The Beautiful Tree (28 page)

Meeting at the end of the day, watching the autorickshaws pull up and researchers and their boxes of papers pile out, I felt incredibly relieved and satisfied that all had gone, more or less, as planned. And that we were beginning to accumulate data that would help us answer the questions everyone had about the quality of private schools. For three days we carried on like this. And then for months afterward, the tests were sorted and sent away for marking, the questionnaires coded and entered into spreadsheets, and the data analyzed.

Altogether, my teams tested 24,000 children. We started in India and moved on to Nigeria, then Ghana, then back to India, then on to rural China (I’ll discuss the Chinese case separately). What did we find?

It turns out that poor parents are not “ignoramuses.” The major research effort described above had been required to gain data on pupils’ achievement—something that is considered essential before comparative judgments can be made between public and private schools. But in fact, the evidence already accumulated during the first part of the study suggested pretty strongly that parents knew they were onto something when they chose private over government schools. For when my teams were conducting the surveys that provided the evidence of the nature and extent of private education (discussed in Chapter 3), they asked to visit one specified primary school classroom (fourth or fifth grade, depending on the country). They called on the classroom only when teachers should have been teaching (that is, waiting until any breaks, sports periods, or assemblies were over before their visit). They noted what the teacher was doing, or if he or she was absent. They also noted what facilities were available in the classroom and around the school. And the data collected also told us something about the pupil-teacher ratio. To this evidence, I was now in a position to add data on the relative achievement of pupils in public and private schools.

On all the indicators explored, government schools, in general, performed worse than both recognized and unrecognized private schools—and remember, unrecognized schools where the ones particularly criticized by development experts:

That is, the research showed that private schools were not only more effective but also more cost efficient than the public schools.

As the results came in and were analyzed, and I realized what they were showing, I began to sense that I was onto something extremely important. Early in my journey, I’d been met with denial from those in government and many development experts that private schools for the poor even existed. The evidence my teams had accumulated—and evidence from others now working in this area—showed beyond doubt that they were there, and in fact were serving a majority of schoolchildren in poor areas. Now no one could deny their existence. But development experts were still unimpressed: They were adamant that these private schools, especially the unrecognized schools, were fly-by-nights, run by unscrupulous businesspeople intent on ripping off the poor. And the poor, well they were ignoramuses (but don’t let’s use that word) for letting themselves be so hoodwinked. The quality of educational provision in these private schools was suspect, to say the least. You could see for yourself how bad it all was in the low-cost private schools, just by seeing the poor-quality infrastructure and by knowing that teachers were untrained and underpaid.

Well, that was not at all what the results showed. The results seemed to indicate pretty categorically that the development experts didn’t have a leg to stand on. It became clearer and clearer that poor parents were keen education consumers when they chose private over public schools.

There’s a big debate in the West about whether class size matters.
¹
Whatever may be true in the United States or United Kingdom, where class sizes are already relatively small, any government intervention—hugely expensive interventions at that—would lead only to small reductions in these already small classrooms. But in developing countries, it may be different. Certainly, poor parents appear to see things differently. One of the major reasons, parents have told me, they send their children to private schools is that classes in public schools are simply too big. Parents simply believe that teachers won’t be able to teach
their
children; they worry their children will get lost in such large classes. Other things being equal, for poor parents class size appears to be a key factor in their choice of private schools.

And my researchers found in every case, average class sizes were smaller in private schools than in public schools (see
Figure 1
). In Delhi, the pupil-teacher ratio was
three times higher
in government than private unrecognized classes. In Hyderabad and Mahbubnagar, government class sizes were nearly
twice as large
as those in private unrecognized schools. In Ga, Ghana, government class sizes were over twice as large as those in private unrecognized schools. In Lagos State, Nigeria, they were one and a half times larger.

Calling unannounced on primary school classes, my researchers found in all cases that teaching commitment was highest in the recognized private schools, followed closely by unrecognized private schools. In all cases, it was lowest in the government schools:

Language is a major issue in Indian education. Mother-tongue teaching is the prescription in government primary schools, usually up to fifth grade. While English was made an official language in India in 1967, alongside Hindi, each state also has its own official language—in Andhra Pradesh, it is Telugu—and each state has “clamoured to prioritize and preserve its own language in state schools.”
²
But then in the poor areas of Hyderabad that we researched, the majority of families are Muslim, hence Urdu-speaking. Each of these languages has a different script. This means that in public schools in Andhra Pradesh, young children are taught in either Telugu or Urdu and must learn both languages, as well as Hindi. English was not usually introduced until about fifth grade, although government schools in Andhra Pradesh have recently started teaching it in first grade. But poor parents told me that they wanted their children to be proficient in English, which they perceived to be the international language, the language that would help their children get ahead in business and commerce and lift their families out of poverty. And they felt that English-medium schools (those that teach all subjects in English) were the way to do this. An important reason, they told me, for choosing private schools was that they were English medium. Private schools, they said, provided what they wanted rather than what the government said they should have.

In our research, we found that private schools were much more likely to be English medium than government schools. In Andhra Pradesh, India, they were in the majority, even in rural areas: In Hyderabad, 88 percent of recognized and 80 percent of unrecognized private unaided schools reported they were English medium, compared with fewer than 1 percent of government schools. The majority of government schools (73 percent) were Urdu medium. In Delhi, nearly half (47 percent) the recognized private unaided schools were English medium, whereas 21 percent of unrecognized private unaided schools were English medium. Many of the private unrecognized schools, however, provided both Hindi- and English-medium streams (34 percent). Only 3 percent of government schools were English medium, the majority being Hindi medium (80 percent). Even in rural Mahbubnagar, well over half the recognized (51 percent) and unrecognized (57 percent) private unaided schools reported they were English medium or had two streams, one of which was English, compared with fewer than 1 percent of government schools.

So private school teachers are more committed than their government counterparts; class sizes are smaller; and private schools provide poor parents with what they view as a preferred route out of poverty. But what of the buildings and facilities within the schools? What of trained teachers? Clearly, they are what most trouble the development experts and government officials who castigate the private schools for their low quality. One such troubled expert is Professor Keith Lewin of the University of Sussex, whom the BBC interviewed for the film we made in Nigeria. Sitting comfortably in his London flat, Indian icons on the mantelpiece behind him, he was adamant that private schools for the poor were of low quality and not part of any educational solution: “There is a
hidden curriculum
in all these places,” he said. “If there are no latrines, if there is no clean running water in the school, it tells you something about the attitude of the management of that school and the motivation of the people that run it.”

I put this to a father who sent his child to Ken Ade Private School in the shantytown of Makoko. He was angry. The gist of what he said went like this: “Our homes don’t have water, we don’t have toilets either! The school buildings are much better than our homes. Why is he insulting us like this?” The conditions of the school simply reflect—no, are an improvement on—normal life in Makoko. So why do people like Professor Lewin suggest that only schools that are up to his Western standards are acceptable? That’s not what parents believe.

In any case, comparing provision in the budgets of private schools with that in government schools, the reality is
the exact opposite
of Professor Lewin’s insinuations. My researchers collected data on a range of 14 quality inputs to schools. On only
one input
—the provision of playgrounds—were government schools superior across the different studies. What might this say, I wonder, about the “attitude” and “motivation” of the government authorities and their development partners? It’s true also that in Ghana, Nigeria, and Andhra Pradesh, India, aid agencies, including DfID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the European Union, had recently been on a spending spree in the government schools, refurbishing them, sometimes providing entirely new schools, and equipping them with luxury goods like televisions. So private schools were not operating on a level playing field. No wealthy outside agencies were assisting them. Even so, often they do better.

My research teams looked at a range of inputs that could reasonably be viewed as proxies for quality. First, there were those related to the health and hygiene of students: drinking water, toilets for children, and separate toilets for boys and girls. Second were those concerning the comfort and safety of children: that is,
pucca
, proper, not temporary, buildings; desks; chairs; electricity; fans; and a playground. Third, there were those that showed some investment by the school authorities in learning facilities: blackboards, libraries, tape recorders, computers, and televisions.

In
the vast majority of cases in all areas
, both types of private schools, unrecognized and recognized, were either superior to government schools in providing these inputs, or there was no significant difference between school types. In Hyderabad, for instance, this was true of
all
indicators. In Delhi, it was true of 10 out of 13; in Mahbubnagar and Lagos State, 11 out of 13; and in Ga, 10 out of 14.