Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Slumming It In Private Schools

Here in the United States of America, Americans are constantly bombarded with the message that the failure of students in the public schools is a lack of money, or that if the State did not provide free public education, America would be filled with stupid people.  But is there actually any truth to that?  I do not think so, but the message has been so ingrained into the public conscious, attempts to break from the public education system via charter schools, or school vouchers, are met with the full force of the teachers’ unions opprobrium, including withholding of campaign funds for the candidate of the day.

But there are lessons Americans can learn from some of the poorest of the poor, the slum dwellers.

In slums around the world, from Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya to rural villages in Ghana and China and places in between, Tooley has discovered poor people opening small private schools that offer alternatives to dismal or inaccessible public education. The schools charge only pennies a day, and most also provide scholarships to orphans or children of the indigent. One in five students in the Hyderabad slums, for example, attends a private school on some kind of need-based scholarship. Whether in Kibera (Kenya) or Gansu (China), these schools all seem to boast committed and punctual teachers, efficient and attentive owners, and satisfied parents.

Tooley visited numerous public schools in these far-flung places as well, and they also share certain traits: a dearth of discipline; teacher complacency; and classes in which students sit and chat instead of learning. Development experts readily acknowledge the shortcomings of public schools in less-wealthy nations. But Tooley expresses bafflement at their proposed remedies—more regulation, more money, better teaching training—especially when impoverished communities have already improvised and created their own successful alternatives.

Just how successful? Do pupils in private schools for the poor actually learn more than those in public schools? To find out, Tooley assembled and trained research teams that eventually tested 24,000 fourth-graders from impoverished areas who attended a range of schools—private schools recognized by the local government, private schools not so recognized, and public schools—in India, Nigeria, Ghana, and China. His findings are stunning:

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).

Redistributed money is not the answer.  Privatization is the key to knowledge.

From a City Journal piece titled The Private Schools No One Sees, which is a short review of a book written by James Tooley titled The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, which is indeed worth a read.

Indeed it sounds beautiful.

Posted by John Venlet on 07/01 at 06:24 PM
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