The Beautiful Tree (29 page)

For a small number of inputs, government provision was superior to that in private unrecognized schools, but not to that in private recognized schools. In Delhi, this was only true for tape recorders; in Hyderabad, it wasn’t true for any inputs; whereas in Mahbubnagar, it was true for playgrounds and televisions. (Interestingly, a large aid project in rural Andhra Pradesh has provided televisions ostensibly for learning purposes, which might explain their more common presence in government schools. However, the research disappointingly showed that they weren’t actually used for learning but remained in the principal’s office.) In Ga, it was true for proper buildings, desks (the private unrecognized schools usually made do with a combined bench and worktop rather than a desk), playground, and blackboards, whereas in Lagos it was true only for
pucca
buildings.

Finally, in only a tiny proportion of cases (a total of three indicators for the entire sample) were amenities in government schools superior to both types of private schools: in Delhi, separate toilets for boys and girls and playgrounds, and in Lagos, playgrounds. That’s all.

If there is a “hidden curriculum” in schools for the poor, my findings clearly indicate that private schools are not the rogues.

What about teacher training? Government schools are very likely to have more extensively trained and educated teachers than private schools. In Hyderabad, for instance, only around 7 percent of government school teachers lacked a college degree. In the private recognized schools, the figure was nearly 30 percent, whereas in unrecognized schools it was over 40 percent. In Ga, Ghana, around 75 percent of all teachers in private schools (both registered and unregistered) had attended school only until senior secondary (equivalent to 12th grade), compared with only 40 percent of government school teachers. In Lagos State, Nigeria, over 25 percent of teachers in unrecognized private schools were educated to senior secondary, whereas there were no teachers whose education had stopped at this level in the government schools. But when critics dismiss private schools for not having extensively trained teachers, the key reason they do is because they assume the teachers will be less effective. We’ve already seen that these untrained teachers are far more likely to show up and teach than their more heavily trained counterparts in government schools. Does their lack of training make any difference to student achievement—a key indicator of their effectiveness? It turns out that it does not. Private schools again turn out to be superior to government schools.

In all the studies, the same pattern was found for the “raw” mean scores, with private recognized schools achieving the highest, followed by private unrecognized and government schools achieving the lowest scores—except for the sole case of Urdu-language achievement in Hyderabad (see
Figures 2
and
3
).

The results from Delhi were typical. In mathematics, mean scores of children in government schools were 24.5 percent, whereas they were 42.1 percent in private unrecognized schools and 43.9 percent in private recognized. That is, children in unrecognized private schools scored nearly 18 percentage points more in math than children in government schools (a 72 percent advantage!), while children in recognized private schools scored over 19 percentage points more than children in government schools (a 79 percent advantage). In English, the performance difference was much greater (children in unrecognized schools enjoyed a 35 percentage point advantage over their public school counterparts, whereas children in recognized schools scored 41 percentage points more). However, these differences might be expected, given that government schools are not providing what parents want, English medium. (On the other hand, they might
not
be expected, given an oft-repeated criticism that private schools are English medium in name only—that this is just another way they pull the wool over ignorant poor parents’ eyes.

 

Figure 2.
INDIA: RAW SCORES

SOURCE: Author’s own data.

What we found showed that the private schools were in fact educating their children to a much higher English standard than what children might pick up naturally in the local community, through radio, television, and advertisements, for instance—which is perhaps what the tests were measuring in children in government schools.)

But in any case, if more private schools are English medium, we might expect government schools to be superior in achievement in Hindi; the opposite was true. Children in private unrecognized schools achieved on average 22 percentage points more than children in government schools (an 83 percent advantage). In recognized private schools, children scored on average 24 percentage points more (an 89 percent advantage).

In Hyderabad, similar results were found for mathematics and English. However, in Urdu, the results for government and private schools were roughly similar—although private unrecognized schools had the highest average score (30.5 percent), followed by government (29.1 percent); private recognized had the lowest (25.4 percent).

These raw scores are indicative, but not the end of the story—for it may be that there are simply brighter children from slightly wealthier backgrounds (although all parents were of course quite poor) going to private schools, and hence the private schools have an unfair advantage over government schools. In any case, we’ve seen that the private schools have better inputs in general than government schools—so perhaps these also make a difference to attainment? What we need is some way to statistically adjust the data to see what would happen if children with the same characteristics were in government and private schools—and for these schools also to have the same characteristics. Things get rather technical at this point—interested readers can consult the academic papers on my website to explore the range of statistical methods used and the results obtained (
www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest
). But the simple message from all the detailed statistical analyses is that they made no important differences to the “raw” scores above. Controlling for the range of background variables, including education and wealth of parents, students’ IQs, and peer-group effects, the differences were usually slightly reduced but generally still large and still favored both types of private schools in each study. For instance, in Hyderabad, a child attending a private unrecognized school would be predicted to gain 16.1 percentage points more in mathematics than the same child attending a government school. In a private recognized school, the difference in scores would be 17.3 percentage points. In English, the advantages would be even greater—16.9 percentage points more in an unrecognized school and 18.9 percentage points in a recognized school. Interestingly, in Urdu, after controlling for the background variables, there was no statistically significant difference between government and either type of private school.

 

Figure 3.
AFRICA: RAW SCORES

Do the private schools achieve better results because they are better financed? This is what the development experts claim, on those occasions when they acknowledge superior private-sector performance.
The Oxfam Education Report
states it thus: “There is little hard evidence to substantiate the view that private schools systematically outperform public schools
with comparable levels of resourcing
.”
³
And the United Nations Development Programme makes the even stronger claim that “private schools do not systematically outperform public schools with comparable resources.”
⁴

Is either true? In my research, I wasn’t able to obtain detailed information on actual income and expenditure within any type of school—private school managers in general were understandably wary of divulging sensitive financial information to researchers (although I did get figures for case study schools, which I’ll come to later), while government principals said that this information should be obtained from the Ministry of Education, which was not generally forthcoming. However, it was possible to elicit data from the primary school teachers in the random sample on what is, in any case, the most significant element of school budgets—teacher salaries—estimated to make up the vast majority (80 to 96 percent) of all recurring expenditures in government primary schools in developing countries.
⁵

In every case, the same picture began to emerge: government school teachers were paid considerably more than private school teachers—up to seven times more. But government teachers’ higher pay does not in the slightest seem to translate into higher performance (see section on teaching commitment above), nor into higher achievement of children (see previous section on academic performance). But then the development experts might come back and say, OK, it might not lead to better performance, but, clearly, the private school proprietors must be exploiting their staff because they are paid much less than public school teachers. This doesn’t seem to be borne out by discussions with school managers. On the contrary, it seemed that there was a large enough pool of unemployed people to satisfy the demand for jobs. Instead of condemning private schools, perhaps they might be viewed as providing a useful public service by mopping up thousands of college and high school graduates in countries where unemployment is a huge problem among those groups.
⁶
In fact, the much lower wages in private schools are more likely indicative of the public schools’ over
paying
their teachers—that the rates negotiated through union activity within the government-run monopoly school system were in fact much higher than the market rate for teaching.

In every case, private school teachers were paid considerably less than government teachers. The differences for Delhi are shown in
Figure 4
. Here, the average monthly salary for full-time fourth-grade teachers is
seven
times higher in the government schools than in unrecognized private schools. In Delhi, government teachers were paid on average 10,072 rupees (around $224), compared with 1,360 rupees (around $30) in unrecognized private. Government teachers were paid around three times more than teachers in recognized private schools (who received on average 3,627 rupees [or about $81]).

However, class sizes were smallest in unrecognized private and largest in government schools, so computing the unit cost per pupil might give a more valid comparison. In no case did I find, even on this measure (which might, in any case, seem to be excusing the government schools for large class sizes), that the private schools had more resources per pupil than the government schools. In all cases, the unrecognized schools had considerably lower per-pupil expenditures. Public schools in Delhi were spending nearly two and a half times as much per pupil as unrecognized private schools. In all cases apart from Ga, Ghana, the recognized schools also had considerably lower per-pupil teacher costs than the government schools.

 

Figure 4.
AVERAGE MONTHLY TEACHER SALARY AND AVERAGE PER-PUPIL
TEACHER COST

SOURCE: Author’s own data.