Not Just for the Privileged

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Mohammed Anwar is one of the new breed of “edupreneurs” or educational entrepreneurs transforming the school sector in India.

In 1987, he started a low-cost private high school with 34 students in a small, rented building in Hyderabad.

Today, M.A. Ideal High School has about 2,000 children enrolled.

Inspired by the work of Professor James Tooley, the Newcastle University professor of political studies in education and a leading international advocate of budget private schools for the poor.

Mr. Anwar opened another four branches under the same banner of M.A. Ideal High Schools in the slums of Hyderabad and in a poor, rural area.

All schools are coeducational; teaching is in English; and the target market is low-income families. Parents pay low fees of between $24 and $49 per annum.

“My school is popular with parents because they are satisfied with the education,” says Mr. Anwar. “There is a low-fee structure, good infrastructure, separate classes for high school girls, merit scholarships, and computer education.”

Disillusioned by chronic teacher absence and low-quality teaching, the poor in urban and rural India are flocking to private schools.

“In private schools, the management will pay only if teachers are present,” Mr. Anwar says. “If they are irregular in their attendance, they will be fired. More importantly, the management is always monitoring the teachers.”

According to a University of Newcastle study, a large majority of poor children living in India’s urban areas are privately enrolled. The figure is about 50% in rural areas.

Although the trend is particularly pronounced in countries such as India, and in sub- Saharan Africa, the story is similar across the developing world.

Poor parents are turning to private schools—long a privilege of the wealthy and middle class—in greater numbers. This movement is driven by the push for universal primary schooling. Governments are struggling to keep up with demand for places, and often lack finances to expand access to education.

In the People’s Republic of China, underground private schools are flourishing in many areas. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee Non-Formal Primary Education Program, after starting in 1985 with 22 one-room schools now enrolls 1.5 million poor school students or 11% of primary school children, according to a World Bank study.

Despite the popularity of private schools in developing nations, there are well-grounded fears about deepening inequality.

“We also need to worry about the equity implications of private schooling,” said a 2008 report in the Comparative Education Review on the possibilities and limits of private schooling in Pakistan.

“There is a growing concern in Pakistan that private education leads to the emergence of two classes—the English medium–trained elite and the vernacular Urdu medium–taught masses.

The study suggested that the rise of private schooling was increasing disparities within rural and urban areas, although it was breaking down the gap in quality education between rural and urban areas.

Another controversy surrounds the popularity of faith-based schooling.

In the developed and developing worlds, there has long been a vigorous ideological debate on the values that primary and high schools inculcate. Anxieties about religiously based private schooling, especially in Pakistan’s madrassas, increased after the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001.

“Millions of families, especially those with little money, send their children to religious schools or madrassas. Many of these schools are the only opportunity available for an education, but some have been used as incubators for violent extremism,” said the 9/11 Commission report in 2004.

However, subsequent studies by Economics Professor Tahir Andrabi of Pomona College, the World Bank’s Jishnu Das, and Harvard University’s Asim Ijaz Khwaja show madrassas account for less than 1% of enrollment in Pakistan and that the real boom in private schooling is in “secular market-based, low-cost private schools.”

As budget private schools burgeon, a large education services industry is springing up to serve the learning institutions in poor areas.

This year, Mr. Anwar expanded his operations by starting a company called Empathy Learning Systems. It provides services to low-cost schools starting in Hyderabad— where more than 65% of children are enrolled in private-unaided schools—with the goal of expanding throughout India.

“Basically we would like to improve the quality of education in low-cost schools, especially in the learning of English,” he says.

The significant increase in private schools for the poor raises deeper questions about the current structure of public spending on education in developing nations, and how international organizations can approach the issue.

“This has huge implications for public school funding in developing nations when studies show that, in poor areas, the majority of school children are in private schools,” Professor Tooley says.

“This is an indication of government failure.”

In April this year, the World Bank published a report on the Role and Impact of Public– Private Partnerships in Education, particularly focusing on developing nations. It found that developing nations are increasingly reliant on private education groups such as for-profit and not-for-profit schools, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), faith-based groups, and local communities to provide education services.

“In general, private management of public schools can be efficient and can yield improved academic performance. Despite being controversial, vouchers have also been found to improve academic outcomes, especially for the poor,” said report coauthor Harry Patrinos.

Governments could contract NGOs to provide education services to low-income schools, such as teacher training, textbooks, curriculum design, and technical services. Alternatively, governments could contract with private bodies “to take over the entire operation of schools,” the report said.

Professor Tooley proposes three approaches to get potential investors behind the developing world’s private school sector starting with microfinance-style loan schemes for private school infrastructure improvements. Providing investment for innovation in curriculum and learning is another possibility along with investing in a chain of private schools via dedicated education funds or joint ventures with edupreneurs who are starting up private schools all over the developing world.

Naveen Mandava, the chief operating officer of Empathy Learning Systems, identifies deregulation of the education market as the number one priority, and says he would be hesitant about any funding in the form of aid as “it would distort the quality of the market.”

“We need to remove regulations which make it difficult to start and/or expand a school enterprise,” he says. “For example, currently, schools have to be nonprofit.”

Financing from international organizations and lenders, or investors, could be directed either to schools seeking to expand or to students who want to study in private schools.

“One policy way out of this would be to provide voucher-based funding to schools,” he says.

Another opportunity for NGOs and international organizations could be in the provision of education products.

“Spoken English is in huge demand in this market but there are no good players who can provide such a service at an affordable cost,” Mr. Mandava says.

Henry Levin, professor of economics and education at Columbia University in New York, says that without a government that seriously cares about the education of the poor at the regional and local levels, lowfee private schools will continue to expand and thrive.

But he cautions that boosting the private school sector is not the only way to solve the problem of dissatisfaction with and lack of access to quality public education in developing countries.

“The problems of education in the subcontinent (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) are the fact that the governing parties view teachers as key instruments of their hold on political power rather than as professionals who are responsible for educating the young,” he says.

The result is that two endemic problems face the children of the poor. The first is high teacher absenteeism with impunity “because it is sanctioned by the political parties as a benefit of employment.” Consequently, students receive “very little regular, articulated, and quality instruction.” Second, even when they do teach, teachers do not cover the curriculum to induce parents to pay for private tutoring to cover the material that will be included in the examinations.

“The government could get these parents back to public schools if it could and would address these issues,” Professor Levin says.

He cites an experiment in India where teachers in informal, oneroom, rural primary schools were given salary incentives for attendance with low-cost monitoring by a time-dated camera. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University shows that the teacher absence rate dropped from 42% to 22%, and a year after the study began, children were 40% more likely to be accepted at regular schools.

“Some advocates of the low-fee private schools see them as an alternative to stubborn inequities in government schools and policies,” Professor Levin says.

“For others, the movement to privatization is the leading edge of an attempt to create a new area of investment and profitability by privatizing one of the largest segments of the public sector.” •