The Beautiful Tree
Page 31
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, where there might be only a few schools, or even none? Even if we could, in theory, fund the schooling of all these rural children, this would still be useless if there were no private schools for them to attend. 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, just as their numbers are higher in urban or small-town areas where fee-paying capacity is higher. Based on what I have seen in my journeys, it seems likely that private entrepreneurs would respond to this kind of incentive. 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 teacher recruitment, training, and/or accommodation. As long as everyone is suitably incentivized, there would seem to be no reason why a process of judicious experimentation couldn’t discover ways of making this work, even in apparently inhospitable places.
Quality Matters
Getting Amaretch into private school is one, solvable, challenge. But what about the quality of education when she gets there? At a recent conference, Professor Keith Lewin said to me that there should be “a plague on both your houses.” Candidly he agreed that government schools for the poor are appalling. But so too are private schools for the poor: “You might have shown that they’re better than public schools,” he chided, “but they’re still rubbish.”
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. How can we get Amaretch’s private school to be of a higher infrastructural standard? Here a creative new frontier for investors and philanthropists is dramatically revealed, where the investment community can potentially make a huge difference in the lives of poor people. 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.
I explored this with 10 to 15 case study schools in each of the countries, to gain a deeper insight into finances. In every instance, the case study schools showed a viable return for the proprietor. For example, 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. Teacher salaries averaged 4,388 naira ($30.26) per month, with other recurrent expenditures at 7,450 naira ($51.38) per month, plus the proprietor’s monthly salary of 8,000 naira ($55.17). Such a school made a surplus of about $1,456 per annum, or about 20 percent of its income.
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. Again, through the Educare Trust in Hyderabad, and Educare in Makoko, Nigeria, I set up two small pilot loan schemes, each funded by donations of $25,000, that offered loans of between $500 and $2,000, at commercial interest rates to private school managers who wanted to improve their infrastructure. The entrepreneurs submitted detailed proposals, which were vetted, along with their (usually informal) accounts, to ensure that the plans were reasonable and the repayments—typically over three years—were affordable. Typical projects included building proper latrines, refurbishing classrooms or building new ones, buying land, or on the lower end, buying a school bus and desks and chairs. I’ve also seen the need for a bit of financial management advice and training, to help school proprietors manage their budgets more effectively. All this can be provided with philanthropic funding.
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. 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. In these small-scale projects, we’ve had no problem with defaulters, using some of the mechanisms common to microfinance programs, such as peer pressure, in our case through private school associations. If larger microfinance agencies can embrace such loans, then it could be taken to a much larger scale. Easier access to financing could mean that problems with poor private school infrastructure are also relatively easily solvable. Amaretch’s school is already looking much better.
But perhaps Professor Lewin had in mind other, deeper problems with budget private schools, concerning teaching methods and curriculum? Suppose Amaretch is a really bright girl. Will she then be stuck in a class, learning by rote, week after week, topics that she could easily assimilate in a few hours? Or suppose she’s not so quick herself, perhaps because of her lack of schooling. Will she then be stuck in a class falling further behind the others and eventually fail altogether? And what will she be taught? Will she be forced to digest subject after subject of the state national curriculum that she’ll only pass in exams through extensive cramming and that will make her wonder what the point of all that cramming is? And will she wish that she had covered other topics in school that would seem much more immediately relevant to what she would need in her adult life? If she became the proprietor of a small business, would she wish she’d had training in business skills, entrepreneurship, or accounting methods? If she got a job in a product-support call center, would she wish she’d had an advanced course in English pronunciation? In short, even when she gets to private school, can we really say that she is receiving the education that she deserves, rather than a certain amount of dubious schooling?
I have to admit, for what it’s worth, that I find this kind of objection quite compelling. 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. It always makes me sad when I see the brightest kids treading water, struggling to maintain enthusiasm for rote learning a passage that they understood at the first reading; some become disruptive, even drop out of school altogether, as a result of their boredom. Conversely, it breaks my heart to see less-gifted children (described in India as “dull,” which always makes me cringe) struggling to keep pace with their class, left behind because they’ve not mastered basic reading and arithmetic, and who now will never do so, because the rest of the class has moved on. And the children in between too, I often wonder whether their learning couldn’t be made more engaging, more liberating, less passive.
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 deviate from it, and more to the point, parents want their children to pass the state exams, currently the only route to higher education and employment. And the teaching styles—well, they are ones that everyone is used to and feels comfortable with, the way that proprietors and teachers themselves were taught, and parents accept as being the right ones.
In short, I’m as bothered by pedagogy and curric
ulum as many development experts are. 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 methods (the District Primary Education Project is a notable example in India), or in using high-technology solutions, such as television, interactive radio, or information technology, to bypass teachers altogether, or to train them in “modern” methods, or to supplement classroom teaching with these beamed-in add-ons.5
But the stark fact is, little or none of this really works—the child-centered methods 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 methods once the aid workers have bid farewell. 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. Presumably, aid agencies engaged with these kinds of projects assume that, once they’ve shown how brilliant they are, then governments will pick up the tab. Unfortunately, the evidence shows that this doesn’t happen. Once the aid agencies disappear, everything reverts to the status quo ante. Such projects do not manage to harness any incentives for poor people to continue with, or invest in, the intervention, and it is hard to see how any of the proposed solutions can overcome these combined problems.
But is the correct response then to simply let things continue as they have and avert our gaze whenever we go into these classrooms and see what is taking place? I don’t think it need be. For again, the private school market provides the basis for a possible way forward.
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. I found it rather embarrassing on my first visit to the slums of Hyderabad back in 2000, that I was asked to speak at a meeting of private school proprietors and was bombarded with questions about what they could do better with teaching and curricula. I was from overseas, where everything was much better, what could I advise them to do? And 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?” I used to hide behind the idea that I was there to learn from them, that they had so much to teach us in the West. I still think that’s true: the very fact that private school proprietors are there at all in these seemingly inhospitable environments is something that we can learn from and gain inspiration.
But I think now that it was a bit of a cop-out to say that I had nothing to contribute, only things to learn, about the way they handled their curricula and teaching. That was certainly their reaction, as attested by the many disappointed faces when I trotted out the “I’m only here to learn” line. But we don’t have to go the route of the failed—or soon discontinued—aid interventions to effect real change. Private school proprietors’ eagerness for new ideas is the key reason why not—and why they are motivated, incentivized, to want to explore new ideas in a completely different way from those handing out or receiving aid funds.
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” by the media. Now, Hyderabad is flooded with call centers; many alumni of private schools for the poor seek employment with them but are stymied by their low standard of English pronunciation—their teachers can’t help because they don’t speak English well enough either. I invited Mitra to try the hole-in-the-wall approach here: could children teach themselves to improve their English pronunciation?
We conducted the experiment in Wajid’s Peace High School. The details—based on a speech-to-text recognition program6—need not concern us here. The experiment showed that this method was successful in improving English pronunciation. But what happened after the experiment was most relevant. Wajid is closely connected to many other private school proprietors through various federations and informal associations. Many came to see what was happening in his school. Many came to learn of our findings. And they wanted what Wajid had in their schools. And they were prepared to pay for it, of course; they didn’t simply want it handed to them. Previously, his preferred investment in computer technology was, once suitable surpluses had been accrued, to acquire as many secondhand computers as possible, and a computer teacher. Now proprietors like Sajid-Sir were saying to us: “Perhaps we don’t need a computer teacher. We need the hole in the wall.”
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. School proprietors need to differentiate themselves within the marketplace. To maintain or even increase market share, they need parents to know that their school is special. If a method of learning seems to have demonstrably better outcomes, they’ll want it for their schools.
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. In some of the poorest areas of the world, private education makes up the vast majority of school enrollment. 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 non-commercial, nonprofit lines. 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.
In poor areas of developing countries, however, private education forms the majority of provision. In these areas, parents have genuine choices of a number of competing private schools within easy reach and are sensitive to the price mechanism (schools close if demand is low, and new schools open to cater to expanded demand); in these genuine markets, educational entrepreneurs respond to parental needs and requirements.
So let’s return to concerns about the quality of education for Amaretch, and what outsiders could usefully offer by way of improvements. We don’t have to be afraid of imposing solutions that are not deemed practicable by parents. We don’t have to worry about finding solutions that are not sustainable because no one can afford to follow them through once the aid money dries up. Instead, if we’re concerned about teaching and learning and curricula, we can try small-scale experiments—like the one in Hyderabad with Sugata Mitra—to see if something works. If it does, we won’t keep it to ourselves but will make sure everyone knows about it. (The same is true if it doesn’t work, so that people can avoid repeating that mistake.) 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 i
t—perhaps using loan funds to help. The problems of sustainability and scalability that so bedevil any aid intervention are solved. Testing new methods in the market is where venture philanthropy can make its mark. If a new method works, then let the market take it up. If it doesn’t, then we’ll know that our aspirations for educating the poor with that method were misplaced, but we can always try another.
The Brand-Conscious Poor
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.”8 In private education, brand names could be important in helping solve the genuine information problem that exists—and they provide a third major opportunity for outsiders to assist with the education market. How can poor parents judge whether one private school in their community is better than another and whether it adequately serves the educational needs of their children? Typically, my research showed that 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. Even parents who don’t bother with these kinds of judgments or exploring the different options benefit because some (perhaps most?) parents do bother. 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. Although not all parents discharge their educational responsibilities with care and wisdom, private school managers must cater to those who do. This is another way in which the market deals with a problem—apathetic parents—that bedevils public school systems (since public schools provide no economic incentive for their principals to cater to the demands of well-informed parents).