Easterly’s Dilemma William Easterly begins and ends his latest book, The White Man’s Burden, with the heart-rending story of 10-year-old Amaretch, an Ethiopian girl whose name means “beautiful one”: “Driving out of Addis Ababa,” he passes an “endless line of women and girls . . . marching . . . into the city.”1 Amaretch’s day is spent collecting eucalyptus branches to sell for a pittance in the city market. But she would prefer to go to school if only her parents could afford to send her. Easterly dedicates the book to her, “and to the millions of children like her.” He returns to Amaretch in his concluding sentence: “Could one of you Searchers”—the word he uses to define entrepreneurs of all kinds—“discover a way to put a firewood-laden Ethiopian preteen girl named Amaretch in school?”Read more at location 4397
The Searchers I’ve encountered on my journey—the educational entrepreneurs who’ve set up private schools in places not unlike where Amaretch finds herself—are already finding the way. The accepted wisdom—what everyone knows—is that children like Amaretch need billions more dollars in donor aid to public education before they can gain an education. And the poor must be patient. Although public education is “appalling,” “abysmal,” “a moral outrage,” “a gross violation of human rights”—all epithets commonly used to describe the “government failure” of public education—there is no alternative.Read more at location 4404
Behind the scenes, unassisted by donor involvement or government intervention, the poor have found a silver bullet, or at least the makings of one. The route to the holy grail of the development experts—quality education for all—is there for all to see, if only they’ll look. By themselves, the poor have found their own viable alternative. The solution is easy: send your children to a private school that is accountable to you because you’re paying fees. Perhaps it’s all too easy a solution for the development experts (even taking into account some remaining complexities—such as how literally everyone can access private education, of a desired quality—which I’ll come to in a moment). The poor just did it.Read more at location 4411
Individual entrepreneurs, like Reshma and Anwar in the poor areas of Hyderabad, India, or BSE in Makoko, Nigeria, or Theophilus in Bortianor, Ghana, or Xing, in the remote Gansu mountains of China, or Jane in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, all recognized the desire of poor parents like them to have a decent education, saw the problems of public education, and decided that the best way forward might be to start a school.Read more at location 4419
They took a risk, started small, scoured around for teachers and buildings, experimented with what worked, found that parents liked what they were doing—or changed things around until parents did—and their schools grew and grew. Others saw what they were doing and thought it seemed a neat way to help their community and make a little money as well—sometimesRead more at location 4421
And individual parents—like Victoria’s fisherman father and fishmonger mother—anxiously aware that not all was well for their children in government schools, calculated that they could just about afford the private school, gave it a try, found it worked, and told others about their success.Read more at location 4424
the poor are empowering themselves. En masse, they are abandoning public education. It’s not good enough for their children. And they’ve found a superior alternative. That’s a good news story, isn’t it?Read more at location 4432
Although private schools for the poor, my research has shown, are better than public schools, there is still plenty of room for improvement.Read more at location 4437
there is the genuine information problem currently experienced by parents, an information asymmetry as the economists would put it. How do parents really know whether their school is any good?Read more at location 4438
William Easterly: “Has this book found, after all these years, the right Big Plan to achieve quality education for all? What a breakthrough if I have found such a plan when so many other, much smarter, people than I have tried many different plans over fifty years, and have failed. . . . You can relax; your author has no such delusions of grandeur.Read more at location 4441
some, their parents can’t afford the fees, or can’t afford the opportunity costs of not having their children working for the family purse.Read more at location 4452
Others have parents who aren’t particularly bothered about their child’s education, with the same effect.Read more at location 4454
figures from the aid agencies exaggerate the problem because they don’t take into account children already attending unrecognized private schools, off the state’s radar.Read more at location 4455
In my research, I found that nearly one in five of all students in the slums of Hyderabad receive free or subsidized tuition based on need. The Searchers who’ve created private schools are already reaching children like Amaretch, but not yet Amaretch herself.Read more at location 4459
The solution could be to extend what is occurring within the private schools to create targeted vouchers for the poorest, for those children whose parents don’t care about their education, and, in countries where boys are likely to be favored as I found in India, for girls to use at private schools.Read more at location 4462
Easterly also notes the success of the World Bank Food for Education program in Bangladesh—a rare example, he says, of successful aid—that gave cash payments to parents in return for their allowing their girls to go to school (indeed, he notes precisely, “This is the kind of program that could help Amaretch in Ethiopia”Read more at location 4464
through these targeted vouchers, true, parents have the incentive to send their girls to school, but the schools—presumably public schools—have no incentive to educate the girls once they’re in school.Read more at location 4468
If targeted vouchers are made available for private schools in the right way, they have the potential not only to incentivize parents to send their children to school (and if opportunity costs are a problem, these vouchers could include supplements for the parents themselves, as well as to cover school fees), but also to incentivize school management to do its best for the children once in school.Read more at location 4473
Crucially, as far as the school is concerned, these parents are paying fees, just like all the others, and so the school will suffer if they are not satisfied—theyRead more at location 4478
I’m not suggesting, even if anyone would listen, a wholesale Big Plan to transfer aid funding straightaway to targeted vouchers for private schools for the poor.Read more at location 4482
It’s easy to see how it could all go wrong. Targeted vouchers handled by the wrong agencies could lead to widespread fraud.Read more at location 4491
But surely finding the funds for a large number of targeted vouchers would be a problem? I don’t think it would. Even as things stand now, with current levels of aid funding and without touching any government funds currently being spent on public education, so with no need to reform public education and public finance, I reckon we could afford to send every out-of-school child to private school.Read more at location 4503
Take Ghana for instance. The British aid agency, Department for International Development, alone gives about $27 million per year to Ghanaian state education. In the poor areas of Ga, where my research was conducted, a typical private school for the poor might charge about $30 per year. In remoter rural areas, the cost will be even lower.Read more at location 4507
Suppose, more realistically, that there are some costs associated with voucher administration, say 6 percent of the funding.Read more at location 4511
A second objection might be that this is all well and good for urban areas, where we know there’s already a huge supply of private schools, but what about remoter rural areas,Read more at location 4518
But it is surely plausible that a major reason for the lower number of private schools in rural than urban areas is because fewer parents can afford the fees. If so, then targeted vouchers could also lead to an increase in the number of private schools in rural areas,Read more at location 4520
And if the reason why entrepreneurs are not establishing schools in some remote villages—cases in rural Gansu, China, spring to mind—has less to do with finance than with the lack of availability of suitable teachers, then incentives can be worked into the targeted vouchers to solve this problem too. Perhaps targeted vouchers in these kinds of remote rural areas could include additional amounts for teacherRead more at location 4524
Getting Amaretch into private school is one, solvable, challenge. But what about the quality of education when she gets there?Read more at location 4529
Perhaps he had in mind problems such as poor infrastructure, lack of proper latrines, leaky roofs, and so on. Of course, he’s right. These can be improved.Read more at location 4533
The key relevant finding of the research is that the vast majority of the private schools in the poor areas are businesses, not charities, dependent more or less entirely on fee income and, very importantly, making a reasonable profit.Read more at location 4536
in the shantytown of Makoko in Lagos State, a typical case study school had 220 pupils and 13 teachers, and average fees of 1,800 naira ($12.41) per term, with 9 percent of students on free scholarships.Read more at location 4539
Teacher salaries averaged 4,388 naira ($30.26) per month,Read more at location 4541
Because the private schools for the poor are run as businesses, a pretty easy solution is available to help school proprietors improve their infrastructure: microfinance loans could be provided, through existing or purpose-created microfinance organizations.Read more at location 4543
I’ve found a hunger for this kind of money, available to schools that couldn’t usually access other funds, perhaps because they didn’t have formal property rights or were operating only semilegally—the kind of small businesses highlighted by Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital.Read more at location 4551
This hunger showed that critics’ claims of private school proprietors’ profiteering from the poor—the “hidden curriculum” condemnation I heard, that if schools don’t provide latrines, for instance, it shows the proprietor only cares about profit, not the children in his care—are completely misplaced. As soon as funds were made accessible, the private school proprietors showed themselves eager to invest in improvements.Read more at location 4553
But perhaps Professor Lewin had in mind other, deeper problems with budget private schools, concerning teaching methods and curriculum?Read more at location 4560
I’m not totally satisfied by what I see in the private schools for the poor, in terms of their teaching and learning styles, and the curriculum.Read more at location 4570
For it’s true, in general, that the private schools I’ve visited are generally steeped in the same learning styles—usually rote learning—as the public schools, and they tend to follow the state curriculum. Regarding the latter, they more or less must. The government inspectors aren’t too keen on letting them deviateRead more at location 4576
Now, development agencies have plowed millions upon millions of dollars into trying to get teachers to change their methods, and children to rise above passivity. Millions of dollars have been spent on training teachers in child-centered methodsRead more at location 4582
But the stark fact is, little or none of this really works—the child-centeredmethods introduced (which are themselves often the subject of criticism in the donor countries promoting them) just don’t gel with teachers, who tend to revert to their preferred methodsRead more at location 4587
Expensive high-tech solutions, the television, interactive radio, and information and communications technology projects that hit the headlines, might work well while they’re being funded. However, as soon as the aid funding is withdrawn, the intervention ends.Read more at location 4589
First, it becomes quickly apparent from any visit to private schools in poor areas that very often the proprietors themselves are eager to learn of different ways of teaching and learning, and of new curriculum areas, from overseas visitors.Read more at location 4597
going around each school, the proprietor would sit me down in his or her tiny office after I’d visited the classes, and ask: “How can I improve my teaching? Tell me, what can I do better?”Read more at location 4601
A couple of years ago, I collaborated on a small-scale project in a private school in the slums of Hyderabad with Dr. Sugata Mitra, who, before he moved to Newcastle University, was chief scientist at NIIT Ltd., one of India’s largest computer education companies. Mitra has experimented with peer-group learning using information technology—dubbed “the hole in the wall”Read more at location 4610
The school proprietors were hungry for innovation. Why? First, whatever the critics of private schools for the poor may claim, the proprietors simply care about their children’s education and want the best for them. Even on its own, that might be enough for some of them to invest some of their surpluses in new methods and technology. But the power of the market is that the proprietors’ good intentions are coupled with another major incentive that makes it even more likely that they will seek to invest: they know that they face increasing competition.Read more at location 4623
Importantly, the situation in these poor areas is completely different from the situation in private schools in the West: there is a genuine market operating in these countries.Read more at location 4629
In some of the poorest areas of the world, private education makes up the vast majority of school enrollment.Read more at location 4630
In the West, however, private education is only a small fraction of total enrollment, around 7 percent in the United Kingdom, for instance. This is true, even if one focuses instead on urban areas, which have a particularly high concentration of private education: in central London, for instance, private school enrollment is only about 13 percent, and overwhelmingly organized along noncommercial, nonprofit lines.Read more at location 4631
Such private education “markets” are unlikely to illustrate real competitive behavior, are more likely to exhibit complacency or even anti-competitive cartels (as has recently been reported in the UK7), because the “market” is very small, has a largely captive audience, and is competing against a near-monopoly state provider.Read more at location 4634
In poor areas of developing countries, however, private education forms the majority of provision.Read more at location 4637
In these areas, parents have genuine choices of a number of competing private schools within easy reach and are sensitive to the price mechanismRead more at location 4637
in these genuine markets, educational entrepreneurs respond to parental needs and requirements.Read more at location 4639
The only way that we can really help is to ensure that the improved technology—whether in curriculum, teaching methods or learning methods—is available, suitably packaged, as inexpensive as possible, through some commercial enterprise. If private schools think it’s desirable, they’ll buy into it—perhaps using loan funds to help. The problems of sustainability and scalability that so bedevil any aid intervention are solved.Read more at location 4645
In The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C. K. Prahalad challenges the “dominant assumption” that the poor don’t care about brand names: “On the contrary,” his findings suggest, “the poor are very brand-conscious.”Read more at location 4651
In private education, brand names could be important in helping solve the genuine informationRead more at location 4653
parents use a variety of informal methods, such as visiting several schools to see how committed the teachers and proprietor appear. Or they talk to friends, comparing notes about how frequently exercise books are marked and homework checked. Importantly, I found that if parents choose one private school but subsequently discover that another seems better, they have little hesitation in moving their child to where they think they will get a better education.Read more at location 4656
The less concerned can free ride on the choices of the more concerned. And since school proprietors know this, they ensure that teachers show up and teach, and they invest any surpluses in school improvement, to ensure parental satisfaction.Read more at location 4660
This is another way in which the market deals with a problem—apathetic parents—that bedevils public school systemsRead more at location 4663
parents, don’t know what education is—they themselves may be illiterate, for instance—so can’t possibly judge what their children are getting.Read more at location 4665
Particularly at the primary school level—the level of most concern in this book—the nature of what constitutes a desirable education isn’t that hard to understand. Parents believe it should be about becoming literate and numerate,Read more at location 4667
I don’t know anything about computer software or hardware, Internet searches, digital cameras, commercial airlines, or car maintenance, or even much about food and clothing, to name a few market decisions I’ve been faced with in recent days, and so for which the information problem rears its ugly head. Of course, I could become deeply informed about each of these areas, but life is too short. I could look at consumer guides like Which?Read more at location 4673
But still, in general, I manage to purchase all the necessary goods and services in a way that usually works fine for me, without much effort to overcome the information asymmetry. How? I buy trusted brands. I have a Sony computer and digital camera and Microsoft software; I use Google for my computer searches, fly by British Airways or KLM/Air France, use Northern Motors to maintain my Nissan, and shop at Tesco and Marks & Spencer for food and clothing.Read more at location 4677
Buying trusted brands would be another way of overcoming the information problem for poor parents wanting the best education for their children.Read more at location 4682
One possibility would be for investors to assist expansion-minded proprietors in accessing loan capital, in the way already outlined above.Read more at location 4686
Establishing a chain of “budget” private schools, serving poor communities, would seem an extraordinarily exciting and innovative project for investors and philanthropists to engage in.Read more at location 4695
School proprietors are eager to differentiate themselves in this market, and a key concern of parents is educational quality. By becoming part of the brand name, managers could show that they emphasize quality moreRead more at location 4700
What of schools that don’t become part of the chain? In the short term, they could suffer,Read more at location 4706
But in the dynamic market of education, two things would likely happen. First, individual educational entrepreneurs would seek to improve what they offer in order to retain children or win back those who have left. Second, most fundamentally, if the financial and educational viability of an educational brand name was demonstrated, others would soon enter the market, establishing competing brand names that offer quality education at a low cost.Read more at location 4708
Prahalad observes that the founder of Aravind Eye Care System—which provides cataract surgery for large numbers of the poor—was “inspired by the hamburger chain, McDonald’s, where a consistent quality of hamburgers and French fries worldwide results from a deeply understood and standardised chemical process.”Read more at location 4711
And perhaps you don’t even have to start with the poor. I’ve a friend who’s starting a chain of private schools in China for the middle classes.Read more at location 4716
In information technology, NIIT Ltd. started out offering courses to a few people who thought they might be beneficial. In time, it has emerged to create its own brand of certification. A graduate of NIIT—a GNIIT—is now accepted as possessing an internationally recognized qualification. Search through the matrimonial pages in the Times of India (a sort of “lonely hearts” section in which parents seek matches for their children) and you’ll see that being a GNIIT is as much a signifier of qualityRead more at location 4720
Just as NIIT has conquered the world of computer education certification, so I believe there is nothing to stop some educational entrepreneurs, perhaps assisted by forward-looking philanthropy, in creating brand-name certification for budget private schoolsRead more at location 4735
Their quality is higher than that of government schools provided for the poor—perhaps not surprisingly given that they are predominantly businesses dependent on fees to survive and, hence, are directly accountable to parental needs.Read more at location 4744
By increasing what private schools for the poor already offer, such as additional free and subsidized places for the poorest, sensitively applied targeted vouchers could broaden access on a large scale.Read more at location 4747
Investing in microfinance-style loan programs so that private schools can improve their infrastructure is one way forward.Read more at location 4749
And investing in a chain of schools—either through a dedicated education investment fund or through joint ventures with educationalRead more at location 4751
when their children reach school age, middle-class parents are faced with the dilemma of sending their children to the assigned state school or a private alternative. For many, this decision brings a terrible moral dilemma.Read more at location 4760
Fiona Miller—the girlfriend of then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former adviser Alistair Campbell and herself a former adviser to Cherie Blair—argued in a Channel 4 documentary that pushy middle-class parents who were abandoning the local comprehensive state school were the biggest threat to public education.Read more at location 4762
Oxford don Adam Swift made his name telling middle-class parents that sending their children to private school damaged the egalitarian project of public education in his book How Not to Be a Hypocrite.Read more at location 4767
For if you send your children to private school, you are saying that the state system is not good enough for your children—itRead more at location 4769
But of course if you choose to follow what you believe to be morally right, by supporting the state schools that the majority must attend, then you run the risk of jeopardizing your own dear child’s future.Read more at location 4772
Swift’s dilemma—of middle-class angst—may seem minor compared with those problems facing parents in poorer countries.Read more at location 4774
I think the solution that poorer parents have embraced can help soothe the consciences of middle-class parents too.Read more at location 4775
