A LUTA CONTINUA - Papers.ssrn.com

‘Education for all’ through privatisation?

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

‘ A L U TA C O N T I N U A ’ ( T H E STRUGGLE CONTINUES): R E J O I N D E R T O WAT K I N S James Tooley

It is unclear why Watkins ignored a fundamental point of my article: education for the poor can be financed by the state or through private means, by those who are not poor so affordability of education need not be an issue. The fact that the poor are willing to pay fees when alternative state education is free is an indictment of state education in developing countries. The poor simply cannot wait in the hope that the state might provide better education. Their needs are urgent and can be met by private schools.

Introduction I read Watkins’ spirited response to my article while waiting to meet one of the managing directors of the World Bank, who had invited me to Washington DC to discuss my team’s latest findings. Readers will forgive me if I chuckled when I read Watkins’ conclusion that ‘Professor Tooley and his like-minded colleagues are ploughing a lonely furrow. Nobody, it seems, is listening to them. Long may it stay that way.’ Perhaps our lives are a little less lonely than he imagines! Watkins’ tone suggests that he disagrees fundamentally with my position. However, the structure of my argument consisted of four basic points and it would seem in fact that Watkins agrees with the first three:

unaccountable to parents, especially when the communities and parents in question are poor, and/or members of ethnic minorities, and/or living in marginal areas.’ That poor parents are flocking to private schools because state schools are inadequate and unaccountable seems to be useful agreement on basic but important facts. I am still surprised at the ease with which development experts, like Watkins, concede such significant territory; with such agreement, there should be plenty of space to move forward constructively. The only source of contention for Watkins in the structure of my argument would seem to be the final point, which can be characterised as follows: 4.

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Private schools for the poor are burgeoning across a range of developing countries; Watkins concurs: ‘That many such parents currently send their children to private schools is well documented’. Poor parents are sending their children to private schools partly because of inadequacies of state education, especially teacher absenteeism; Watkins agrees, citing the evidence of the Probe Team. Poor parents also object to the lack of accountability in the state sector; Watkins agrees: ‘That many education systems in developing countries fail to meet even the most basic requirements for accountability is not in dispute. Too often these systems are unresponsive to local community needs and

© Institute of Economic Affairs 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, Oxford

The conclusion drawn by many – probably most – development experts is that ‘education for all’ means state education for all, and that the private sector is a distraction. However, are they missing another alternative? That is, to go with the grain of current parental choice, and think about the potential of private education to meet the educational needs of all.

Here Watkins comes down firmly against considering any other option than state education for the poor. To think otherwise is ‘a politically motivated assertion rather than an evidence-based argument’. Of one of the possible solutions I put forward, vouchers, he notes, presumably to scare off readers, that these are familiar from ‘the work of neoconservative educationalists in the United States and the libertarian right in Britain’. If I were to employ

iea e c o n o m i c similar scare tactics, I could just as easily say that the idea of a government monopoly in education, ‘is familiar from the work of educationalists in Nazi Germany and Marxists in the former USSR’. In any case, his characterisation misses the important point that social democrat Sweden has the only universal education voucher system in the West (Tooley et al., 2003), and it is arguable that the first education voucher proposal was put forward by the radical Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (West, 2003). Minor differences between Watkins and Tooley Moving away from the main structure of my argument, what dispute is there about the details? I find six main areas of disagreement. The first two are relatively minor: First, Watkins accuses me of misrepresentation of others’ evidence, especially the Probe Team. It certainly wasn’t my intention to misrepresent anyone: as I’ve stressed elsewhere (e.g., Tooley and Dixon, 2003), it is significant that, although the Probe Team do paint what they term a ‘relatively rosy’ picture of the private sector, where ‘accountability to the parents’ leads to ‘a high level of classroom activity . . . better utilisation of facilities, greater attention to young children, responsiveness of teachers to parental complaints’, etc. (Probe Team, 1999, p. 105), this does not mean that they end up endorsing it – I had meant for readers to infer that the Probe Team were some of the ‘development experts’ who very curiously rejected that possibility. Second, in passing towards the end of his article, Watkins notes that not even Adam Smith would have supported the case for privatisation: ‘Adam Smith himself rejected the argument. He recommended universal public schooling, largely at government expense, to overcome the exclusion of the poor’. Just because Adam Smith was right about many things, doesn’t mean to say that he was right about everything. Indeed, there has been a lively discussion in recent years about Smith’s views on education and the state (see Tooley and Stanfield, 2003). But let’s be clear, Adam Smith certainly didn’t recommend for education anything like the ‘universal public schooling’ that we see supported by Watkins in countries around the world now. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations, Smith recommended a system where state aid was intended mainly to finance school buildings, leaving teachers substantially dependent for their incomes on the fees received from even the poorest parents. And he was at pains to avoid state training and provision of teachers. Very much as in the private schools for the poor in developing countries now, people were to be free to choose since ‘they would soon find better teachers for themselves than any whom the state could provide for them’ (Smith, 1950, p. 281). So the argument from Adam Smith is not quite as clear-cut as Watkins appears to believe.

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Major disagreements between Watkins and Tooley Empirical evidence The remaining four issues seem to be the substantial areas of disagreement: third, there is the issue of empirical evidence about the merits of public versus private education. Watkins offers two sources of evidence, from India and Tanzania. He writes, ‘contrary to Tooley’s claims, the [Probe] team emphatically did not find that private schools systematically outperform state schools when parental income is taken into account’, but that, in private schools for the poor, ‘the curriculum was geared towards cramming and rote learning rather than the wider personal development of children’. In fact, the Probe Team systematically neither looked at educational performance nor at quality issues, but their judgements here are subjective and interpretative, so cannot be used in the substantive way that Watkins implies. He also suggests that in Tanzania, ‘Once again, there is no evidence that private schools produce better results if parental wealth is taken into account.’ This is completely wrong: in their systematic research in Tanzania, controlling for socio-economic factors and the school choice process, Jimenez et al. (1991) found that a student with the background of the average government school student would score 1.16 times higher in a private than a government school on an average of maths and verbal reasoning tests (p. 211). What is true is that in the (only) study to which Watkins refers (Dyer, 2003), it is stated that some research has found that ‘private schools are not as effective as government ones’ (section 1.1). However, the research to which Dyer is referring is that by Lassibille and Tan (2001), which compared the whole range of government secondary schools with a narrow range of private schools, viz. Christian (not for profit) and Wazazi (not for profit) schools, run by parents’ organisations affiliated to the ruling party in the country. But private schools run by individuals, foundations and private businesses did ‘not figure’ in their study; even though such schools account for 31% of secondary schooling in Tanzania! (p. 166). Moreover, not only do Lassibille and Tan acknowledge that Wazazi schools are considered ‘the less attractive option’, with those attending taken ‘from a weaker pool of students’ (p. 153), they also note that the private schools in their sample are almost all ‘relatively new schools’ (p. 165), which the authors themselves suggest may not have had time to establish themselves, with problems of ‘lack of “brand name” recognition and instability in clientele’ (p. 165). So it seems that the study is not comparing like with like. Even worse, it turns out that Dyer has apparently misrepresented the findings of Lassibille and Tan. Far from showing universal superiority of


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government over private schools, what the researchers actually say is that ‘Wazazi [private] schools lag behind only in English and Kiswahili (and actually rank ahead in mathematics) . . . Christian [private] schools are comparable in efficiency with Government schools in the teaching of mathematics, while Wazazi schools are more efficient; both types of private schools lag behind Government schools, however, in the teaching of English and Kiswahili [p. 164].’

Moreover, ‘comparing scores in forms 2 and 4, students in Wazazi schools appear to make more progress than other students during this segment of the secondary cycle’ (p. 152), while both types of private schools are more effective in this ‘value-added’ sense than government schools in Kiswahili. So it seems that Watkins is not on strong ground here. But we share the sense that empirical evidence on this issue is important, and perhaps I should have pointed to some of this in my original article. For there have been numerous studies over the last 15 years or so that have investigated the relative performance of public and private schools in a range of developing countries: for instance, Jimenez et al. (1988), investigating mathematics achievement in Thailand, found that ‘private schools are, on average, more effective and less costly than public schools in improving student performance in mathematics’ (p. 139). Kingdon’s (1996) study in urban Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, found that, after controlling for a range of family background variables, students in private unaided schools scored up to 30% higher on standardised tests in mathematics than in the other school types. When the cost per achievement point was computed, private unaided schools achieved higher achievement for less than half the cost of the government schools. Similarly, Duraisamy and Subramanian’s (2003) study in Tamil Nadu, India, explored English and mathematics achievement in higher secondary schools. Students in private unaided schools performed better than those in government schools. Govinda and Varghese (1993) also found that children attending private unaided schools in Madhya Pradesh, India, outperformed children attending government and private-aided schools in maths and Hindi. Indeed, ‘managementtype – government or private – emerges as the most significant factor influencing learner achievement’ (p. 265). However, while all these studies have found private schools outperforming state schools, even after controlling for socio-economic factors and the school choice process, a clear shortcoming of such research for my argument is that none has specifically looked at private and public education for the poor. This is a lacuna that my team is trying to fill, taking the issue of empirical evidence on performance and quality very seriously. We are engaged in systematic


econometric studies in five countries – Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, India and China – in conjunction with local teams, gathering achievement data on 4,000 randomly-selected Grade 4 children in the slums and villages in each country, together with pupil-, teacherand school-level data, that is answering the question of whether or not private education serves the poor better than the public, in terms of outcomes, inputs and cost-effectiveness. While I may have tried the patience of Watkins and other readers in the previous article by referring to our as yet unpublished research findings on the proportion of poor families using private education, it would probably be inappropriate to say what the evidence here is pointing to, without it being peer-reviewed and without critics like Watkins having the opportunity to peruse the method carefully (anyone impatient for the provisional results can view our website, www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest). But let’s move into hypothetical mode: suppose that these results or similar studies showed the private sector for the poor outperforming the public sector. Would this make any difference to Watkins’ position? From reading his work, I’m not sure that it would. For, whether its better or worse academically, or more or less costeffective, supporting the private sector would seem to come up against the fundamental objection: it is unfair and unequitable to do so, because many families cannot afford to use it. School finance This brings us to the fourth major criticism of Watkins, on an area where my argument is ‘reinforced by a lack of conceptual clarity’: finance. Watkins suggests that my perspective on the affordability of private education in Hyderabad, India, is that of someone stuck in ignorance in an ivory tower; viewed from the slums, ‘it can look very different’. He computes that for a family ‘living on a minimum wage in Hyderabad’, ‘roughly one-quarter of its income’ would be required to ‘put three children through primary school’. In fact, in my article, I calculate that it could be even higher than this: I suggested (up to) 10% of a rickshaw puller’s expected income per child, so three children would be 30%, not 25%. But it’s when I spend time away from my office in Newcastle in the slums that I find poor parents telling me they would rather invest their income in this way, than send their children to totally inadequate state schools. But of course affordability is the key issue. It is true that some parents – a minority in all of our studies – cannot afford to pay for private schools, and others – perhaps a majority – struggle to meet the costs. But that is precisely why one possible recommendation is to consider vouchers (publicly and/or privately financed) as a way of helping the poor access private education. For vouchers would mean that poor parents don’t have to pay some or all of the direct costs

iea e c o n o m i c of schooling, but that this is met from other budgets (state or private). It’s not clear why Watkins misses the significance of this proposal. Instead he says that ‘recourse to household financing can exacerbate inequalities based on income and gender’. The income factor is certainly the case – perhaps this is one of the ‘blindingly obvious’ factors that Watkins himself is guilty of stressing. The gender issue may be more complex – for our figures thus far don’t suggest that there is a significantly higher proportion of boys than girls benefiting from private education. But again, hypothetically, even if the evidence pointed this way, there would seem to be two policy options that could emerge from this finding – that state education is the only way forward, or that access for disadvantaged groups to private education should be enhanced, perhaps through (state or privately financed) vouchers. The second, for some reason, is not on Watkins’ radar: at least, he says it is not, although, curiously, when he comes to list examples of successful projects that show that state education can work (see below), at least one of his successful policies (the co-operation between state and an NGO in Bangladesh, which ‘has led to dramatic gains in the enrolment of girls’) would seem to be using precisely the mechanism of a targeted voucher to enable girls to enrol in ‘RNG’ – registered non-governmental – schools! (ADB, 2003; for details on other targeted voucher schemes in developing countries, see Tooley et al., 2003). Moreover, Watkins asserts that ‘willingness to pay is not the same as ability to pay’, for paying for schooling ‘divert[s] resources needed to maintain nutrition, . . . maintain shelter, invest in production or provide a buffer against future emergencies’. Again, this is blindingly obvious. If you pay for one thing, you don’t have those funds available for other purchases. Yes, spending on education does ‘divert’ resources. But so does spending on food and shelter. Does this mean for Watkins that we should nationalise them as well? Accountability Fifth, Watkins takes me to task over the issue of accountability. Now, as noted above, Watkins shows welcome candour when he says that ‘many education systems in developing countries fail to meet even the most basic requirements for accountability’. His riposte is to say, however, that although this is often the case, it’s not always the case, and gives examples, often of small-scale interventions, from El Salvador, Uganda, Bangladesh, Brazil and two Indian states (Himachel Pradesh and Rajhastan), which have led to increased accountability. Such examples, he says, ‘could be multiplied many times over’. I’m certainly not in favour of any notion of ‘economic determinism’ that suggests that states can never get it right: indeed, the very notion of a public voucher system is based on

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the premise that states would have to get that particular reform right. So, if his examples are correct, then this is great for the people involved. But what would Watkins recommend for poor parents who are not party to these experimental reforms? The way forward This brings us to the sixth area of disagreement between us: what is to be done? It would seem that, according to Watkins, poor parents who are not lucky enough to be involved in such reforms will just have to wait until governments make things better. Each of his good practice examples highlights, says Watkins, that ‘Real empowerment requires that poor people have access to information, that they develop an organisational capacity and that governments create participative and accountable structures’ (emphasis added). The process of ‘change is difficult’, says Watkins, it takes considerable time and political effort; but even when change is instituted purportedly to benefit poor people, as in his example of Kenya where free primary education was introduced, this leads to short- or medium-term difficulties: ‘Overcrowded classrooms and shortages of teachers and teaching materials are the most immediate challenge – as witnessed by the current difficulties facing Kenya’. But, for Watkins, the only answer to such problems is ‘increased public investment and improvements in service delivery’. My point is that such increases and improvements may not be forthcoming, or effective, not even in the long term, let alone the short term, so what should poor people do now? Watkins says that parents should not ‘withdraw their children from the public education system and put them in private schools’, for this ‘reduces parental pressure to improve government schools’. The message from Watkins is clear, poor parents will just have to wait until ‘things get better’: by removing your children from the totally inadequate state school, implies Watkins, you are jeopardising the state system. It doesn’t matter that you are poor yourself, and that your children’s education may be the only viable vehicle out of poverty: you’d better hang on in there in the state sector, and hope that something happens to make things better. Meanwhile, your children can irrevocably suffer from teachers who don’t turn up, or who don’t teach if they do turn up, until governments learn the lessons from experiments elsewhere. But don’t, whatever you do, send your children to private school! Viewed from the slums, I suggest parental perception may be less sanguine and more impatient. They may not feel they have any impact on distant or corrupt political processes. They may not believe in any case that politicians can or will effect solutions to their problems. Their only realistic alternative is to exit the state system. Which is why, in our wider work, we consider ways of working with the decisions


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parents make now, and look for ways of supporting the private sector – even without instituting political reforms such as vouchers. For progress towards accountable education may not necessarily involve complex political processes and the realignment of power relationships. Instead, the lessons coming loudly and clearly from parents using the private system is that it involves a very simple and easy transfer of power from the politician to the parent, and this can be done now. And for those who are unable to make that move for financial reasons, there are other ways of helping that do not involve wholesale change through the political process – through targeted non-governmental financial assistance and micro-finance, for instance. What I am arguing is that Watkins’ attitude seems rather patronising to the poor. Staying in state education and exerting pressure might work (let’s say for the sake of argument) to improve things in developed countries; perhaps it is a form of neocolonial imperialism to say that it has to be the only solution in countries without strong democratic traditions and with corrupt political processes. Education for all Watkins concludes by saying that ‘developingcountry governments, the donor community, and most development economists now accept the case for free universal education, at least at the primary level’. He may be right in general. That doesn’t stop us believing that poor people deserve better than mediocre state education, and to note the choices they are now making for private education. Putting the two things together, it leads us to seek to challenge the mainstream development view that the only way forward for ‘education for all’ is to support free education in state schools. A much more immediately beneficial way forward for equity, justice and educational achievement could be to go with the grain of parental choices now, and assist


them in making those choices in whatever ways we can. And, pace Watkins, with empirical data behind us, we are not being totally ignored in our efforts. References ADB (Asian Development Bank) (2003) Special Evaluation Study on the Government and Nongovernment Provision of Primary Education in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal, January 2003. Duraisamy, P. and T. P. Subramanian (2003) ‘Costs, Financing and Efficiency of Public and Private Schools in Tamil Nadu’, in J. B. G. Tilak (ed.) Financing Education in India: Current Issues and Changing Perspectives, Delhi: Ravi Books. Dyer, K. (2003) ‘Private Primary and Pre-schooling in Tanzania’s Education Sytem’, Report for Maarifa ni Ufonto. Available at www.ufunguo.org. Govinda, R. and N. V. Varghese (1993) Quality of Primary Schooling in India: A Case Study of Madhya Pradesh, Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning. Jimenez, E., M. E. Lockheed and V. Paqueo (1991) ‘The Relative Efficiency of Private and Public Schools in Developing Countries’, The World Bank Research Observer, 6, 2, 205 –218. Jimenez, E., M. E. Lockheed and N. Wattanawaha (1988) ‘The Relative Efficiency of Private and Public Schools: The Case of Thailand’, The World Bank Economic Review, 2, 2, 139–164. Kingdon, G. (1996) ‘The Quality and Efficiency of Private and Public Education: A Case Study in Urban India’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 58, 1, 57–81. Lassibille, G. and J. Tan (2001) ‘Are Private Schools more Efficient than Public Schools? Evidence from Tanzania’, Education Economics, 9, 2, 145–172. Probe Team, The (1999) Public Report on Basic Education in India, Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. (1950) The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (6th edn. [1950]). Tooley, J. and P. Dixon (2003) Private Schools for the Poor: A Case Study from India, Reading: CfBT Research and Development. Tooley, J. and J. Stanfield (eds.) (2003) Government Failure: E. G. West on Education, London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Tooley, J., P. Dixon and J. Stanfield (2003) Delivering Better Education, London: Adam Smith Institute. West, E. G. (2003) ‘Tom Paine’s Voucher Scheme for Public Education’, in J. Tooley and J. Stanfield (eds.) Government Failure: E. G. West on Education, London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.