Private Schools for the Poor?

The cause of much of the developing world's problems is a lack of human capital. Aid agencies and international groups therefore call for more spending on public schools, without wondering if this cash infusion actually achieves any meaningful change. Is there a better way? 

Last week on City Journal's website, Liam Julian reviewed James Tooley's The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. The book discusses the millions of poor people around the world who prefer to send their children to private schools, as opposed to government schools were teachers are often truant. Julian writes, 

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).

As goes Delhi, so apparently go Hyderabad, Ghana, Nigeria, and China: private-school students drastically outperformed their public-school peers in every location.

Comments

[dog collar]

It's sad that a good education isn't something offered equally to all children regardless of financial status of the family. Children are the future of the world and should all be given as much advantage as possible, without regard to economics.

[Charles C. Johnson]

Obviously, it's tragic. But it's also tragic that people don't live forever, that fathers sometimes bury sons, etc. There are many, many things that are sad.

The question is how do we design institutions that recognize the tragic and yet still work to maximize human welfare. The current attempts to have foreign aid money roll in and try to spend, spend, spend up the educational standards hasn't worked and cannot work for the simple reason that markets are a better allocator and revealer of worth than government quotas.

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