proposals to the international aid agencies and was turned down. Then I got lucky. I was to present the results of my small-scale Hyderabad research at a conference in Goa, India. Present was Charles (“Chuck”) Harper, senior vice president of the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that gave most of its grants for research on the overlap between science and religion. But, it turned out, it was also interested in exploring “free-market solutions to poverty.” The bad news, I realized with a sinking feeling, was that Chuck would be leaving before my talk. So one morning, I cornered him, told him as much as I could about my findings in the slums of Hyderabad and about the tantalizing glimpses I’d had elsewhere. I told him that I thought I might be onto something interesting and said, why don’t we go out into the poorer areas of Goa, and you’ll see it for yourself. It was a big risk: I’d never been out to the poorer areas of Goa. Perhaps what I’d found in Hyderabad wouldn’t exist elsewhere in India? Perhaps Sajitha Bashir of the World Bank was right about private schools for the poor being only localized in India? We hired a car, skipped the morning’s lectures, and drove. We came upon a group of slender women in dowdy saris carrying heavy loads on their heads as they worked on road improvements. “Where do you send your children to school?” we asked. They didn’t understand a word we said. We drove on, off the main road and into a little village: I needn’t have worried. In front of us was a private school of the sort I’d described. Then we found another, and another. Driving back to the plush hotel where the conference was based, Chuck told me that I should submit a proposal to the foundation, and it would receive a sympathetic hearing.