by James Tooley
Finally, parents were learning from the experience of those who had moved between the two systems. One mother told us that she had a sister who used to be a pupil in Olympic, the government school bordering Kibera: “She told me that there is a difference in the teaching. In Olympic, teachers do not concentrate on the pupils and so her performance started going down. She told me when she moved to the private school, the teacher teaches well; let’s say it was an English class; the teacher teaches well and spends enough time with the children but when she was in the government school, the teacher does not spend much time with them; as long as she has seen she has taught something, she walks out of class.”
But it wasn’t just the perceived higher standards in the private schools that attracted parents. Parents also told us of the ways in which private school managers were sensitive to the plight of parents who could not afford to pay their fees on time, a point in favor of sending children to private schools. One mother remarked: “I am thankful to the head teacher [of the private school] very much for being very considerate to parents. You will never see a child not in school because of delay paying school fees. In those cases, the head teacher will write to the parent to ask them to meet with her to discuss when the fees can be paid.” A father concurred, “Here, with the little money we earn we can pay bit by bit.” And then there was the concern about the “hidden” costs of the supposedly free education in government schools. One of the main requirements was school uniforms—and it was argued by parents that, in their view, government schools were using the inability of poor parents to meet uniform requirements in full to turn them away. One mother pointed out, “In a private school, a child is allowed to attend school with only one uniform while in the government school he must have two uniforms before he is allowed to attend school.” Another agreed: “Even if learning there [in the government schools] is free, school uniform is expensive and you have to buy full school uniform at once. I prefer to pay fees and buy the school uniform bit by bit.”
One mother enumerated what she saw as the costs that she would incur if she sent her child to a government school: “I went there [to a government school] to see [and] they told me I had to have 11,000 Kenyan shillings [$143.23] cash in hand.” Partly, she reported, this charge was for the building maintenance fund. She continued that once you’d “bought a school uniform,” you still had to buy “the school sweater, which costs 600 Kenyan shillings [$7.81], and you have to make sure you have two sweaters, which is 1,200 Kenyan shillings [$15.62]. Good leather shoes and socks two pairs. You have to have two of everything.” In short, the mother argued about government schooling, “I don’t think it’s free.”
One father summed it all rather neatly as to why he still preferred private schooling for his daughter rather than what was provided free in the public school: “If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and vegetables, you have to pay for them.”
Education Free, for All; or Education Free-for-All?
After all this, the introduction of free primary education in Kenya didn’t seem like such a success story. What I found in Kibera—and I also did parallel research in the slums of Kawangware and Mukuru in Nairobi, with more or less identical results—surely didn’t point to free primary education as being the panacea that the development experts made it out to be. Far from leading to an increase in enrollment, at best it might have led to a simple transfer of children from private schools in the slums—where they appeared cared for in small classes by teachers who were accountable to parents—to the government schools on the periphery, where parents believed their children were left pretty much to their own devices.
Interestingly, I found that some development agencies appeared aware of the problems in public schools after free primary education. But they put it all down to introducing free primary education too quickly. I read a report from Save the Children, for instance, which noted that, following the introduction of free primary education in Uganda and Malawi, there were “some disturbing signs of quality declines.” They were in “no doubt that such declines have taken place,” but argued that “we should be clear on the reasons for this.” The reasons? “In both countries user fees were abolished swiftly without sufficient funds being made available to meet the shortfall. This problem was compounded by the immense success of the abolition of user fees in terms of attendance.”6 A report from Action Aid took the same line. It agreed that “quality problems encountered in education systems . . . that have eliminated fees are real and urgent.” Again, however, this implied the need for “substantial increases in donor support” to properly plan and finance the introduction of free primary education.
In other words, it was all the fault of donors for not providing sufficient funding to these countries. Give additional massive amounts in aid and free primary education can be made to work properly. But it seemed to me that it couldn’t really be that simple. After all, free primary education was introduced decades ago in both India and Nigeria: in Nigeria, the Universal Free Primary Education Act was enacted on September 6, 1976, nearly 30 years before my research. In India, the National Policy on Education of 1986, nearly 20 years before my research, proclaimed free and compulsory primary education, which was soon introduced in many states, including Andhra Pradesh, and finally made law with the Constitutional 93rd Amendment of 2001. And in Ghana, free primary education—their Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education—was being introduced very slowly indeed, from 1996, financed with huge doses of foreign aid, including $100 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, $85 million from DfID, and $50 million from the World Bank. But none of this seemed to have stopped a mass exodus of poor children from public to private schools.
The Conundrum Solved
I was now in a position to answer the conundrum, which was, as Pauline Rose had put it, “If children were previously out of school . . . because of inability to pay fees and enrollment increased dramatically following their abolition, how is it possible that these same poor families can now afford to pay fees in private schools instead?”
My research in Kenya suggested that these poor families had always been able to afford private schools. Before free primary education, they were already in private schools. The real conundrum for me was why the development experts hadn’t already figured this out.
I was to get more puzzled the more I read their work. They seemed to agree with what I was finding about problems in public schools, but they didn’t then consider what poor parents were choosing—the private alternative—as a possible way forward. Were they, too, like the academic I’d interviewed from the University of Nairobi, less than impressed by poor parents’ abilities as education consumers?
7. Poor Ignoramuses
The Bad and the Very Ugly
When the BBC film crew came with me to Nigeria to make a documentary of the private schools for the poor in Makoko, I interviewed Mrs. Mary Taimo Ige Iji, the chief educational administrator for Mainland, Lagos—the local government area under which the shantytown of Makoko falls. We had traveled in convoy to the three government schools on the edge of Makoko—we in our battered old Volvo hired from a friend of BSE’s in Apollo Street, Makoko; she with a team of five assistants in her brand-new white Mercedes. We had assumed that she would know where she was going—in her office she had proudly said that she personally inspected all the schools in her local government area. In the event, her car waited by the side of the road for us to catch up, so as to follow us to Makoko. It seemed that they had never been there before, not even to the public schools on the outskirts of the shantytown, let alone inside the shantytown itself.
We interviewed her on the balcony of the top floor of the first public school. I found her a rather fierce and domineering woman and was nervous that my questions might have offended her. But I needn’t have worried. Her answers conveyed absolutely that she knew I could only be playing devil’s advocate asking about possible virtu
es of low-cost private schools: no one could possibly think any differently from what she was saying.
I asked her why poor parents apparently—how could I put this, strangely—seemed to prefer to send their children to private schools in the shantytown, rather than to this rather nice public school building. (Actually, she had said it was a rather nice building—I found its architecture austere, imposingly grim, and Stalinist. But I went along with her characterization for the interview.) She didn’t mince her words.
“There are many reasons. Parents don’t have the information that the public schools are free; some of them they chose private schools because they are near their homes.” So much by way of introduction. “But the most important point is fake status symbol, in quotes ‘fake status symbol”’—she said this, without any sense of irony, standing above her Mercedes. In fact, at about this moment in the interview she moved to rest her arm on the balustrade, probably coincidentally, but it did have the effect of blocking out the car beneath from camera view. Relaxing now, getting into the swing, she continued: Poor parents “want to be seen as rich parents, caring parents, who take their children to ‘fee-paying’ schools supposedly better.” But these poor parents, as we all know, are completely fooled. Poor parents, she said, are “ignoramuses.”
I tried not to flinch as she spat out her contempt for the people I’d been working with. Why? I asked. Because the private schools, far from being any good, “are very poor in facilities, because there is no way you can compare these poor, ill-equipped private schools with government schools where all the teachers are qualified, fully qualified.” The private schools, she said, are in “three categories—the good, the bad, and the very ugly.” It was clear in which category the private schools in the shantytown fit: “. . . these poorly, ill-equipped unapprovable private schools, ‘mushroom’ schools, they are causing a lot of damage, a lot of damage,” she continued. “At the end of it the children will come out half-baked, they are not useful to themselves, they end up in occupations like their parents are doing, they don’t progress further, so that’s two generations, three generations, wasted.”
She couldn’t have been clearer. Private schools for the poor were bad—“very ugly”—because of poor facilities and untrained teachers. Children came out half-baked; generations were wasted. Mary Taimo Ige Iji turned out not to be alone in her views. Her views were the common refrain about private schools serving the poor, that they were schools of “last resort” and must inevitably be offering a low-quality experience (it would be hard to call it an “education”) because the facilities were so bad.
Certainly, the conditions of the schools I visited on my journey sometimes looked miserable. Buildings looked rough, and schools were usually poorly equipped; the teachers, it was true, were largely untrained. I pointed out these obvious criticisms to a young teacher in Ghana, the daughter of the proprietor of Shining Star Private School, which was little more than a corrugated-iron roof on rickety poles at the side of the main road out of Accra. The government school, just a few hundred yards away, was housed in a smart building, newly refurbished by the British aid agency DfID. “Education is not about buildings,” she scolded me. “What matters is what is in the teacher’s heart. In our hearts, we love the children and do our best for them.” She left open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.
But was she right? What was the actual quality of the private schools for the poor? Could the human spirit rise above these meager surroundings and still provide something of educational value? And in any case, what was the quality of the alternative—the public schools to which parents could send their children, but which many were abandoning? Parents from Makoko who we interviewed for the BBC film were adamant in their reasons why they sent their children to private school. Perched at the end of a wood walkway above the stinking lagoon, the fisherman father of Sandra, the girl who had first introduced me to Ken Ade Private School in Makoko, told us, “In the public school they do not teach very well and that is why everybody, including me, prefers the private to public school, because they want their children trained for the future.” Sandra’s mother agreed: “In the private school, the teachers are better and when they teach, the children will be able to get immediately what they are saying. That’s why I prefer to send my children to private school.” And another articulate father put it like this: “Going to the public school here in Nigeria, particularly in this area in Lagos State, is just like saying wasting the time of day . . . because they don’t teach them anything. The difference is clear, the private school and the children of private school and the children of public school, the difference is so great that the children of private school can speak very well, they know what they are doing but there in the public, the children are abandoned.”
Certainly, when we visited the public schools on the edge of Makoko with the BBC crew we got a sense of that abandonment. I’ve already listed some of the things I first saw in those public schools in Chapter 3. But much to my surprise, we caught footage of something else, something I’d seen many times, but which I never believed we’d capture on camera. A young male teacher was sleeping, sprawled at his desk, while a girl in his class tried to teach her peers from a tatty textbook. Picture the scene: The BBC cameraman, producer, and director arrive in the classroom. The children shoot up, boisterously as always to greet their visitors. They sing out, “Welcome to you, BBC crew.” Still the teacher sleeps. A pupil, embarrassed, tries to wake the teacher. Still he sleeps.
A bit unkindly, the BBC broadcast this bit of the film dubbed over with the voice of Professor Olakunle Lawal, the honorable commissioner for education, Lagos State, a very distinguished gentleman, with a PhD from Oxford University (it was while waiting to interview him that I had met Dennis Okoro, the ex-chief inspector). Giving his view on the past problems but current well-being of the teaching profession in Nigeria, he told us eloquently that, in the past, “teachers were not well motivated because of the challenges attached to their conditions of service. At times you had haphazard payment of salaries, and at times outright nonpayment for some. However, in the last six years things have changed considerably. This public school is very good now, you have well-trained manpower.” That was a tad mischievous, putting his voice over the image of the sleeping teacher. Adding insult to injury, they also had Mary Taimo Ige Iji criticizing teachers in the private schools for the poor, and contrasting them with the public school workforce: Well in the private schools the teachers are not qualified, while they are there they are not paid regularly. . . . They can be fired anytime so they are not dedicated and most important they are not qualified. But in government schools the teachers are very disciplined and they are trained teachers. They can be fired for misconduct but it rarely happens.
I felt sorry for the teacher who prompted all this. Had I not seen so many like him, I would have discouraged the BBC from using his image. But it just seemed to capture so well the problems I’d seen in the public schools for the poor.
But was I alone in thinking that standards in the public schools were pretty appalling? On my journey, I devoured as much as I could of the writings of the development experts. Reassuringly—if reassuring is the right word for the anger and disgust I felt—I found that all the development experts I read seemed to agree that there were dire problems in the public schools—as personified by the sleeping teacher. Public education, they agreed, was a disaster. But then their conclusions on what to do about the problem seemed just baffling to me.
Public Education for the Poor Is a Disaster . . .
All the development experts I read seemed to agree. I’ve already noted the PROBE Report’s findings for northern India, summarized too by Amartya Sen, that teaching was occurring in only half the classrooms visited at random—with some teachers doing exactly what we reported in the BBC film, sleeping at their desks or in the staff room. Others were drinking and making merry. These voices are not alone. I could
not find a single dissenting voice in what I read as I traveled. And whenever I spoke personally with any development agency officials in country, they were always eager to tell me of the failings of public education. Here’s a summary of what I was told, what I read, and what I saw for myself.
Absentee Teachers
Public schools are letting down the poor, first, because of their teachers. The most serious problem, said the development experts, is teacher absenteeism. I read the most recent United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on how to reach “education for all,” which was clear that “random surveys in many countries confirm that teacher absenteeism remains a persistent problem.”1 The most up-to-date report from the United Nations Development Programme agreed that in India and Pakistan, “poor households cited teacher absenteeism in public schools as their main reason for choosing private ones.” An academic article on teacher absenteeism reported that in two districts in Kenya, teachers were absent nearly 30 percent of the time and that children would expect not to be taught by public school teachers for over 40 percent of their time in the classroom.