Private Education is a Beautiful Success
James Tooley’s book, The Beautiful Tree, is fascinating. Tooley – hoping USA’s massive spending on education for third-world countries was bringing great results – was surprised to find out which schools were actually thriving there.
Surprise! Not the ones with American-style bells, whistles, libraries and gyms. Tooley discovered, almost by accident, the existence of tiny private schools in slums that outperformed government (and foreign aid) funded public schools. Disbelieving what he stumbled upon in one country, he made it his business to seek out the phenomenon in others Despite the assurances of education experts that no such schools existed, he found them everywhere he looked.
Not a surprise: Tooley began to question the whole concept of exporting our public school model as a way of helping our fellow man. In the private slum schools – financed by the sacrificial giving of extremely poor parents to the tune of hundreds (not even thousands) of dollars – he found children excelling their public schooled peers in every measure of academic success. In the million-dollar schools he found what could only be called replications of the very dysfunction that we know is prevalent in the U.S. schools we hold up as models: low attendance, low performance, student and teacher apathy, high dropout rates, teen alienation from home and family. Sigh….you get what you pay for.
Tooley was so blown away by all this that he designed a massive research study to dig deeper, and with scientific rigor, into the initial findings and anecdotal evidence. Confirmed in country after country, his findings about the superiority of the poor little unofficial schools failed to ruffle the waters of the development experts who still touted their public schools as the weapon of choice in the war on poverty, and still denied the existence and efficacy of the ‘underground’ school system.
This book is a very interesting read, and here’s one quote to whet your appetite:
“Public schooling seems to many to be a permanent, timeless feature of human civilization. But it’s a temporary aberration, the revolution that is taking place in developing countries is seeing to that. The power and spirit of free enterprise are shining through again in the field of education. Will it eventually replace public schooling? I think the evidence shows that to be very likely. …It builds on something that no central planner can possibly embrace, the strength of millions of decisions by individual families, the millions of bits of information grasped by the Searchers who relentlessly create and innovate, modify and develop what the people want.”
Nice! I like the idea that the aggregation of free choices leads to more freedom for everyone. Get your central planning out of my personal sphere of response-ability! And while you’re at it, stop foisting it on bright, industrious, generous, innovative people just because they happen to be poor! Every parent who makes the choice for private education of their children is making a stand for all children to have better options for education.