So how are the world’s poorest people educating themselves? The answer is shocking in its simplicity: by saying “no thanks” to state- and NGO-funded and -run schools and founding their own. “[W]hile on a sightseeing excursion to [Hyderabad, India’s] teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. ‘Why,’ he wondered, ‘had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?’”
In the United States we often hear a perplexing connection made between a school’s performance and the condition of its facilities. Recall the case of Ty’Sheoma Bethea, related by Mark Steyn in this recent piece, who wrote to President Obama “to ask him to do something about the peeling paint in her classroom. He read the letter out approvingly in a televised address to Congress.” The children Tooley studied, in places poorer than most Americans could dream of, don’t seem to have had stopped to worry about their own disadvantages:When he related his Hyderabad discovery at the World Bank office in Delhi, for example, one staffer “launched into a tirade”: such private schools, she said, were ramshackle and shoddy; they ripped off the poor by charging money for worthless instruction; their owners were motivated solely by profits; and their teachers were unqualified, unskilled, and ineffective.
Her sentiments jibed with the larger development community’s notions about private schools for the poor but not with what Tooley saw in the slums of Hyderabad, where he returned several times to visit schools, observe classes, and chat with students, parents, teachers, and owners. The schools’ physical structures were indeed mostly ramshackle, but they were assembled no worse (and often far better) than the homes of the neighborhood children who learned in them. The owners seemed responsible and often caring, the teachers engaged and capable. And the parents Tooley met were adamant that the tuition they paid—between $1 and $2 per child, per month—was money well spent. They would never send their kids to the local public schools, they said, where facilities were fancier but teachers were truant.
It’s difficult in light of Tooley’s findings to believe that education has failed for lack of computers or state-of-the-art science labs or fresh coats of Benjamin Moore eggshell. “One cannot help but think,” writes the reviewer, Liam Julian, “that Tooley has provided the rudimentary outline of how education can be brought to many more millions of the world’s poorest.” Maybe we can learn something from them, too.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).
