by James Tooley
Reassuringly, I found agreement for my conclusion, at least about the lack of firm evidence. The Oxfam Education Report concluded, “Surprisingly, in view of the confident assertions made in some quarters, there is little hard evidence to substantiate the view that private schools systematically outperform public schools with comparable levels of resourcing.”10 Oddly, although agreeing with me that there was “little hard evidence,” the report was still able to summarize the position, on the same page, that, while “there is no doubting the appalling standard of provision in public education systems,” private schools for the poor are of “inferior quality,” offering “a low quality service” that will “restrict children’s future opportunities.” How did the author know this, if there was “little hard evidence”? Never mind, the United Nations Development Programme made the same admission of little evidence alongside an even stronger claim about the relative performance of private and public schools: “Many proponents of private education claim that private schools outperform public ones. . . . But little evidence substantiates these claims. Private schools do not systematically outperform public schools with comparable resources.”
Reading the development experts, it seemed that their sweeping deprecations of private schools serving the poor were not well founded. They could of course be right, but I’d found no proper evidence that they were. Poor parents were making difficult choices. Could they really be as foolish as these development experts were implying? I had to find out. Reading this kind of material, I knew my research had to look in detail at the relative quality of the education provided in public and private schools for the poor.
But first I needed to address one other mystery in the development experts’ writings. Because the low-cost private schools are of such supposedly low quality, and because their proprietors are driven by the profit motive, the development experts were adamant about something else: the urgent need for regulators to save the poor from unscrupulous providers. As I traveled, I read what these experts said about the apparent need for increased regulation, and it too puzzled me, albeit in a different way.
8. An Inspector Calls
Flashing Policemen
The winding dirt road from Bortianor, the fishing village home of Supreme Academy in Ga, Ghana, meets the main Accra-Cape Coast highway at what locals call the “roadblock.” It’s where the police used to stop all the traffic plying this route, where massive jams built up throughout each day. It’s no longer used; the barrier lies vandalized by the roadside. Now there are mobile police roadblocks, randomly set up anywhere along the route. Traveling back from Bortianor to Accra one day in a beaten-up old taxi, with huge cracks in its windshield, no seat belts, no functioning speedometer, and various other transgressions of the road-safety laws, we encountered one of these mobile roadblocks. As we neared the policeman who was waving us to a halt, my driver took out his license and documents and slipped a 10,000-cedi note (about $1.10) into the back pages. As we stopped, he handed his documents to the policeman, who perfunctorily pocketed the gift, and we were soon on our way. It’s called “flashing.” “Why don’t you flash me some small money?” is a common refrain from officials everywhere in Ghana.
It’s the same in Nigeria, traveling on the Lagos to Ibadan highway, where hulks of burnt-out trucks and cars lie by the road or are strewn across the median strip at disturbingly frequent intervals. The police wave you down—policemen who seem much more menacing than those in Ghana. Perhaps it has something to do with the Russian submachine guns they sport nonchalantly over their shoulders or the rounds of ammunition wrapped across their chests. Whenever I’ve been stopped in this way, the procedure was the same: they ask to see my passport, take it to their little bivouac on the other side of the road, make me walk all the way to meet their boss, and make me wait and wait, exchanging pleasantries about soccer (the captain of the Nigerian national team plays in the English Premier League, and they are always keen to explore my knowledge of this), keeping me waiting; perhaps my driver sorts out their “gratification.”
And it’s in India too. Rushing to take me to a dentist for emergency treatment in Hyderabad (fillings fall out in the most awkward of places), my car slipped through traffic lights while the lights were red. This happens a lot. Unfortunately this time, a motorcycle policeman was behind us and waved us down. My driver sighed and slowly got out, slipping a 500-rupee (about $12) note into his driver’s license.
This kind of low-level corruption among government officials is all-pervasive in the countries where I was traveling. How could the development experts write about regulation of private schools without considering this reality? Was I missing something, or were they?
Last-Chance Schools Need Regulating
Their writings were clear enough. One of the reports from Save the Children stressed that “before private sector involvement should be contemplated as a possible policy option,” strong regulations needed to be in place: “Without adequate regulatory capacity, private sector participation in service provision is a matter of concern, because the needs of the poor are [otherwise] unlikely to be met.”1 Another report, perhaps realizing that the horse had already bolted, emphasized how this was a grave concern: “The private sector has increased its role in the provision of services spontaneously rather than as a result of government planning,” so has emerged “far beyond the capacity of state control.”
Dr. Rose, too, was concerned with how private schools for the poor could be regulated. She explored the possibility of “lighter regulation to enable the private sector to operate unfettered,” but didn’t find this appealing. Instead, “tighter regulation” to “avoid the continued explosion of low quality private education” was required. For liberalizing regulation “runs the risk of allowing last-chance schools,” her term for private schools for the poor, “to proliferate.” And that was undesirable.
I read a report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that took the same, hard line against private schools for the poor: Regulation of “low quality” private education is urgently required, to “protect . . . citizens from exploitation in their quest for access to education.” Without such regulation, the poor will continue to “pay very high costs for poor quality education.” A proper “regulatory framework is fundamental to ensure that children receive . . . a quality education.” The onus must be on the “central State” to “provide and implement a strong regulatory environment.”
These pronouncements baffled me, not because I was against regulation per se: of course not, if regulations could be introduced that really protected the poor, who could be against that? No, they puzzled me because they didn’t gel with my growing experience of how regulations—of anything, not just schools—worked in the countries I was studying. This time, the mystery was why the development experts appeared to be writing in a vacuum, far removed from the reality that always impinges on you wherever you travel and work in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Regulations, Regulations, Regulations
For there are already strong regulations that govern private education for the poor in all the countries I visited on my journey. And in practice, they work in exactly the same way as with the flashing policeman.
Andhra Pradesh—as do all other Indian states—already has regulations specifying every aspect of what private schools can and cannot do. In a legal bookshop in Koti, Hyderabad, I bought a three-volume tome, V. J. Rao’s Law of Education in Andhra Pradesh, which meticulously detailed them all—and more government orders come out monthly, so it’s really difficult to keep abreast of them all. It took me weeks of poring over these volumes to fathom exactly what a private school could and could not do—there are regulations on everything, including teacher qualifications, how dismissed teachers can appeal and to whom, the number of hours a principal must teach, how to advertise teacher vacancies, the necessity of “avoiding unhealthy competition among schools in the locality,” what records should be kept and how, the precise details of how
school income should be spent (and that no profits can be made), precise physical requirements for classrooms and playgrounds, teacher-pupil ratios, and the curriculum and syllabuses to be followed.
No private school teacher, the regulations spell out, is allowed to “read any cheap literature relating to sex in the presence of pupils or encourage students to study such cheap literature,” and women teachers “shall wear traditional clothes of non-transparent material consistent with modesty.” No teacher may receive a dowry, nor smoke in the presence of students. Everything is laid out meticulously, right down to the tiniest details of the “Duties of Sweepers,” which reads in full, “They shall maintain the upkeep of the institutions and its premises, namely, laboratory, library, staff rooms, toilets and play ground, etc.”
So many regulations, it’s hard to see how any normal school manager, with more pressing demands on his or her time, could keep up. But severe punishments are laid down for any breach of these rules, punishable with imprisonment for up to three years, plus a fine. But in practice? In practice, all these incredibly detailed regulations are simply ignored. Didn’t the development experts realize this?
Early on in my research, I was in Hyderabad with Pauline Dixon. Her PhD research focused on the regulatory environment, and so we had an appointment with the district education officer with authority over schools in Hyderabad, in his new government offices still under construction. He told us that he had only three inspectors working under him (and he himself didn’t do inspections) for the 500 or so recognized private schools, plus the similar number of government schools. So how on earth could he get around to all these schools and ensure that they comply with every detail? So in practice, he allowed his team to simply ignore the vast body of legislation, and instead adopt the “rule of thumb” that private schools should comply with only four regulations in order to gain recognition and remain recognized. They needed to have, he told us, a playground of the correct size, a 50,000 rupees (around $1,100) fund in a joint school-government bank account, all teachers properly qualified with government teacher-training certificates as a minimum, and a library.
This type of “regulation-lite” might seem more realistic. Possibly it would even be the kind of regulatory regime that the development experts have in mind, rather than the arcane detail of the actual legislation, when they argue for the need of proper regulation?
But here’s the rub: once we’d heard about his pared-down approach, Pauline quickly investigated about a dozen private unaided schools in Hyderabad whose managers I knew fairly well. None of them complied with more than two of the regulations even on this new slimmed-down list. All had the endowment fund, but only two had a proper library. None had a playground of the correct size, although most had a playground of some description. Not one had all teachers correctly qualified, although most had some of their teachers up to this level. Yet every one of these schools was recognized! And I found exactly the same story in Nigeria. A casual visit to 10 recognized private schools in the local government district of Kosofe in Lagos State, where my teams were doing the study, revealed that, according to the government regulations, only three of them should have been recognized. The remainder met few, if any, of the specified regulations.
So what’s going on? How can schools be recognized when they clearly don’t meet even a subset of regulations, let alone the full monty? Just as my taxi driver at the beginning of this chapter could pass through the police roadblock, which had been specifically set up to look for offenders of the road safety code, when his vehicle was in flamboyant violation, recognition is not acquired by meeting regulations. There are tried and trusted mechanisms in these countries that easily circumvent the need to meet regulations. Becoming recognized simply means bribing the inspectors with money. If you pay, you get recognized, and can stay recognized. If you don’t, you won’t. It’s simple.
Instant Gratification
It’s all quite remarkably open. On my journey, I was amazed at how candid government officials were about this aspect of their work. At the meeting with the district education officer in Hyderabad, after we’d been told about the problem of few inspectors, many schools, and almost unlimited regulations, I thought I’d try my luck with a question I assumed would get no answer at all. Prompted by what some private school managers had told me, I asked him, “Do the schools try to bribe the inspectors?” He turned to my assistant and asked for a translation of what I’d said. They spoke in Telugu, he perhaps buying time to think of the answer. But then he offered, quite openly: “Everyone gets bribes. Sometimes the inspectors give me bribes, sometimes the schools. And I know that if I don’t give them what they want, then they will go above my head and bribe someone else—a politician, my boss, whoever—so I might as well take the bribe and give them what they want.”
Bribery is endemic. It’s the way the system functions smoothly. Pauline explored this further with some of the school managers in Hyderabad. Again, they were entirely up-front about the situation. One told her: “Everything is possible if you offer the right amount of bribe. . . . In fact, if we follow the proper channels, every path will be closed.” Another said that all government officials can be bribed and that “an official will not be able to sleep at night if he doesn’t ask for bribes.” She asked them what happened when the school inspectors called. Only one said that the inspector came to “visit the classrooms and give suggestions.” But even she added, “And at last takes the bribe.” Most commonly, they said that the inspector was only interested in bribes. One offered: the inspector comes “to collect the bribe and sign the register to show the government that he has visited the school for inspection.” Another said that the inspector comes and does “nothing in particular; he inspects only the records and goes with filled pockets.”
Indeed, the system has become more or less formalized, with roughly set amounts required to pass through certain stages of the recognition process. If an inspector asks for too much, these set amounts can be referred to and offered instead. So in Nigeria, for instance, the school proprietors told me that the registration process first requires a name search, to ensure the chosen name is not already in use. The official fee costs 5,000 naira (around $40)—about the annual cost to parents of school fees in unregistered schools, or just over the monthly salary of a teacher in these schools. But in addition, the proprietor must pay “gratifications” of about 1,000 naira (about $8) to the officials. Then there are the requisite inspections before the registration process is completed. At least two are required, costing, officially, 5,000 naira, paid to the Ministry of Education at the payment office of the Lagos State government. But again, the proprietor must also bribe the inspectors “as gratification to the inspectors if he wants a favorable report.” These extralegal fees range from 5,000 naira to 15,000 naira ($40 to $120) depending on the number of inspectors that come and the proprietor’s bargaining skills. According to the proprietors, “We know that this money always reach the top,” that is, the Ministry of Education officials themselves.
To be registered, the schools should have a sickbay, with a full-time nurse—an impossible expense for these schools—and a one-acre playground—inconceivable in the slums and shantytowns. The school grounds should also have a full-time gatekeeper. None of the low-cost private schools have these. To overlook these omissions, the inspector receives a bribe of 5,000 naira. The same goes for failure to employ fully trained teachers (5,000 naira to the inspectors for noncompliance).
And so it goes. At every stage of the registration process, there are official fees to be paid; and at every stage, bribes for the inspectors to overlook noncompliance.
Parents the Losers?
So I wasn’t balking at the regulation of private schools because I was against regulations per se; I just couldn’t actually see how they could work given the reality on the ground. And it seemed to me that the development experts hadn’t thought it through at all.
Budget private schools—even the recognized ones—are,
in practice, largely unregulated by, and hence unaccountable to, the state. But there is not a lack of regulations, as the development experts seem to imagine. Regulations are simply ignored as long as bribes are paid. On the face of it, the parents are the losers: for government regulation might have given them a way to sort out whether one school is better than another—if it is recognized by the authorities, it must be better. But clearly, government recognition conveys no information about school quality; it only indicates the school’s ability to afford bribes. So it would seem that parents suffer as a result of this system—not only because they are deprived of one source of valuable information but, in fact, because they are positively misled by the information that is available. And since the revenue that schools use to pay the necessary bribes is derived from tuition paid by poor parents, regulations have in fact become a regressive tax on the consumption of education—working precisely counter to the goal of “education for all.” Rather than being exploited by unscrupulous school proprietors, parents are, indirectly, being exploited by unscrupulous inspectors.
Of course, the development experts might counter that the whole system could be reformed. It’s not this type of corrupt regulatory system they have in mind when they seek to impose “strong” regulations on budget private schools. Instead, they want something that works well, just like they might say regulations do back at home. True, it will require slow and painstaking reform of the very fundamentals of government and society. And the poor, meanwhile? Well, they must be patient, until these reforms have been introduced. For how else can these poor “citizens” be protected against “exploitation” by for-profit providers?