Private Education In The Slums

HE WAS IN Hyderabad, India looking at the city’s main tourist attraction, the Charminar, when, as Clive Crook relates in The Atlantic Monthly, education professor James Tooley

came across a school for the children of slum dwellers. To his surprise, he found that this was not a state school but a private one—providing education to the extremely poor and collecting fees (of a few rupees a day, or less than a dime) for its services.

Tooley was an education researcher so he got some money from the Templeton Foundation to research education in the poor areas of Hyderabad.

Tooley and his team—confining their search to poor areas lacking amenities such as running water, electricity, and paved roads—counted 918 schools.

Sixty percent of the schools were private and about a quarter were black-market schools, unregulated and unknown to the authorities. They were outperforming the government schools, as you might expect. And there was something more.

Remarkably, some of the slots in these private slum schools were offered free or at reduced rates: The parents of full-fee students, desperately poor themselves, willingly subsidized those in direst need.

Tooley doesn’t get on very well with the international development community. Well, old chap, I mean, he’s been consorting with libertarian and conservative think tanks. Not really cricket, old man.

But now James Tooley has been given $100 million “to invest in private schools for the very poor in developing countries.”

But Clive Crook has good news.

Development professionals need not be concerned, however. The money is from a private foundation. It won’t waste any country’s aid budget.

Thank goodness for that! In the United States we are spending about $750 billion a year on government education. And everyone knows that education is woefully underfunded.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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