Backing the Wrong Horse: How Private Schools Are Good for the Poor

Last fall the High-Level Plenary Meet-ing of the UN General Assembly brought together more than 170 heads of state-"the largest gathering of world leaders in his-tory"-to review progress toward the Millennium Devel-opment Goals. It was, we were told, "a once-in-a-gen-eration opportunity to take bold decisions," a "defining moment in history" when "we must be ambitious." One of the internation-ally agreed-on development goals the heads of state reviewed was the achieve-ment of universal primary education by 2015. The UN was not happy with progress. There are still officially more than 115 million children out of school, it reported, of which 80 percent are in sub? Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. But even for those lucky enough to be in school, things are not good: "Most poor children who attend primary school in the developing world learn shockingly little," the UN reported.

Something had to be done. Fortunately, the UN could call on Jeffrey D. Sachs, special adviser on the Mil-lennium Development Goals to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and author of The End of Poverty. He's also director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He proposed as the way forward "Quick Wins," which have "very high potential short-term impact" and that "can be immediately implemented." Top of his list is "Eliminating school fees," to be achieved "no later than the end of 2006," funded through increased international donor aid. To the UN it's as obvious as motherhood and apple pie.

But the UN's "Quick Wins" are backing the wrong horse. For the past two and a half years I've been directing and conduct-ing research in sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana) and Asia (India and China). And what I've found is a remarkable and apparently hitherto unnoticed revolution in education, led by the poor themselves. Across the developing world the poor are eschewing free disturbed by its low quality and lack of accountability. Meanwhile, educational entrepre-neurs from the poor communities themselves set up affordable private schools to cater to the unfulfilled demand.

Take Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, reportedly the largest slum in Africa, where half a million people live in mud-walled, corrugated iron-roofed huts that huddle along the old Uganda Railway. Kenya is one of the UN's showcase examples of the virtues of introducing free basic education. Free Primary Education (FPE) was introduced in Kenya in January 2003, with a $55 million donation from the World Bank-apparently the largest straight grant that it has given to any area of social serv-ices. The world has been impressed by the outcomes: Former President Bill Clinton told an American prime-time television audience that the person he most want-ed to meet was President Kibaki of Kenya, "because he has abolished school fees," which "would affect more lives than any president had done or would ever do." The British chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, visiting Olympic Primary School, one of the five gov-ernment schools located on the out-skirts of Kibera, told the gathered crowds that British parents gave their full sup-port to their tax money being used to support FPE. Everyone-including Sir Bob Geldof and Bono-raves on about how an additional 1.3 million children are now enrolled in primary school in Kenya. All these children, the accepted wisdom goes, have been saved from ignorance by the benevolence of the international community-which must give $7 billion to $8 billion per year more so that other countries can emulate Kenya's success.

The accepted wisdom, however, is entirely wrong. It ignores the remarkable reality that the poor in Africa have not been waiting helplessly for the munificence of pop stars and Western politicians to ensure that their children get a decent education. The reality is that private schools for the poor have emerged in huge numbers in some of the most impoverished slums in Africa and southern Asia. They are catering to a majority of poor children, and outperforming their government counter-parts, for a fraction of the cost.

I went to Kibera to see for myself, with a hunch that the headline success story might be concealing some-thing. In India I had seen that the poor were not at all happy with the government schools-a recent study had shown that when researchers called unannounced on government schools for the poor, only in half was there any teaching going on at all-and so were leaving in huge numbers to go to private schools set up by local entrepreneurs charging very low fees. Would Kenya be any different? Although the education minister told me that in his country private schools were for the rich, not the poor, and so I was misguided in my quest, I perse-vered and went to the slums. It was one of Nairobi's two rainy seasons. The mud tracks of Kibera were mud baths. I picked my way with care.

Within a few minutes, I found what I was looking for. A signboard proclaimed "Makina Primary School" outside a two-story rickety tin building. Inside a cramped office Jane Yavetsi, the school proprietor, was keen to tell her story: "Free education is a big problem," she said. Since its introduction, her enroll-ment had declined from 500 to 300, and now she doesn't know how she will pay the rent on her buildings. Many parents have opted to stay, but it is the wealthier of her poor parents who have taken their children away, and they were the ones who paid their fees on time. Her school fees are about 200 Kenyan shillings (about $2.80) per month. But for the poorest children, including 50 orphans, she offers free education. She founded the school ten years ago and has been through many difficulties. But now she feels crestfallen: "With free education, I am being hit very hard."

Jane's wasn't the only private school in Kibera. Right next door was another, and then just down from her, opposite each other on the railway tracks, were two more. Inspired by what I had found, I recruited a local research team, led by James Shikwati of the Inter-Region Economic Network (IREN), and searched every muddy street and alleyway looking for schools. In total we found 76 private schools, enrolling over 12,000 students. In the five government schools serving Kibera, there were a total of about 8,000 children-but half were from the middle-class suburbs. The private schools, it turned out, even after free public education, were still serving a large majority of the poor slum children.

Was Jane's experience typical since the introduction of free primary education? Most of the 70- odd private-school owners in Kibera reported sharply declining enrollment since the introduction of FPE. Many, however, were reporting that parents had at first taken their children away, but were now bringing them back-because they hadn't liked what they'd found in the government schools. We also found the ex-managers of 35 private schools that had closed since FPE was introduced, 25 of whom said that it was FPE that had led to their demise. Calculating the net decline in private-school enrollment, it turned out that there were many, many more children who had left the private schools than the 3,300 reported to have entered the government schools on Kibera's periphery and who were part of the much celebrated one million-plus supposedly newly enrolled in education.

In other words, the headlined increase in numbers of enrolled children was fictitious: the net impact of FPE was at best precisely the same number of children enrolled in primary school-only that some had trans-ferred from private to government schools.

I discussed these findings with senior government, World Bank, and other aid officials. They were sur-prised by the number of private schools I had found. But, they said, if children had transferred from private to state schools, then this was good: "No one believes that the private schools offer quality education," I was told. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Commission for Africa agrees: conceding that mushrooming private schools exist in some unspecified parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it reports that they "are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality."

But why would parents be as foolhardy to pay to send their children to schools of such low quality? One school owner in a similar situation in Ghana, where we later conducted the research, challenged me when I observed that her school building was little more than a corrugated iron roof on rickety poles and that the gov-ernment school, just a few hundred yards away, was a smart, proper brick building. "Educa-tion is not about buildings," she scolded. "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 it open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.

Exploring further in Kenya, my team and I spoke to parents, some of whom had taken their children to the "free" government schools, but had been disillusioned by what they found and returned to the private schools. Their reasons were straight-forward: in the government schools class sizes had increased dramatically and teachers couldn't cope with 100 or more pupils, five times the number in the private-school classes. Parents compared notes when their children came home from school and saw that in the state schools pupil notebooks remained unmarked for weeks; they contrasted this with the detailed atten-tion given to all children's work in the private schools. They heard tales from their children of how teachers came to the state school and did their knitting or fell asleep. One summed up the situation succinctly: "If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and veg, you have to pay for them."

Perhaps these poor parents are misguided. Certainly that's what officials believe. But are they right? We test-ed 3,000 children, roughly half from the Nairobi slums and half from the government schools on the periphery, using standardized tests in math, English, and Kiswahili. We tested the chil-dren's and their teachers' IQs and gave questionnaires to pupils, their parents, teachers, and school managers so that we could control for all relevant back-ground variables. Although the gov-ernment schools served the privileged middle classes as well as the slum chil-dren, the private schools-serving only slum children-outperformed the government schools in mathemat-ics and Kiswahili, although the latter had a slight advantage in English. But English would be picked up by privi-leged children through television and interaction with parents. When we statistically controlled for all relevant background variables, the private schools outperformed the government schoolchildren in all three subjects.

But there was a further twist. The private schools outperformed the government schools for considerably lower cost. Even if we ignore the massive costs of the government bureaucracy and focus just on the classroom level, we find the private schools are doing better for about a third of teacher-salary costs: the average month-ly teacher salary in government schools was Ksh. 11,080 ($155) compared to Ksh. 3,735 ($52) in the private schools.

Free primary education in Kenya, a showcase exam-ple of the UN's "Quick Wins" strategy, has simply transferred children from private schools, where they got a good deal, closely supervised by parents, with teachers who turn up and teach, to state schools, where they are being dramatically let down. One parent was clear what the solution was: "We do not want our children to go to a state school. The government offered free education. Why didn't it give us the money instead and let us choose where to send our children?" For this parent, a voucher system was the obvious way forward, putting her right back in control.

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LA teacher battles opponent tougher than gangs

Migdia Chinea, a Cuban-American screenwriter and actress who has writing credits for the TV series "The Incredible Hulk" and "Superboy," recently documented how she was attacked and injured by students while she served as a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Now she's reporting that the students who attacked her, body-slammed her to the floor in front of witnesses who documented the attack, and left her with a concussion and possibly long-term injuries were the easy ones to deal with; the system that is supposed to provide care for injuries on the job is a harder opponent to beat. "Despite my being injured by students while working, with a teacher as a witness and a police report, Sedgwick, the LAUSD's insurance has not yet 'accepted' my disability claim, and perhaps won't pay in the end, until a deposition is taken three months from now. Meantime, as a woman alone, I wonder how am I going meet my financial responsibilities without incurring further debt?" Chinea told WND. "How am I going to pay my mortgage and eat?" she asked.

In an earlier commentary for WND, she described how, as a UCLA-educated graduate with a "Googleable" career as a professional screenwriter, economic conditions forced her to seek employment as a substitute teacher in order to obtain health insurance benefits. She described the violence in the L.A. schools, how there was no teaching at the school to which she was assigned, only "confinement." She told of the classrooms being left in shreds, teaching materials stolen, vandalism to her car, and the verbal and physical assaults.

One such school, she said, "is surrounded by criminal street gangs and is widely considered one of the most dangerous campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The South Side Village Boys, South Side Watts Varrio Grape, Grape Street Crips, East Side Village Bloods, Hacienda Bloods, Circle City Piru and Bounty Hunters street gangs all claim turf in that area, and frequent flare-ups of gang violence are common."

She also told about being hurt on the job, with witnesses and a police report that documented the circumstances. "On Oct. 5, 2007, at another notorious middle school, I was deliberately body-slammed on the head by two to three large young men in a P.E. class of 53 students, while another teacher (someone I had never met before) was decent enough to give a formal declaration to school and police authorities of what he had witnessed. I sustained a concussion and sciatica nerve damage as a result of this personal attack intended to 'terrorize [me].' I have memory lapses and continued head and leg pain. I'm told by the local police that this sort of physical abuse on teachers occurs with disturbing regularity. The LAUSD case nurse assigned to my case labeled my attack 'boys will be boys.'" she wrote.

In going through the process of seeking to have her medical claim paid and her injuries addressed by a district that lists local police station telephone numbers on its website, she has discovered something even worse than a body-slam. The district for which she worked, and left her injured, is the one deciding on her treatment and ultimate disability, since the school district is exempt from state-mandated worker's compensation requirements and provides its own coverage.

"I've been told by another teacher (still working as such) who has been through this hell, that LAUSD will be willing to 'kill me' to protect and cover-up their corruption - which is, in turn, not reported nor investigated by the press. I have reported this 'murderous intent or potential' to the LAPD and I'm supposed to get a call from their organized crime unit - but not so far," she told WND. "Meanwhile, the LAUSD continues to call me three times every morning and as I hear the names of the schools to which they wish to send me to 'substitute,' they're the worst schools in the district. Therefore, I believe they want to finish me off," she said.

Officials with the school district declined to answer messages left by WND requesting a comment on Chinea's allegations. The district now is being run by David L. Brewer III, who was appointed a little over a year ago to replace former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who ran the district for several years. She also reported that neither school officials nor the school district's physician will have a conversation with her, even though she's continue to try to obtain information about her situation, including an unanswered e-mail just days ago.

The district had her "released" to return to work, but the doctor who made the decision didn't notify her, then "refused my phone calls," she said. "I have requested a meeting with the LAUSD Board of Education, to no avail. I have asked them to, please, explain to me what constitutes an 'act of violence' because only a small percentage of teachers who are seriously assaulted qualify under their own definition. But there's no response," she said.

"On Jan. 5, 2008, the same day that the city held a conference hailing a citywide drop in crime, an L.A. Times columnist wrote that 60 LAUSD schools were vandalized while grim-faced teachers swept up the mess," she continued. "To be in this situation, after having achieved certain things and pulled myself up by my bootstraps and have my own home, is horrible," she told WND.

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