The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  Actually, as I journeyed and researched, it occurred to me that there might be another way—and it was curious to me that the development experts didn’t catch on to this possibility. Indeed, it’s more or less what government officials in Hyderabad told Pauline and me. In a sense, they weren’t too bothered about whether the private schools met their regulations because the schools had a much stronger sense of accountability to people who could be relied on to make sure things were working well. The district education officer in Hyderabad put it succinctly: “The teachers in the private unaided schools are accountable to the parents. The parents insist on quality. The teachers in the private unaided schools are faced with the sack if they do not perform. . . . They can easily be removed. . . . The parents are rational and so the schools are accountable.” Another government official in Hyderabad reiterated the same claim: “In the private schools, the manager watches the teachers all the time. In turn the teachers watch the children.”

  Wasn’t this different kind of accountability significant? Couldn’t the development experts be satisfied that it would, at least to some powerful degree, help protect parents against any unscrupulous providers?2

  Baden Powell and the Really Important People

  Near the center of the coastal city of Accra, Ghana’s capital, is the shantytown of Baden Powell, called thus because you reach it by passing Baden Powell Centenary Memorial Hall. Here along the rocky shoreline ran open sewers between corrugated-iron-roofed huts, with views across the ocean that might cost millions elsewhere. There are more African-sounding shantytowns too, such as Agbogbloshie and Neema. There’s also Jamestown. One hot, humid October day, I visited these shantytowns with Emma Gyamere, my team leader in Ghana. It had been a very long day; we’d been out traveling since 7:30 a.m., checking on schools taking part in the testing for the comparative survey. Our car had no air conditioning, and I was feeling exceedingly hot; my right arm was very sunburned from sticking out the window all day. Feeling weary and a little sun-stroked, I hope I can be excused for what happened next.

  We walked through the slum. Children pointed excitedly at the “white man” and practiced, as they did in every other African country I visited, their “how are you’s”; some chanted “how are you, how are you, how are you!” delighting in their own mastery. Older men smiled and greeted us in the customary fashion. We located the school we were looking for, Sunrise Preparatory School. The proprietor was standing outside her tiny office, talking to a very thin, unkempt older man. She motioned us to sit outside and wait. The wooden chairs were small, but at least in the shade, although it was still uncomfortably humid. After a while, I looked at my watch. We’d been waiting 20 minutes while the proprietor engaged in discussion with this man. “She’s very rude,” I said to Emma, who agreed. Accepted was the fact that a visiting white man should be given priority, even though he had called unannounced. After another five minutes, I suggested that we leave. Emma readily agreed, and I got up to tell the owner.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but this is a parent.” She said it in a way that for her demanded no more explanation. Of course, she couldn’t stop her conversation with a parent, one of the really important people in her world, no matter who had come to visit her.

  The proprietor of Sunrise Preparatory School understood that different kind of accountability well. Of course she was accountable—not to the government inspectors, who would be more interested in bribes than educational standards. She was accountable to parents—the really important people—and through them to the students in her school. If parents withdrew their children and thus their fees, she would go out of business. She knew that very clearly and would do all she could to prevent it.

  This alternative idea of accountability didn’t seem to get much consideration in the development experts’ writings I reviewed. However, I read tantalizing glimpses that some were at least aware of it—but frustratingly, they didn’t make anything of it at all. For instance, I’d read a report by Save the Children that had as one of its major themes the need for greater regulation of private schools for the poor. However, it had an interesting aside that raised the alternative route to accountability. Save the Children had interviewed a 12-year-old boy, Jhazeb, in a private slum school in Karachi, Pakistan, one that they had disapprovingly noted didn’t provide a playground and so fell short of its regulatory requirements. However, the boy was not concerned with this supposed failure: “Though the school is small and does not have any ground for sports, Jhazeb said they are contented playing in the fields and the streets by their houses and he would rather see the school bring in more computers and offer computer classes to their students.”3

  Young Jhazeb was aware of the opportunity cost of providing a playground, and thought that his school should have other priorities. Save the Children used this anecdote to note that private schools “are already responding to parental preferences, within the context of market forces (‘If we offer computers and classes rather than playing fields and equipment we’ll have higher enrolments.’).”

  Again, just as my experience at Sunrise Preparatory School suggested, doesn’t this example from Pakistan also show, at least in some small way, private schools being accountable, perhaps more accountable than government, to the parents and children they serve? Government says that all private schools must provide a playground, which would be very expensive, given the price of land in the slums and the revenue of the schools, and may not even be possible, given the scarcity of available land. The children know better. They think they have enough play areas, thank you, and that scarce resources are better spent on other things, such as computer education, that will help them get on in life. The private schools respond to this demand and offer what children, and parents, want.

  Shouldn’t this be viewed as something valuable? Not for Save the Children, it appeared. For in its report, it followed this example with a discussion about accountability, suggesting that it had entirely missed the point: “Whereas proponents for an increased role of the private sector in education point to a greater accountability within such schools, this has not been reflected in the information collected.” From the ensuing discussion, accountability to Save the Children meant, by definition, political accountability. It didn’t find much of this, not surprisingly, in the private schools, and it was blind to any other sort. This view also seemed to be shared by everyone I else I read. A UNICEF report had exactly the same narrow conception of accountability. For UNICEF, it meant things like “parent-teacher associations” and “citizen input into state regulatory institutions,” rather than the kind of accountability hinted at by Jhazeb in Karachi, or by the proprietor of Sunrise Preparatory School in Accra.

  I was puzzled by why this alternative accountability—to parents and children—didn’t merit more attention from the development experts. If you are paying fees at a private school, as the parents of Jhazeb in Karachi are doing, then doesn’t that lead to a relationship of accountability with the school owners that makes them interested in what you value and want for your child? How does it do this? Put simply, you can withdraw your patronage, stop paying your fees, and take your child elsewhere if you don’t get what you value. Of course, there are some complications from doing so. For a start, you must find another suitable private school; your child might be quite settled in the current school so you’ll have to weigh the benefits of changing schools against the costs of not changing. And school owners know that. But above all, school owners know that you can move your child, that you have the right to leave, and so will, other things being equal, strive to ensure that you don’t. Otherwise, they lose income. And if enough children leave, they go out of business.

  Intriguingly, some development experts did seem clear that this kind of accountability—market accountability—was effective for the poor in numerous areas of their lives. The World Bank called it the “short route” to accountability, to be contrasted unfavorably when it comes to education with the “long route,” where accou
ntability comes only through poor people’s voting for politicians who then may, but usually do not, enforce accountability through the political process. But although they point to its manifest benefits in many areas for the poor, and are clear that it is a much easier form of accountability than political accountability, they are equally as clear that it cannot work for education.

  I had to get to the bottom of why the development experts rejected this short route to accountability for education. Usefully, the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004 spelled out in depth the advantages of market accountability but gave detailed “good reasons” why it was not suitable for education. I carefully tried to follow its argument.

  First, it favorably describes how accountability works in a typical market transaction, when, say, a person buys a sandwich: “In buying a sandwich you ask for it (delegation) and pay for it (finance). The sandwich is made for you (performance). You eat the sandwich (which generates relevant information about its quality). And you then choose to buy or not buy a sandwich another day (enforceability), affecting the profits of the seller.” That is, accountability is a relationship between purchaser and provider, with five constituent parts: delegation, finance, performance, information, and enforceability. All these parts are important, it says. If any are missing, “service failure” results.

  Now the wonderful thing about a competitive market, the report argues, is that it “automatically” creates accountability between sellers and buyers: “The key information is customer satisfaction, and the key enforceability is the customer’s choice of supplier. Competitive markets have proved a remarkably robust institutional arrangement for meeting individual interests.”

  On the face of it, this discussion appeared rather promising. For it would seem to show very neatly the advantages that private schools for the poor have over public schools in terms of accountability. I felt I could easily substitute parents and schools into the World Bank’s formula to show the advantages of this “short route” to accountability quite clearly. In a private schooling market, it would mean this:

  You choose a primary school for your child (delegation) and pay the monthly fees (finance). The schooling is delivered to your child (performance). You check on how your child is doing in school, perhaps by noting how her exercise books are marked or how well he speaks English with his friends (which generates relevant information about its quality). And you then choose either to send your child to the school next month or to change schools (enforceability), affecting the income of the school owner.

  On the face of it, all the accountability stages appeared to work well. In the public school system, however, the “accountability” system wouldn’t function at all well:

  In sending your child to the local public school, you do not choose that school (uncertain delegation) and someone else pays for it (no finance). The schooling is delivered to your child (performance). You check on how your child is doing in school, perhaps by noting how her exercise books are marked or how well he speaks English with his friends (which generates relevant information about its quality). But then your only choice is whether to send your child to school at all or take him or her out of the public education system, neither of which affects the school principal’s or teachers’ pay (lack of enforceability). The only possible route to enforceability is through the political process, but that is slow, cumbersome, and, in practice, ineffective.

  So the advantages of the private system of accountability seemed obvious in the schooling example. The most important difference is “enforceability” in the private case, which of course depends in part on the issue of who pays (finance). Because the parents pay fees to the private school, they can enforce quality.

  However, the development experts are adamant: Although very effective for most other areas for the poor, this short route to accountability is not possible in education. The only possible route to accountability here is the “long route”—“by clients as citizens influencing policymakers, and policymakers influencing providers.” The short route to market accountability, whatever its virtues, is inapplicable to education. There can be “no direct accountability of the provider to the consumer.” Why not? The World Bank puts the issue thus: “For various good reasons, society has decided that the service will be provided not through a market transaction but through the government taking responsibility.”

  And it lists the good reasons—which are good enough for me to address later in a separate chapter. Before that, it’s important to realize that the development experts are very much aware of the huge problems with political accountability. The list of problems is in fact so long that it is really hard to see how it could be surmounted. If there really were no alternative, then obviously one would need to do what one could to attempt to surmount the problems, and the poor would have to be patient. But why neglect the obvious solution of private education for the poor?

  Problems, Problems, Problems

  The problems with the long route to accountability—political accountability—in education seem enormous, at least for the poor in developing countries. The first problem is what the World Bank calls “voice” failure. This is the failure of the poor to have any influence over what their governments do. They have no “voice” in the political process. The state, controlled by politicians and administrators, “simply does not care about providing services” for the poor. The clear signs are “when too little budget is devoted to services for poor people, and when the budget is allocated to meet political interests.”

  But why don’t poor people just vote bad governments out of office? Sometimes, the World Bank says, the electoral system simply doesn’t work—it is itself subject to corruption. But even when it at least works at this basic level, poor people find it hard to influence politicians about the state of public education. Poor people, like everyone else, might vote along ethnic lines, not particularly concerned with evaluating how their chosen politicians have performed with public education. (A joke doing the rounds in India at the time of one election I witnessed was, “In other countries you cast your vote; in India you vote your caste.”) Or they might simply take with a grain of salt politicians’ promises to improve public education services because they know that politicians haven’t delivered in the past. It is far easier simply to vote for candidates who offer to provide “ready cash and jobs” for one’s particular ethnic group, race, or caste.

  According to the World Bank, one of the severe problems with using the political process to reform education to benefit the poor is the politicization of education: schooling has become a political battleground, with different groups in society competing for scarce public resources, often with contradictory desires. The elites and middle classes may say they want universal education, but they won’t vote to jeopardize more public spending on higher education, which benefits their own children. Politicians see the public education system as an easy way to provide patronage. And teachers unions, very powerful forces in many developing countries, act in their own interests, to better their wages and conditions of services by enhancing job security and extending holidays—exactly as I’d found in India, even to the extent of adding “casual leave” on top of the already-existing long school holidays—all of which can act against the interests of the poor. These contradictory pressures lead, the World Bank report said, to political inertia and corruption: “Politics generally does not favour reforms that improve services for poor people. Such reforms require upsetting entrenched interests, which have the advantage of inertia, history, organizational capability, and knowing exactly what is at stake. Policymakers and providers are generally more organized, informed, and influential than citizens, particularly poor citizens.”

  Using the political process has not been an effective way for the poor to improve public education. But even if solutions can be found, through reforms such as decentralization and improving information, the World Bank points out an even greater state failure, “compact failure.” Here, the state fails to
enforce responsibility for public services. It cannot, or will not, motivate management to organize or incentivize its “frontline workers.” So even if poor people could influence politicians and policymakers, the World Bank says, the politicians and policymakers in turn cannot effectively influence the service providers. They can’t or won’t “impose penalties for underperformance.” They won’t fire teachers, for example, so absenteeism goes unpunished. Even if poor people’s political voices are strengthened, at best this might make “policymakers want to improve services for the poor. But they still may not be able to.” Even well-intentioned policymakers “often cannot offer the incentives and do the monitoring to ensure that providers serve the poor.” Problems such as teacher absenteeism and the “rude treatment” of pupils and their parents—the social distance I often encountered whenever I visited government schools—are all symptoms of this problem, reports the World Bank.

  To counter absenteeism, corruption, and underperformance in practical terms, the World Bank suggests that the authorities strictly monitor teachers and principals. But again, this only brings further problems, and it is difficult to see how they can be solved—even in theory, let alone in practice. The authorities could try to compensate teachers by results—rewarding those whose children achieve higher grades and punishing those whose children don’t. But teachers unions resist anything so simple, for reasons that the World Bank also seems to find persuasive: “Good teaching is a complex endeavour,” it agrees. Teaching quality can’t be assessed only “on the basis of student scores on a standardized examination,” it reports, because schooling “has many other objectives.” Whether it’s because of this complexity or simply because of teachers union intransigence, it doesn’t matter as far as outcomes are concerned: the result, the World Bank reports, is that “simple proposals of ‘pay for performance’ for individual teachers and principals have rarely proved workable.”