The Beautiful Tree (26 page)

Shouldn’t this be viewed as something valuable? Not for Save the Children, it appeared. For in its report, it followed this example with a discussion about accountability, suggesting that it had entirely missed the point: “Whereas proponents for an increased role of the private sector in education point to a greater accountability within such schools, this has not been reflected in the information collected.” From the ensuing discussion, accountability to Save the Children meant, by definition, political accountability. It didn’t find much of this, not surprisingly, in the private schools, and it was blind to any other sort. This view also seemed to be shared by everyone I else I read. A UNICEF report had exactly the same narrow conception of accountability. For UNICEF, it meant things like “parent-teacher associations” and “citizen input into state regulatory institutions,” rather than the kind of accountability hinted at by Jhazeb in Karachi, or by the proprietor of Sunrise Preparatory School in Accra.

I was puzzled by why this alternative accountability—to parents and children—didn’t merit more attention from the development experts. If you are paying fees at a private school, as the parents of Jhazeb in Karachi are doing, then doesn’t that lead to a relationship of accountability with the school owners that makes them interested in what you value and want for your child? How does it do this? Put simply, you can withdraw your patronage, stop paying your fees, and take your child elsewhere if you don’t get what you value. Of course, there are some complications from doing so. For a start, you must find another suitable private school; your child might be quite settled in the current school so you’ll have to weigh the benefits of changing schools against the costs of not changing. And school owners know that. But above all, school owners know that you can move your child, that you have the right to leave, and so will, other things being equal, strive to ensure that you don’t. Otherwise, they lose income. And if enough children leave, they go out of business.

Intriguingly, some development experts did seem clear that this kind of accountability—market accountability—was effective for the poor in numerous areas of their lives. The World Bank called it the “short route” to accountability, to be contrasted unfavorably when it comes to education with the “long route,” where accountability comes only through poor people’s voting for politicians who then may, but usually do not, enforce accountability through the political process. But although they point to its manifest benefits in many areas for the poor, and are clear that it is a much easier form of accountability than political accountability, they are equally as clear that it cannot work for education.

I had to get to the bottom of why the development experts rejected this short route to accountability for education. Usefully, the World Bank’s
World Development Report 2004
spelled out in depth the advantages of market accountability but gave detailed “good reasons” why it was not suitable for education. I carefully tried to follow its argument.

First, it favorably describes how accountability works in a typical market transaction, when, say, a person buys a sandwich: “In buying a sandwich you ask for it (delegation) and pay for it (finance). The sandwich is made for you (performance). You eat the sandwich (which generates relevant information about its quality). And you then choose to buy or not buy a sandwich another day (enforceability), affecting the profits of the seller.” That is, accountability is a relationship between purchaser and provider, with five constituent parts: delegation, finance, performance, information, and enforceability. All these parts are important, it says. If any are missing, “service failure” results.

Now the wonderful thing about a competitive market, the report argues, is that it “automatically” creates accountability between sellers and buyers: “The key information is customer satisfaction, and the key enforceability is the customer’s choice of supplier. Competitive markets have proved a remarkably robust institutional arrangement for meeting individual interests.”

On the face of it, this discussion appeared rather promising. For it would seem to show very neatly the advantages that private schools for the poor have over public schools in terms of accountability. I felt I could easily substitute parents and schools into the World Bank’s formula to show the advantages of this “short route” to accountability quite clearly. In a private schooling market, it would mean this:

You choose a primary school for your child (delegation) and pay the monthly fees (finance). The schooling is delivered to your child (performance). You check on how your child is doing in school, perhaps by noting how her exercise books are marked or how well he speaks English with his friends (which generates relevant information about its quality). And you then choose either to send your child to the school next month or to change schools (enforceability), affecting the income of the school owner.

On the face of it, all the accountability stages appeared to work well. In the public school system, however, the “accountability” system wouldn’t function at all well:

In sending your child to the local public school, you do not choose that school (uncertain delegation) and someone else pays for it (no finance). The schooling is delivered to your child (performance). You check on how your child is doing in school, perhaps by noting how her exercise books are marked or how well he speaks English with his friends (which generates relevant information about its quality). But then your only choice is whether to send your child to school at all or take him or her out of the public education system, neither of which affects the school principal’s or teachers’ pay (lack of enforceability). The only possible route to enforceability is through the political process, but that is slow, cumbersome, and, in practice, ineffective.

So the advantages of the private system of accountability seemed obvious in the schooling example. The most important difference is “enforceability” in the private case, which of course depends in part on the issue of who pays (finance). Because the parents pay fees to the private school, they can enforce quality.

However, the development experts are adamant: Although very effective for most other areas for the poor, this short route to accountability is not possible in education. The only possible route to accountability here is the “long route”—“by clients as citizens influencing policymakers, and policymakers influencing providers.” The short route to market accountability, whatever its virtues, is inapplicable to education. There can be “no direct accountability of the provider to the consumer.” Why not? The World Bank puts the issue thus: “For various good reasons, society has decided that the service will be provided not through a market transaction but through the government taking responsibility.”

And it lists the good reasons—which are good enough for me to address later in a separate chapter. Before that, it’s important to realize that the development experts are very much aware of the huge problems with political accountability. The list of problems is in fact so long that it is really hard to see how it could be surmounted. If there really were no alternative, then obviously one would need to do what one could to attempt to surmount the problems, and the poor would have to be patient. But why neglect the obvious solution of private education for the poor?

The problems with the long route to accountability—political accountability—in education seem enormous, at least for the poor in developing countries. The first problem is what the World Bank calls “voice” failure. This is the failure of the poor to have any influence over what their governments do. They have no “voice” in the political process. The state, controlled by politicians and administrators, “simply does not care about providing services” for the poor. The clear signs are “when too little budget is devoted to services for poor people, and when the budget is allocated to meet political interests.”

But why don’t poor people just vote bad governments out of office? Sometimes, the World Bank says, the electoral system simply doesn’t work—it is itself subject to corruption. But even when it at least works at this basic level, poor people find it hard to influence politicians about the state of public education. Poor people, like everyone else, might vote along ethnic lines, not particularly concerned with evaluating how their chosen politicians have performed with public education. (A joke doing the rounds in India at the time of one election I witnessed was, “In other countries you cast your vote; in India you vote your caste.”) Or they might simply take with a grain of salt politicians’ promises to improve public education services because they know that politicians haven’t delivered in the past. It is far easier simply to vote for candidates who offer to provide “ready cash and jobs” for one’s particular ethnic group, race, or caste.

According to the World Bank, one of the severe problems with using the political process to reform education to benefit the poor is the politicization of education: schooling has become a political battleground, with different groups in society competing for scarce public resources, often with contradictory desires. The elites and middle classes may say they want universal education, but they won’t vote to jeopardize more public spending on higher education, which benefits their own children. Politicians see the public education system as an easy way to provide patronage. And teachers unions, very powerful forces in many developing countries, act in their own interests, to better their wages and conditions of services by enhancing job security and extending holidays—exactly as I’d found in India, even to the extent of adding “casual leave” on top of the already-existing long school holidays—all of which can act against the interests of the poor. These contradictory pressures lead, the World Bank report said, to political inertia and corruption: “Politics generally does not favour reforms that improve services for poor people. Such reforms require upsetting entrenched interests, which have the advantage of inertia, history, organizational capability, and knowing exactly what is at stake. Policymakers and providers are generally more organized, informed, and influential than citizens, particularly poor citizens.”

Using the political process has not been an effective way for the poor to improve public education. But even if solutions can be found, through reforms such as decentralization and improving information, the World Bank points out an even greater state failure, “compact failure.” Here, the state fails to enforce responsibility for public services. It cannot, or will not, motivate management to organize or incentivize its “frontline workers.” So even if poor people could influence politicians and policymakers, the World Bank says, the politicians and policymakers in turn cannot effectively influence the service providers. They can’t or won’t “impose penalties for underperformance.” They won’t fire teachers, for example, so absenteeism goes unpunished. Even if poor people’s political voices are strengthened, at best this might make “policymakers want to improve services for the poor. But they still may not be able to.” Even well-intentioned policymakers “often cannot offer the incentives and do the monitoring to ensure that providers serve the poor.” Problems such as teacher absenteeism and the “rude treatment” of pupils and their parents—the social distance I often encountered whenever I visited government schools—are all symptoms of this problem, reports the World Bank.

To counter absenteeism, corruption, and underperformance in practical terms, the World Bank suggests that the authorities strictly monitor teachers and principals. But again, this only brings further problems, and it is difficult to see how they can be solved—even in theory, let alone in practice. The authorities could try to compensate teachers by results—rewarding those whose children achieve higher grades and punishing those whose children don’t. But teachers unions resist anything so simple, for reasons that the World Bank also seems to find persuasive: “Good teaching is a complex endeavour,” it agrees. Teaching quality can’t be assessed only “on the basis of student scores on a standardized examination,” it reports, because schooling “has many other objectives.” Whether it’s because of this complexity or simply because of teachers union intransigence, it doesn’t matter as far as outcomes are concerned: the result, the World Bank reports, is that “simple proposals of ‘pay for performance’ for individual teachers and principals have rarely proved workable.”

Perhaps governments could move away from such objective measures of student outcomes, and instead move toward subjective measures to judge teachers? Again, the World Bank says, this would only bring additional problems to systems prone to corruption and bad management: “Perhaps good teaching can be assessed subjectively by another trained educator—a head teacher or school principal. But this creates the temptation to play favourites or, worse, to extract payments from teachers for good assessments.” So one must limit the autonomy of school principals and again make them accountable to the authority. One must bring in some “assessment standard” for school principals too: “But all the problems of assessing good teaching also apply to good school heads. Indeed, that is how dysfunctional bureaucracies cascade into a morass of corruption, as upward payments from those at lower levels buy good assignments or ratings from superiors.”

It all seems too difficult to reward good performance. But if one can’t do this, then one must reward everyone the same, so “excellent teachers working in adverse circumstances and those who never show up” all get paid the same salary. Not surprisingly, this only serves to undermine the morale of good teachers, driving them away from teaching altogether. The same is true if one simply rewards all teachers with higher wages—those who are conscientious get the same rewards as those who don’t show up. As I read this report, it all seemed impossibly difficult to overcome. But aren’t all these impossibly difficult problems in public education pretty easy to overcome in private schools?