October 2001
Private Education for the Poor?
by Claudia Hepburn
Private education is undemocratic
and should be discouraged; its expansion
will balkanize society and will
undermine publicly funded education.
It is neither feasible nor desirable that
poor children attend private schools: the
schools’ expense puts them out of the
reach of poor families, and if they were
subsidized, would exploit society’s most
vulnerable in search of a profit. Private
education, therefore, cannot possibly
help the poor.
These arguments, or variations of them, have been drilled into us so often that most people I know believe them to be simple facts of life. If we want to help the poor, we must focus society’s resources on a strong public school system that will provide them with an equitable start in life. Private schools, with their dubious motives of profit and exclusivity, cannot and will not ever meet their needs.
Two education researchers, one Canadian, one British, have turned these clichés on their heads. With a careful examination of education history in the West and contemporary educational Professors E.G. West and James Tooley have respectively revealed startling facts about the public and private sectors in educating impoverished children. Their work directly confronts the notion that publicly-administered schools are better able than private schools to address the educational needs of the poor.
First let’s consider the work of E.G. West, whose 1965 book Education and the State outraged the established thought in the progressive ‘60s so much that it provoked a libel suit. Popular wisdom, then as now, held that the public was grossly illiterate before Egerton Ryerson and his band of merry education reformers in Canada, the United States, and Britain instituted free, compulsory schooling in the mid nineteenth century. West, the first twentieth century researcher to study school attendance records and literacy rates in Victorian Britain, uncovered a very different truth. His research, which won the libel trial, used original government documents to reveal how well private education was serving families of all income levels before the state decided education was a worthwhile undertaking.
West found that prior to 1870, when through the Forster Act the British government became heavily involved in education, school attendance and literacy rates were 90 percent or above in England and Wales. The poor were being served by private schools. Government records show that in 1818 roughly half a million children attended private schools in Britain, the same number that attends them in that country today. By 1834 that number had more than doubled to 1,294,000 without any encouragement from government funding or regulation, and by 1851, the number had nearly doubled again to 2,144,478 (West, 1965, pp. 173 and 175. Quoted in Tooley (2000), p. 68). By looking at such records as the education qualifications of criminals, the records of workhouse children, and the number of people able to sign their marriage registers, West concludes that “93 percent of school leavers were already literate when the 1870 board schools first began to operate” (West, 1965, p. 167. Quoted in Tooley, 2000, p. 70.) As Arthur Seldon explains, “education would have been among the earliest candidates for household budgeting after the staples of everyday life” (1990, p. 257. Quoted in Tooley, 2000, p. 68.)
West’s findings on educational levels in Victorian Britain are similar to the findings of researchers studying nineteenth century education in Canada, Germany, and America. For example, in Toronto, which did not have one of Ontario’s highest school attendance rates, more than 80 percent of school-aged children attended school in 1863, nearly a decade before it became compulsory (Prentice, 1988, pp. 158,164. Quoted in Coulson, p. 250). Indeed, York University Prof. Paul Axelrod has concluded that in Canada, as in England and the United States, school attendance became compulsory after high enrollment rates had been achieved (Axelrod, 1997, p.36. Quoted in Coulson, p. 250). People of all income levels held education as a top priority and did not require the state to provide them with schools or attendance laws for them to see that it was achieved. The poor did not require public schools to acquire an education.
Evidence from Canada, Britain, and the United States all suggests that school attendance and literacy rates were not dramatically lower before the state took a hand in education than they are today. The poor of Victorian times were not educationally impoverished as public education activists would have us believe. But what about today’s poor? How would they fare without government schools? Is there such a thing as private education for the poor that is effective, compassionate, and affordable?
To answer these questions, James Tooley has spent years overseas studying public and private education in developing countries. His research on schooling in India offers compelling evidence that the private sector is far more able than the state to deliver equality of opportunity to low-income children.
In “Serving the Needs of the Poor: The Private Education Sector in Developing Countries,” Tooley addresses the popular wisdom that today’s poor lack the necessary skills to choose good schools, the resources to pay for them, and the motivation to keep their children attending them (Hepburn, 2001, pp. 167-184). In India, government-sponsored research on primary education in four states found that private schools were serving students far more successfully than were government schools.
First, research shows that private schools are more effective than public after high enrollment rates had been achieved (Axelrod, 1997, p.36. Quoted in Coulson, p. 250). People of all income levels held education as a top priority and did not require the state to provide them with schools or attendance laws for them to see that it was achieved. The poor did not require public schools to acquire an education. Evidence from Canada, Britain, and the United States all suggests that school attendance and literacy rates were not dramatically lower before the state took a hand in education than they are today. The poor of Victorian times were not schools at educating low-income families. The Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) found that the quality of education in private schools is higher than in public schools, in terms of the time spent teaching, the level of teaching activity, the dedication of teachers, and the attention paid to students (Probe Team, 1999. Cited in Tooley, 2001, p. 175). The superiority of teaching by private school teachers is reflected in the academic achievement of private school students, who score almost twice as high in mathematics and reading tests as their public school counterparts (Kingdon, 1996, pp. 57-81. Cited in Tooley, 2001, p. 176-178).
Private schools may well offer superior teaching and superior academic results, argue the critics, but that is because they have so much money at their disposal with which to hand-pick their students and lure the best teachers away from the public schools. Again, Tooley’s evidence shows that not only are India’s private schools more effective than its public schools, they are much cheaper too. Though the quality of their teachers is clearly superior, private schools are able to attract and keep their teachers while paying them less than half of what public schools pay. Whereas public schools pay roughly $95 to $200 per month, private schools pay from $9.50 to $119 depending on location and qualifications. They pay less because they have less. The typical school charges $10 to $20 per year (all figures in US dollars). Geeta Kingdon, calculating the “cost per achievement point” in private and public schools, found that it cost less than half per achievement point to educate a child in the private sector than in the public sector (Cited in Tooley, 2001, pp. 177-178).
Education is about more than just money and achievement results. It is about compassion for students and their families, too. Surely, private schools, with their over-arching concern for academics and bottom lines, cannot serve their families as considerately as public schools. Tooley levels this myth, not only with his evidence about how much more conscientious private school teachers are than public ones, but also with his surprising figures about scholarships for the most needy. Tooley found that in India, an important element of the private schools for the poor was that they offered scholarships to their poorest students. In a significant number of these schools (38 percent), 15 to 20 percent of students attended free of charge. The free places were offered on the “basis of claims of need checked informally in the community” (Tooley, 2001, p.172).
Both the Indian government’s PROBE report and Tooley conclude that in private schools “accountability to the parents” leads to “a higher level of classroom activity… better utilization of facilities, greater attention to young children, [and] responsiveness to parental complaints.” This research from India is corroborated by research from other developing countries (Tooley, 2001, p. 175-176), which suggests that private education in general is more effective than public education, even when controlled for socio-economic class and the background of the students (Tooley, 2001, p. 182).
All of this suggests that the public in general—and the poor in particular— would be better served by regulatory and investment climates conducive to the development of private schools than they are by government-run schools.
Notes
1 This number is based on research done by Tooley himself, who visited private schools serving low-income families in Andhra Pradesh, a state where recognized private schools serve 11 percent of elementary school students and more than 30 percent of upper-primary level students. Recognized private schools represent about 40 percent of the total number of private schools. The other 60 percent are not recognized by the government. Welfare Reductions Post-1996 Reform
References
Axelrod, Paul (1997). The Promise of
Schooling: Education in Canada,
1800-1914, Toronto: University of
Toronto.
Coulson, Andrew (1999). Market Education:
The Unknown History, New Brunswick
(USA): Transaction Publishers.
Kingdon, Geeta (1996). The Quality and
Efficiency of Private and Public Education:
A Case Study of Urban India." "Oxford
Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 58.1.
Prentice, Alison (1988). The School Promoters:
Education and Social Class in
Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada,
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Probe Team (1999). Public Report on Basic
Education in India. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Seldon, Arthur (1990). Capitalism, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell. p. 257. Quoted in Tooley,
James (2000). Reclaiming Education, London:
Cassell.
Tooley, James (2000). Reclaiming Education,
London: Cassell.
Tooley, James (2001). "Serving the Needs of
the Poor: The Private Education Sector in
Developing Countries." In Hepburn,
Claudia R. (ed.) (2001). Can the Market
Save Our Schools?, Vancouver: The Fraser
Institute.
West, E. G. (1965). Education and the State,
London: Institute of Economic Affairs.
Claudia R. Hepburn (claudiah@fraserinstitute.ca) is Director of Education Policy at The Fraser Institute, and a former teacher. She has a B.Ed. and an M.A. from the University of Toronto. She works in Toronto.
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