The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves
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Last annotated on October 4, 2016
He came across an unexpected phenomenon: an unending line of small, no-frills private schools catering to poor kids.Read more at location 11
He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools.Read more at location 12
When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them.Read more at location 14
“Tooley's specialty as both scholar and practitioner is ultra-low-cost private education in the world's poorest countries.Read more at location 28
Orthodox opinion on developing-country education for the poor holds that parents are too ignorant to know a good school when they see one,Read more at location 29
and that a decent education is impossible to provide on the minimal budgets available to private schools serving poor students.Read more at location 30
country after country, Tooley found that both claims are false.Read more at location 31
“In an era when all the top economics journals are populated with complex mathematical analysis, James Tooley does something really quite unusual. He conducts research about what real people actually do.Read more at location 34
Economists identify so many theoretical problems with the provision of private education for the poorest people without troubling themselves to find out whether people overcome those problems in practice: Tooley demonstrates that they do.Read more at location 35
Entrepreneurs and parents surmount huge obstacles to ensure that children are better educated than in state schools run by bureaucracies purporting to act in the interests of those whom they have never met.Read more at location 37
The Beautiful Tree, has much in common with the work undertaken by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom.Read more at location 39
Instead of being dependent on foreign aid and public schools, the world's poorest people are educating their children on their own dime.Read more at location 50
We meet the real teachers, students, and parents who constitute the delicate educational ecosystems under constant threat from bureaucrats, do-gooders, and naysayers.Read more at location 58
“Edify has a goal to finance 4000 schools by 2017. This will impact over 1 million children. James Tooley directly inspired my life's work. As a result, I believe that, over the next 20 years, 20 million impoverished children will receive a much better education than otherwise would have been possible.” —Christopher A. Crane, president and CEO, Edify.org, a humanitarian organization devoted to working with affordable private schoolsRead more at location 63
