The Beautiful Tree (27 page)

One private school proprietor whom I got to know really well was Mohammed Anwar of M. A. Ideal High School in Hyderabad, India. He was one of the first proprietors I met on that, for me, momentous trip to Hyderabad’s slums in January 2000. On a later visit, I discovered that he had installed, at not inconsiderable expense, an admittedly rather primitive closed-circuit television (CCTV) system throughout his school. On his desk was a monitor, and in many classrooms a small video camera. While he worked in his office, he could switch the view to any classroom to see what was happening.

When I saw this, I politely said how nice it was. I really wondered why on earth he had used his scarce resources to do such an idiotic thing. Surely, in a school that charged fees of $2 per month, his scarce surplus could have been put to better use—why not provide computers for the children, or more books? Why waste your money on a gimmick like that! Anwar later became the head of the new Dynamic Federation of Private Schools. I noticed a couple of other proprietors had copied him and installed similar CCTV systems in their schools. And I also saw one later in a rather posh private school elsewhere in the city.

I didn’t think about Anwar’s CCTV again until I was reading the World Bank’s detailed discussion of the problems of state accountability that I’ve outlined above. Suddenly it dawned on me that Anwar had done something that was incredibly rational in his context. His major problem was teacher accountability—and the major difference between his school and the government schools was that the parents expected him to effectively solve this problem. Having an efficient way of keeping an eye his teachers’ activities was his solution. He knew, in his own words, “the Indian teacher mentality.” He knew that teachers’ accountability to him was the key to his accountability to parents. He didn’t learn what to do from any management consultant or course; he worked out for himself the best way forward. And of course it was an appropriate use of his surplus, if he could keep teachers accountable. I’ve never ever heard of a similar thing happening in a public school.

Private school owners, of course, seemed to easily monitor their teachers’ performance on a day-by-day basis. Even without CCTV (and Anwar did this too), they walk around their schools constantly, checking on teachers’ attendance or whether they were teaching. They check on how often children mark their exercise books. They follow up on parents’ complaints, such as a teacher’s absence or a child’s difficulty in grasping a lesson. They can easily reward teachers who perform well, whose children get good grades in public exams for instance. But they can be fair about this, too. In another school in Hyderabad, the school owner uses a simple computer program to monitor the children’s improvement in class. He can see if very low-performing children’s standards are initially raised and can reward this, even if those children still aren’t performing as well as others. But again, the school owner, being closely involved, will know whether a teacher is working with a particularly challenging group of children, and can reward teachers appropriately.

And what incentive do school owners have to reward teachers in this way? They know that good teachers will be snapped up by other private schools, if they think they can get higher salaries elsewhere or believe they are not being appropriately rewarded. And of course, school owners can always be discretionary, in ways that are impossible in the state system. They don’t have to be oppressive “big brothers”—indeed, such oppressors would soon lose teachers to more sensitive, more discretionary proprietors. For example, a private school owner, a benign big brother, might ask a teacher who was absent or not teaching well on a particular day whether there was a problem. If the poor performance was unusual and was due to a bad or sad experience, the school owner wouldn’t fire the teacher; he or she would be satisfied that the teacher’s behavior was not habitual. There are clear incentives for school managers to keep teachers who are generally good and assist them through particularly hard times.

Of course, a good government principal could also do all these things, and good government inspectors could assist them in doing so. The problem, as the World Bank so clearly notes, is how to ensure that principals and inspectors do these things—for it is just an extension of the problem of ensuring that the teachers are accountable in the first place. It simply raises the problem of accountability to a higher level. The chief problem in the government schools is that the principals and inspectors have no incentives to do any of these things. Principals will draw the same salary and same benefits if they sit in their offices reading the newspaper all day—or even if they don’t show up at all—as they would if they meticulously walked the corridors checking on their teachers. Likewise, inspectors get paid the same whether they check up on schools or stay in the relative comfort of their offices.

All I read pinpointed the problem clearly: the incentive structures are all wrong in the public-sector schools. In the private schools, on the other hand, the incentive structures work in the opposite, positive, direction for each school owner. All school owners depend on parents’ using their schools; if parents don’t, the school owners are out of a job. So this invisible hand of the competitive market keeps all school owners on their toes, constantly monitoring the performance of their teachers, without whose high performance school owners will suffer. It’s this invisible hand that is working in the educational market in exactly the same way that it does, as the World Bank points out, in the market for sandwiches.

So what’s the problem with simply accepting that the short route to accountability—the accountability of the competitive market—is also good enough for education? The alternative will always be an uphill struggle at best. At worst, the long route to accountability will never serve the interests of the poor.

Actually, the development experts’ objection to this conclusion was staring me in the face once I’d got this far. My emerging view was that state regulations didn’t matter too much because private schools seemed to be accountable to others—parents—who appeared capable of keeping a watchful eye on what was going on within them. But of course, this brought me squarely back to the development experts’ criticisms about the low quality of the private schools serving the poor. The development experts didn’t appear to trust poor parents’ judgment, so accountability to parents couldn’t possibly be the answer. For what the development experts continually saw was poor parents being hoodwinked into accepting low-quality provision—lower even than the government alternative. Even if they didn’t explicitly call them “ignoramuses,” it was clear that development experts took a pretty dim view of the choices poor parents made for private education.

Were they right? I had to find out.

9. Old Monk, and Young Nuns on Motorbikes

January 26, 2004, Republic Day, India: Exactly four years to the day since I first came to Hyderabad, took an autorickshaw to the Charminar, and discovered for myself private schools for the poor, I was back in Hyderabad, with Pauline Dixon. We were there to train the extended research team that would collect the data to explore the relative quality of the public and private schools in the poor areas of the Old City.

We’d arrived two nights before. There was a power outage in the city, and we sat by candlelight to catch up with the team. The week before, Gomathi, the spirited young woman who had trained as a social worker and had been my team leader in Hyderabad since I first started doing research there, had taken her five colleagues on a team-building trip to Sri Salam, 170 kilometers away by road, where the river Krishna is dammed to harness hydroelectric power. To get there, you travel through the endless miles of dark forest that is the Rajiv Gandhi tiger reserve. Gomathi’s eyes lit up as she told us of how they had sat around a campfire all night, dancing to the car radio, singing songs, playing dumb charades, and telling stories. In the morning, they swam in the lake and visited the temple. “We’re ready now,” Gomathi said.

And by candlelight we had worked, getting ready to train the larger team that would conduct the first round of research that would reveal whether the private schools were really of such low quality as every development expert claimed. Once we’d conducted the tests in Hyderabad, we would move on to other countries to do the same.

For the previous few weeks, Gomathi and her team had crisscrossed the poor areas of Hyderabad, visiting 150 schools that had been randomly selected from the list of nearly 1,000 schools we found in the school census and getting the school managers’ permission to conduct tests. (They carried letters from the secretary of education, Dr. I. V. Subba Rao, to persuade any reluctant government principals and a letter from me for the private schools.) In each school, the team obtained the names of fourth-grade children, from which we selected up to 30 children in each school, who would become our sample for testing. Gomathi and her team then had around 4,000 English, mathematics, Urdu, and IQ tests printed, and 4,000 copies of the pupil and parent questionnaires and around 200 school and teacher questionnaires photocopied and stapled. She visited cookie and cake wholesalers and managed to persuade several to donate entire boxes so that we could give them out to the children participating. And she purchased 4,000 pencils, rulers, erasers, and plastic bags. All were stacked in the offices. Days were spent distributing them in individual bags for the children, the right number for each school and, once a roster of researchers had been worked out, into the right boxes for each researcher to take into the field.

Research is a peculiar business. My erstwhile colleague at Newcastle University Professor Bruce Carrington used to complain that the true “messiness” of research is never apparent when one reads the abridged, polished, and sterilized accounts in academic research journals. He wished researchers would tell it like it really is, so that new recruits would know what they were in for. Bruce, this research was really messy! So many times I nearly lost my cool, aided by sleep deprivation from jet lag, and the heat and humidity, working in offices without air conditioning where the fans worked only intermittently due to power outages. Equally at times, as things went well, I was euphoric, writing in my journal that this experience was the happiest one of my life.

Gomathi, to her credit, was calm throughout. To be fair to me, she was used to the kinds of things that nearly drove me mad with frustration: researchers’ turning up in dribs and drabs for training, some arriving an hour or more late; piles of photocopying that arrived stapled in the wrong order, which then had to be painstakingly unstapled and reassembled; or IQ tests printed on wafer-thin paper of such poor quality (the printer presumably skimping to cut costs) that you could see through to the question on the next page, which meant you couldn’t really make any sense of the questions, and the whole lot had to be scrapped and new tests ordered from a more reliable printer. Some things happened the way they did because of the marvelous manner in which things just fall together in India: I was out of line in complaining to Gomathi when I realized that she hadn’t yet ordered chairs for the training session that was to begin in half an hour. But who would think of ordering chairs more than 30 minutes before they were needed? By the time the session began, young men had arrived with chairs stacked on the open-backed freight autorickshaws and had neatly arranged them in rows in our training room. And some frustrations arose from peculiarities that one perhaps couldn’t have predicted—like the disappointment I felt when the first batch of trial parent questionnaires were returned unanswered after the third question. Did this mean we couldn’t get any information from the parents; was the whole project doomed? Fortunately, one of my researchers realized that question 4 asked for the ages of the parents’ daughters (as well as those of their sons). The offending question was omitted, and in the new trials parents answered all the questions.

On Republic Day and the day after, 45 researchers were trained. Many were graduate students at local universities; the remainder were young nuns who were active in different types of social work in the Old City and also engaged in postgraduate study. Working through that night, Pauline and I consumed a bottle of Old Monk rum, the local brew that is my official tipple whenever I’m in Hyderabad. With the team, everything was readied into boxed sets for the next three days of intensive testing in schools. The first day, 45 researchers assembled at the Charminar bus station at 7:30 a.m., while my team of supervisors distributed their boxes and smoothly sent them off in the buses and autorickshaws to their appointed schools.

Well, that was how it was supposed to be. I couldn’t really work out why, but it took well over an hour of people madly running around, boxes going this way and that, papers being taken out of one and put in another, team members shouting at one another, before each person had the correct box and knew where to go. And not everyone was on time, to say the least. And not all the autorickshaws that we’d painstakingly lined up the day before had turned up; so some of the researchers were ferried away on the back of my team’s motorcycles. I have this image with me still: my researcher driving a Hero Honda 250 cc motorbike with two young nuns seated sidesaddle behind in their light-brown habits, smiling, with the boxes of tests precariously placed on their laps. Waiting for over an hour in the terrible noise and commotion and heat of the bus station had my nerves jangling. Beggars swarmed around me; a young woman carrying a baby stroked my tummy, asking for money, pointing to her mouth and the mouth of her baby. For an hour.

But eventually, everyone had gone, and Pauline and I and the six team leaders separately toured all the schools among us to check that everything was working well, carrying spare papers with us for those that would inevitably be missing, and standing in for any researcher who had not yet turned up.