Private Education for the Poor

Published February 20th, 2007 in Development Aid & Civil Society and Society.

Last week, Christine Bowers noted on the FP Passport blog that “the world’s slums are full of private school kids.” On a similar note, the FT reported in January on how India’s poor are spurning state schools, indicating the complete inability of the state to provide a “traditionally core public service.”

Christine brings to the fore a point made previously - that while the world’s academics discuss ad nauseum if education is better provided by the public sector, the poor have already decided with their meager wallets. And James Tooley seems to have shown that. His studies on education among the poor worldwide earned him an FT award in September 2006. His research of rural schools in Pakistan showed that “the learning gap between rich and poor was dwarfed by that between public and private schools.”

Now, James Tooley has been hired by the Orient Global Foundation, which has incidentally been setup by an Asian investment firm, to put his ideas into practice.

If people spend what little income they have on an expensive private education for their children, versus a free public one, then either the private education is better or at least they believe it is. Clearly, the private sector offers them better service and more accountability. This is probably obvious to any economist, given the private sector offers strong financial incentives for performance. By contrast, the public must rely on social and moral incentives - which can be weak or non-existent. The FT, in a scathing Feb 17 op-ed, says:
Education is not, as has long been believed, too important to be left to the private sector. It is, instead, too important to be left to failing public monopolies.

True. But privatizing education solves only part of the problem - the quality and scale. It does not address affordability - ignoring those that are outside the market, because they lack the purchasing power. The reason education is a “traditionally core public service” is not because we believe the state can provide better education. Rather, it is because we believe it can more equitably distribute education and be the provider of last resort. We will still need that, and a mix of private and public approaches (did I hear vouchers?).
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3 Responses to “Private Education for the Poor”
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1 Alex M Thomas Feb 21st, 2007 at 3:04 am
Dweep, But privatizing education solves only part of the problem - the quality and scale. It does not address affordability - ignoring those that are outside the market, because they lack the purchasing power.” Exactly. Affordability is what the Government enterprises tries to do.
Jayati Ghosh has written about the voucher system in the Frontline. Here is the link.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20070223002410500.htm