The Beautiful Tree (24 page)

Bringing in a new phrase to describe an old phenomenon struck me as odd. It seemed to be cultural imperialism of the worst kind, I figured, when the language of the poor was not considered good enough to describe their own activities and experiences.

Anyway, looking at nonstate providers in Nigeria, Rose and her coauthor concluded that although the “unapproved” private schools serving the poor had “grown in response to state failure to provide primary schooling which is both accessible and of appropriate quality,” it did not mean that the education offered in the private sector was any good. No, she wrote, the private unapproved schools offered a “low quality of education,” “below a desirable level”; they were “a low cost, low quality substitute” for public education.

OK, these were strong assertions, damning the efforts of all those, like BSE, I had met in Makoko who said they were trying to help their fellow Nigerians. These were powerful accusations, given by a respected university academic and taken on board in good faith by the British government aid agency. So how did she know?

It seemed she didn’t. And she couldn’t possibly know it, given that the DfID commissioned study “derives from interviews with key informants undertaken
over a period of one week
.” The italicized phrase leaped out at me. Can you really make such damning accusations on the basis of one week of interviews? There was at least one point in the study where Rose herself didn’t feel she could: “It was difficult in the time available to assess the quality of service delivered in unapproved schools compared with government schools, but it is evident that the class size is considerably smaller and discipline in the classroom is apparent.” And again: “It was not possible to obtain the perceptions of communities served by these schools. As such, some of the points made
need to be treated with caution, and deserve more in-depth investigation
.” So why then tell us so categorically that the private schools were low quality? The more I read, the more nonplussed I became.

True, she did list a few concrete things she had found. To the usual list of untrained and low-paid teachers, working in, to an outsider, low-quality buildings, was added the complaint that the private school proprietors were motivated by the need “to make a profit.” Almost on its own, this seemed to imply that private unrecognized schools were unlikely to be able to provide “an education of an appropriate standard.” But did Rose similarly believe that the need “to make a profit” meant that her computer manufacturer couldn’t provide a laptop that worked in the field or that the airline that flew her to Nigeria might possibly have dumped her over France, en route from London, in order to save on fuel? It seemed that she was judging the private school proprietors by a different standard. Private school proprietors, she wrote, were “more concerned with making money than the quality of education provided.” Curiously enough, there was a parenthetical qualification: “
other than to the extent that this influences enrolment in their schools
.” But couldn’t she have used this insight in a different way? Instead of damning the private schools, couldn’t it suggest a key motivation for the proprietors to ensure that the quality of education provided was at least high enough to satisfy parents, linking the desire to make a profit with the desire to maintain or raise standards in education? Indeed, Rose also noted, “Proprietors of private schools are concerned about ensuring that they receive a return on their investment, so monitor the teachers closely.” Isn’t that a positive? Isn’t that precisely what poor parents had told me was one of their key reasons for preferring a for-profit private school: the close monitoring of teachers, which was so sadly lacking in the government alternative, where their children were abandoned? None of this seemed to occur to Rose when she came to write her damning conclusions—but then, by her own admission, she had not taken the time to speak with the “communities served by these schools.”

I couldn’t find any other evidence concerning the purported low quality of private schools for the poor. While I found many studies that looked at the relative efficiency and cost-effectiveness of public and private schools—most of which concluded that the private schools were better in both respects, although a couple reached the contrary conclusion, one of which was referred to by Rose—they had focused on the usual type of private school, those serving the better-off, or at most possibly included some of the poorer schools as part of their sample.
⁹
I could find no studies that looked specifically at the relative merits of private and public schools serving the poor.

Reassuringly, I found agreement for my conclusion, at least about the lack of firm evidence.
The Oxfam Education Report
concluded, “Surprisingly, in view of the confident assertions made in some quarters, there is
little hard evidence
to substantiate the view that private schools systematically outperform public schools with comparable levels of resourcing.”
¹⁰
Oddly, although agreeing with me that there was “little hard evidence,” the report was still able to summarize the position, on the same page, that, while “there is no doubting the
appalling standard
of provision in public education systems,” private schools for the poor are of “inferior quality,” offering “a low quality service” that will “restrict children’s future opportunities.” How did the author know this, if there was “little hard evidence”? Never mind, the United Nations Development Programme made the same admission of little evidence alongside an even stronger claim about the relative performance of private and public schools: “Many proponents of private education claim that private schools outperform public ones. . . . But
little evidence
substantiates these claims.
Private schools do not systematically outperform public schools with comparable resources.
”

Reading the development experts, it seemed that their sweeping deprecations of private schools serving the poor were not well founded. They could of course be right, but I’d found no proper evidence that they were. Poor parents were making difficult choices. Could they really be as foolish as these development experts were implying? I had to find out. Reading this kind of material, I knew my research had to look in detail at the relative quality of the education provided in public and private schools for the poor.

But first I needed to address one other mystery in the development experts’ writings. Because the low-cost private schools are of such supposedly low quality, and because their proprietors are driven by the profit motive, the development experts were adamant about something else: the urgent need for regulators to save the poor from unscrupulous providers. As I traveled, I read what these experts said about the apparent need for increased regulation, and it too puzzled me, albeit in a different way.

8. An Inspector Calls

The winding dirt road from Bortianor, the fishing village home of Supreme Academy in Ga, Ghana, meets the main Accra-Cape Coast highway at what locals call the “roadblock.” It’s where the police used to stop all the traffic plying this route, where massive jams built up throughout each day. It’s no longer used; the barrier lies vandalized by the roadside. Now there are mobile police roadblocks, randomly set up anywhere along the route. Traveling back from Bortianor to Accra one day in a beaten-up old taxi, with huge cracks in its windshield, no seat belts, no functioning speedometer, and various other transgressions of the road-safety laws, we encountered one of these mobile roadblocks. As we neared the policeman who was waving us to a halt, my driver took out his license and documents and slipped a 10,000-cedi note (about $1.10) into the back pages. As we stopped, he handed his documents to the policeman, who perfunctorily pocketed the gift, and we were soon on our way. It’s called “flashing.” “Why don’t you flash me some small money?” is a common refrain from officials everywhere in Ghana.

It’s the same in Nigeria, traveling on the Lagos to Ibadan highway, where hulks of burnt-out trucks and cars lie by the road or are strewn across the median strip at disturbingly frequent intervals. The police wave you down—policemen who seem much more menacing than those in Ghana. Perhaps it has something to do with the Russian submachine guns they sport nonchalantly over their shoulders or the rounds of ammunition wrapped across their chests. Whenever I’ve been stopped in this way, the procedure was the same: they ask to see my passport, take it to their little bivouac on the other side of the road, make me walk all the way to meet their boss, and make me wait and wait, exchanging pleasantries about soccer (the captain of the Nigerian national team plays in the English Premier League, and they are always keen to explore my knowledge of this), keeping me waiting; perhaps my driver sorts out their “gratification.”

And it’s in India too. Rushing to take me to a dentist for emergency treatment in Hyderabad (fillings fall out in the most awkward of places), my car slipped through traffic lights while the lights were red. This happens a lot. Unfortunately this time, a motorcycle policeman was behind us and waved us down. My driver sighed and slowly got out, slipping a 500-rupee (about $12) note into his driver’s license.

This kind of low-level corruption among government officials is all-pervasive in the countries where I was traveling. How could the development experts write about regulation of private schools without considering this reality? Was I missing something, or were they?

Their writings were clear enough. One of the reports from Save the Children stressed that “before private sector involvement should be contemplated as a possible policy option,” strong regulations needed to be in place: “Without adequate regulatory capacity, private sector participation in service provision is a matter of concern, because the needs of the poor are [otherwise] unlikely to be met.”
¹
Another report, perhaps realizing that the horse had already bolted, emphasized how this was a grave concern: “The private sector has increased its role in the provision of services spontaneously rather than as a result of government planning,” so has emerged “far beyond the capacity of state control.”

Dr. Rose, too, was concerned with how private schools for the poor could be regulated. She explored the possibility of “lighter regulation to enable the private sector to operate unfettered,” but didn’t find this appealing. Instead, “tighter regulation” to “avoid the continued explosion of low quality private education” was required. For liberalizing regulation “runs the risk of allowing last-chance schools,” her term for private schools for the poor, “to proliferate.” And that was undesirable.

I read a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that took the same, hard line against private schools for the poor: Regulation of “low quality” private education is urgently required, to “protect . . . citizens from exploitation in their quest for access to education.” Without such regulation, the poor will continue to “pay very high costs for poor quality education.” A proper “regulatory framework is fundamental to ensure that children receive . . . a quality education.” The onus must be on the “central State” to “provide and implement a strong regulatory environment.”

These pronouncements baffled me, not because I was against regulation per se: of course not, if regulations could be introduced that really protected the poor, who could be against that? No, they puzzled me because they didn’t gel with my growing experience of how regulations—of anything, not just schools—worked in the countries I was studying. This time, the mystery was why the development experts appeared to be writing in a vacuum, far removed from the reality that always impinges on you wherever you travel and work in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

For there are already strong regulations that govern private education for the poor in all the countries I visited on my journey. And in practice, they work in exactly the same way as with the flashing policeman.

Andhra Pradesh—as do all other Indian states—already has regulations specifying every aspect of what private schools can and cannot do. In a legal bookshop in Koti, Hyderabad, I bought a three-volume tome, V. J. Rao’s
Law of Education in Andhra Pradesh
, which meticulously detailed them all—and more government orders come out monthly, so it’s really difficult to keep abreast of them all. It took me weeks of poring over these volumes to fathom exactly what a private school could and could not do—there are regulations on everything, including teacher qualifications, how dismissed teachers can appeal and to whom, the number of hours a principal must teach, how to advertise teacher vacancies, the necessity of “avoiding unhealthy competition among schools in the locality,” what records should be kept and how, the precise details of how school income should be spent (and that no profits can be made), precise physical requirements for classrooms and playgrounds, teacher-pupil ratios, and the curriculum and syllabuses to be followed.

No private school teacher, the regulations spell out, is allowed to “read any cheap literature relating to sex in the presence of pupils or encourage students to study such cheap literature,” and women teachers “shall wear traditional clothes of non-transparent material consistent with modesty.” No teacher may receive a dowry, nor smoke in the presence of students. Everything is laid out meticulously, right down to the tiniest details of the “Duties of Sweepers,” which reads in full, “They shall maintain the upkeep of the institutions and its premises, namely, laboratory, library, staff rooms, toilets and play ground, etc.”

So many regulations, it’s hard to see how any normal school manager, with more pressing demands on his or her time, could keep up. But severe punishments are laid down for any breach of these rules, punishable with imprisonment for up to three years, plus a fine. But in practice? In practice, all these incredibly detailed regulations are simply ignored. Didn’t the development experts realize this?