The Beautiful Tree (13 page)

 

Table 2.
SCHOOL FEES AND AFFORDABILITY, FOURTH GRADE

SOURCE: Author’s own data.

Girls made up about half of all enrollments in the private schools in both African studies—apparently private schools were not biased against girls, nor did poor parents seem to prefer to send only their boys to private school. Private schools, both recognized and unrecognized, were no different from government schools in gender enrollment. In India, it was slightly more complicated. In Hyderabad, for instance, there were roughly equal numbers of boys and girls in both recognized and unrecognized private schools, again suggesting gender equality. However, there were more girls than boys in government schools (57 percent vis-à-vis 43 percent)—and hence, more girls than boys in school overall. That is, although private schools showed gender equality, it seemed that, if you were a boy
in school,
you were more likely to attend a private school than a government school—it’s just that more boys than girls were not in school at all.

Certainly, the private schools were not “fly-by-nights” either, as some critics contended, out to rip off the poor. In Ga, Ghana, we found the average opening date for a private unrecognized school was 1998—making the average school some 6 years old at the time of the census. For private recognized schools, the average year of establishment was 1995. In Hyderabad, the average year of establishment for unrecognized private unaided schools was 1996 (7 years old at the time of the survey in 2003), whereas recognized schools were on average established 10 years earlier, in 1986. In Lagos State, the equivalent figures were 1997 and 1991, respectively.

And the vast majority of the private schools my teams had found were run as businesses: In Ga, 82 percent of registered and 93 percent of unregistered schools reported they were owned and managed by one or more proprietors. In the Nigerian study, the figures were 92 percent of registered and 87 percent of unregistered private schools. The remaining small minority were run by charities or religious groups (churches and mosques). In Hyderabad, the figures were almost identical: 82 percent of recognized and 91 percent of unrecognized private unaided schools reported that they received no outside funding and totally depended on tuition for their income.

Finally, the schools were affordable to poor parents. In absolute terms, we found the fees to be very low. In Africa, private schools usually charge fees by the term—that is, three times a year. Translating these into monthly equivalents, the average fourth-grade primary fees ranged from around $3.30 in the unregistered schools of Ga to roughly $7.00 in the registered schools of Lagos State. Crucially, these fees are affordable to poor parents. In Hyderabad, India, average fees for fourth-grade primary students were even lower, at around $1.63 per month in unrecognized and $2.15 per month in recognized private schools. That is, the average fourth-grade fees at an unrecognized private school ranged between 4 percent and 6 percent of the monthly minimum wage. In recognized schools, they ranged from 6 percent to 11 percent of the minimum wage. In Africa, they were slightly higher, ranging from around 12 percent to 20 percent of minimum wages. But these figures are slightly misleading—they are higher because we had to use minimum wages set for Ghana and Nigeria as a whole, whereas wages are higher in the urban and periurban areas of the cities. Looking at typical low wages in the places we were researching, we also found that monthly school fees were typically 5 to 10 percent of what the breadwinner earned in a month.

I presented these facts and figures from the three studies to the Accra conference. And to put a human face on these bare statistics, I invited several proprietors of private schools serving poor communities in Ghana—including Theophilus Quaye from Supreme Academy in Bortianor—who gave presentations on their schools, their motivations for establishing them, and their successes and obstacles.

The Honourable Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu by now had been moved from the Ministry of Education to Finance, the number two position in government, and was busy on an anti-corruption drive, featured every day in the
Daily Graphic
during my visit. His replacement at the Ministry of Education, the Honourable Yaw Osafo-Maafo, seemed cautiously interested in what we’d found. He couldn’t attend the conference, but sent his apologies and a highly positive speech, given by one of his deputies, highlighting the existence of private schools for the poor and their potential role in education for all. His deputy told me at lunchtime that she couldn’t believe it when she’d been asked to give the speech, because she thought that “private schools” and “the poor” didn’t belong in the same sentence. “I’ve had my eyes opened,” she said.

The man in charge of education at DfID this time was an erstwhile colleague of mine from England, Don Taylor. I’d worked with him while at the University of Manchester, from where he’d taken early retirement to work as education adviser to DfID, first in Abuja, Nigeria, and now in Accra, Ghana. Don had attended the conference and had given a presentation himself. He’s not against private schools’ having a role in “education for all” as such, he tells the audience. (Indeed, it transpires that his wife is the director of studies at a private school in Roman Ridge, a posh area of Accra.) But he thinks that it’s the middle classes who should be encouraged to use private education, so that government and aid funds can be redirected from richer to poorer, so that the poor can benefit from more investment in public schools.

The day after the conference, I met him at noon, and he took me from the plush DfID offices, in one of DfID’s chauffeur-driven, brand-new air-conditioned Toyota four-by-fours, to lunch at the Ivy, a tony air-conditioned café, frequented mainly by Europeans—possibly aid workers and the like. One could almost imagine oneself not in West Africa at all. He had a brie-and-tomato sandwich; I had chicken and rice. The odd thing about meeting government aid representatives in countries like Ghana is that they’re not at all afraid to criticize the waste and inefficiency of their host government. Indeed, it seems that nothing is more important to share with you. But then as soon as you press them on the alternatives, like a greater role for private education, it’s as if all they’ve said is irrelevant. There is no alternative, they repeat, to what the government is doing. It only has to be done better, with more aid. Don, it appears, was no exception.

He told me that DfID now gives Ghana more than £15 million (around $28.5 million) per year in education aid—not including Don’s salary and office expenses, which come under the general administrative budget. He tells me of the huge problems of teacher recruitment, exacerbated by the arrangement whereby a teacher can attend the University of Education, Winneba, and earn the teacher-training certificate, at government expense, but is obliged to work in schools for only two years before becoming eligible to study for a degree at the University of Ghana, Legon, or other universities, again at government expense for another three years. Teachers obtain these degrees and then leave education altogether, or even leave the country to work elsewhere. It was a huge problem, said Don, that led to teacher shortages, all manufactured by this combined government and aid generosity.

Then he told me of the new funding scheme that was part of the gradual introduction of free primary education around the country. At 30,000 cedis ($3.30) per year per child, it was designed to replace the similar amount that parents paid in school fees at the government schools. Soon, no school would be permitted to charge parents
anything,
everything from parent-teacher association fees, books, exam papers, and so forth would soon be provided free of charge. “So then we really will have free primary education,” he said, proudly. I didn’t probe him on why it had to be for the rich as well as the poor. But in any case, he volunteered the observation that it wasn’t working at all well in the pilot areas. Many public schools were now short of money because in truth, public school fees were usually higher than 30,000 cedis per year, so the per pupil grant didn’t fully replace what parents were previously willing to pay. Some public schools were even saying, Don laughed, that they wanted to become private schools, so that they could charge fees again.

And he told me how two-thirds of all government employees, some 230,000 people, worked for the Ghana Education Service, which brought huge bureaucratic inefficiencies. Moreover, there were problems of imbalances in education, with spending tilted toward higher education and the rich, not the poor.

Problems, problems, problems with public education. So I cautiously pressed him on what he’d heard reported at the conference about the ubiquity of private schools for the poor in Ghana and their potential role in helping the poor. Why couldn’t DfID channel some of its huge aid budget toward these private schools, I asked him: perhaps it could finance a revolving loan fund to help schools like Supreme Academy repair its roof? He chose his words carefully. Yes, I had made quite a persuasive case about the private schools, schools that he hadn’t realized existed. Yes, they were in rural as well as urban areas. Yes, they seemed to be doing a good job. But there could be no place for aid funds for them because they were proprietor driven: “We can’t plough aid money into for-profit businesses.” And that was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned.

I mused on how the denial seemed to have moved on since I first visited Ghana to do the research. The goalposts had shifted. Now the denial was not about the existence of private schools for the poor—you couldn’t get away with that, given the mounting evidence. Now the denial was about their
significance,
and about their role. They couldn’t be part of any “education for all” strategy because they were for-profit. Public education can be the only vehicle for international assistance.

Overnight, I flew out of Ghana. As I landed in Amsterdam to wait for my connection to Newcastle, I knew that another school day was beginning in Bortianor. Mary, Victoria, and the hundreds of other children at the private schools were busy by now with their schoolwork. Their classes were small enough for them to get individual attention from their teachers, who lived in the village or its vicinity and knew their charges’ hopes and difficulties intimately. But they were studying in a building that would be flooded by the rains again in a day or two’s time. But no aid could be made available to help, not even through loans, because the proprietors were motivated, among other things, by profit—profit that seemed wholly beneficial as far as Victoria’s parents were concerned because it ensured that the proprietor would keep an eye on his teachers. Meanwhile, in the government school, I guess that children were awaiting the arrival of their teachers from the plusher suburbs of Accra, caught in the snarled traffic on the Cape Coast highway, reluctant conscripts to the poor fishing village. No matter, the children could patiently wait, playing on the swings and roundabouts thoughtfully provided by their American donors.

5. The Logically Impossible, China

In China, I met the most graphic instance of denial of the existence of private schools for the poor—a denial so strong that I thought I had finally met my match. I was invited to speak at an international conference on globalization and private education at Beijing Normal University in April 2004. I spoke about my findings in other countries, huge numbers of private schools for the poor in India, Nigeria, and Ghana, and tentatively wondered aloud if similar schools existed here, in China. My hosts were polite, didn’t want me to lose face, and were certainly interested in what was happening in other, poor countries. But their response was clear enough. They were interested in private education because it served the well-off and could help in China’s technological and economic boom. Not only were they uninterested in private schools for the poor, they were adamant that they did not exist in China. Indeed, it seemed almost insulting to compare China with poor countries, my hosts implied. I could see why whenever I looked around Beijing, with its burgeoning sky-scrapers and multilane highways everywhere—it looked much richer than London, for instance. So how dare I suggest that this rich state couldn’t provide for its poor, educationally?

“In China,” Dr. Philip Hou, a sympathetic academic from the University of Hong Kong, told me over noodles and beer one evening, “there is the Confucian ethic, so government schoolteachers work harder than in other, poorer countries. There is no problem with absenteeism as in the other countries you’ve looked at.” “Besides,” he continued, when we had relaxed together, “communism has made things different in China: schools, especially primary schools, are organs of state control, and so they won’t be given up lightly by the state.” None of this seemed conducive to the existence of private schools for the poor in China, I agreed. I was nearly persuaded that I had finally met my nemesis in a strong, centralizing state and a keen work ethic.

Nearly persuaded, but he could see that I was not quite convinced. Finally, he told me that his friend Liu Binwen worked for the British aid agency DfID in Gansu province, one of the most impoverished regions of China, in the northwest: “He’ll know exactly what is happening on the ground. He’ll tell you.” He’ll tell me, in other words, that what I am studying elsewhere does not exist in China. I took Liu’s phone number and arranged to meet with him the next day. It turned out that we had met before. We had worked together briefly in 2000 when I was on the International Finance Corporation consultancy project, where I was evaluating a chain of private schools for the middle classes, South Ocean Schools, that was looking for investment; the Chinese government had temporarily assigned him to help me.