Government Schools or Private Schools: Which serves poor children better?

In an article in The Atlantic (March 2007) senior editor Clive Crook describes findings concerning the effect of small for-profit (often a few pennies a day) private schools in poor regions of the world. For years international aid agencies have declared that the only hope for equipping poor people with basic literacy and numeracy is to improve the free, compulsory, state-provided schools.

Crook reports the following: Public schools in most poor countries have long been recognized to be ineffective. Teachers are frequently unqualified for their work. Perhaps worse, they are often uninterested in it: In many poor countries, teaching jobs are viewed as sinecures, and many teachers are disinclined to show up for work at all. They do tend to organize, however. Their salaries add up, and public schools in most developing countries make heavy demands on the public purse.

British Professor James Tooley researched the reach and performance of private schools for the extremely poor in India and elsewhere, supported not by official agencies but by the private Templeton Foundation. These private schools were smaller on average and some of them offered free or reduced rates to the very poorest families. The parents of full-fee students, desperately poor themselves, willingly subsidized those in direct need.

Often these schools are run by one or only a few teachers. Tooley found that on the whole, these schools are doing a better job of teaching the poorest children than the far more expensive state schools. Many parents, poor as they may be, have chosen to reject the state schools and to pay perhaps a tenth of their meager incomes to educate their children privately, Crook reports. Tooley’s findings conform very well to the views of the late Milton Friedman, who spent the last years of his life arguing that publicly funded vouchers and a market of privately run competing schools were the way to fix another education system in urgent need of repair: America’s.