From The Heritage Foundation, a conservative (I think) think tank:
The Failures of State Schooling in Developing Countries and the People’s Response
From the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Findings:
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The Introduction of mandatory and free public education in very poor areas (Slums in India and Sub-Saharan Africa) has not actually increased the rate of school enrollment for young children, because prior to their introduction, young children were already enrolled in local private schools.
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Government run schools, compared to private schools, are often poorly managed and operated, with rampant teacher absenteeism and lax discipline.
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In the surveyed areas the majority of slum parents preferred to send their children to private schools for the above reason. Also cited were the fact that private schools were located closer to the communities they served, and would often reduce or waive fees for particularly impoverished or orphaned children.
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Most of the time, private school students outperformed public school students in terms of scholastic achievement, all other factors being equal.
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Public school officials are dismissive of locally run private schools, citing lack of standardization, teacher qualifications, poor equipment and facilities, and the “ignorance and gullibility” of parents who patronize them.
I cannot see any problems with their methodology.
Their conclusion seems to be that third world education efforts should be market based. I am not sure of the exact details here. Do they mean that the government should subsidize the private schools (and thus make them public)? Get out of the school business all together and abandon the people to their own devices?
To me, it seems that the real issue with public education isn’t the fact that they are public, but rather, that the public solution seems to be very poorly thought out by a bureaucracy far away from the actual slums. For example, the report cites the fact that morale for private school teachers is generally better than that of the public school teachers, even though the public school teachers are better paid, because the private school teachers feel better about doing something to improve the community that they themselves grew up in, and have more of a connection to the local scene. Perhaps the central government is trying to adapt a western model that doesn’t work very well in poor, insular third world communities without as much infrastructure? There is no reason why the public school cannot simply recruit and train teachers locally instead of in a centralized system (I am going on some shaky assumptions here, since the details are not available in the report). Another thing that the report does not touch on is that central governments generally have more than the education of citizens in mind when they adopt public education. I’m thinking that a public school system with a more decentralized, grass-roots focus will serve isolated and insular communities better than either the current system or a privatized system. I’m thinking this is probably not too far off from what the authors had in mind as well.
DISCLAIMER: This isn’t homework, but I am planning on gathering my thoughts on this topic in an essay to be submitted to this contest. I don’t want to be the sole profiteer of the SDMB hivemind, so I included that link in case any other posters also wanted to submit essays. It’s just that I am so hopelessly addicted to the Dope that I can’t seem to distill my thoughts into prose unless it is in the form of a GD post.