Is liberalized, market based education the way forward for developing nations?

Great Debates
1

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.

Private Education is Good for the Poor: A Study of Private Schools Serving the Poor in Low-Income Countries

Findings:

  • 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.

  • Government run schools, compared to private schools, are often poorly managed and operated, with rampant teacher absenteeism and lax discipline.

  • 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.

  • Most of the time, private school students outperformed public school students in terms of scholastic achievement, all other factors being equal.

  • 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.

2

I don’t think I’m qualified to discuss 3rd world education in detail but it seems the website that is sponsoring the essay competition has a very strong libertarian bent so if your intent on winning, it’s probably best to follow the party line. Clicking on the “Bunny game” and “Trading game” links presented a simplistic and patronizing view on the Tragedy of the Commons and Ricardo’s theory of trade respectively. Looking at the articles, they aren’t really much better.

3

Oh, and it seems to me there are two seperate issues that need to be tangled out:

Whether state-run education is better than entrepreneurial education and whether and how much education can be subsidised. You can have entrepreneurial but subsidised education, school vouchers is an example.

The standard argument for subsidising education is that it is regarded as a merit good. That is, the benifits of education apply to the entire community, not just the person obtaining the education. Thus, if it is left to the market, there will be an undersupply of it.

However, an argument against subsidies might be that it allows governments a degree of control in private education, allowing them to withhold funding to schools that don’t toe the party line and putting them at a competitive disavantage.

4

The road to Hell is paved with generalizations, and this question seems destined to generate an 8-line superhighway.

Being a red-blooded American, I’m inclined to agree that a centralized bureaucracy isn’t the best way to achieve anything. But that’s a long step from saying public schools = bad, private schools = good.

The fact is, if you’re trying to move an entire society from illiterate to some degree of functional literacy, you have to include the poor, the isolated and those with physical, mental or emotional disabilities.

Those groups have traditionally been ill-served by a market-based system of private schools.

Look at it this way. Health insurers hate insuring sick people. Auto insurers hate insuring people who have accidents. Property insurers hate insuring buildings in flood plains or on top of earthquake faults. They drive up operating costs. In turn that encourages healthy people/good drivers/low-risk property owners to seek lower-cost alternatives. The lower-cost alternatives keep their costs low by refusing to serve high-risk clients.

Schools (private and public) function best by serving a relatively homogenous group of students. That can include students with special needs – but a private school needs a big enough base of them to be economically viable. Otherwise, the private school can’t make money, will refuse to admit the non-homogenous students – and there goes the concept of universal education.

There is nothing inherently contradictory between the concepts of tax-supported universal education and local autonomy. However, my knowledge of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute suggests they see things differently.

5

I’ve read some of the past winning articles, and there seems to be a fairly even spread, although the site is definitely pro-free market (not sure I’d go as far as libertarian). I think it might just be aimed at a younger crowd.

Aha. Haven’t thought of it from that angle.

Well, unless we’re also looking at changing the very nature of goverment, it would seem that this would be a positive aspect of public education, that is, it would be one reason the goverment would want to implement mandatory public education a nd uniform curriculums. If that is the price of achieving mass literacy, then I would say it is a net positive for a third world country. It would also be a reason why I think mass education via private schools would be impossible; the goverment would never allow it.

That’s basically my issue with the article as well. The authors sort of gloss over it by saying that many private schools accept disadvantaged students free of charge, which contradicts entirely the theory of free markets. What happens when the private school decides philanthropy is burting their bottom line?

I agree, the whole article seems to be proposing a solution - privatize it! to a problem that doesn’t really have anything to do with privatization. Just because public schools are being mismanaged doesn’t mean privatization is the answer.

OTOH, what, then, is the better solution? It would seem that gradual reform of the public education system is the only answer. The authors conveniently leave out East Asian countries like China and Korea where mass public education has been responsible for remarkable progress, but the level of education available in China is grossly uneven and the poorer parts are basically in the same predicament as Sub-saharan Africa.

The same author (Tooley) has also done research on China, but his conclusions there seem to indicate that poor rural communities are setting up private, non-state schools because 1) Goverment schools are too expensive for poor families, which goes against the idea of free mass education, and 2) local goverments are too poor(read: too corrupt) to even fund public schooling, and private schools have sprung up in its place.

At this point, I think I’ve come to a greater understanding. I would agree, then, with the authors that in areas that are so desperately poor that the locals have NO access to ANY form of public education, sponsoring locally run private schools may be a better use of western aid money than trying to channel it through official goverment channels, and may indeed be a very effective way of bring at least some basic literacy to people who otherwise would have nothing. This, however, isn’t what the article’s conclusion seems to be. Private education would still be reliant on market institutions that someone must provide, whether it’s the village head or the Ministry of Education. Perhaps locally run private schools could be an interim solution until the country’s infrastructure and institutions develop enough to reach the most remote communities?

6

Developing countries have had fully private educations available for generations. There have always been elites and those elies have always sent their kids somewhere. That system has been tried out and has failed.

A bigger problem is the economic factors that make in unfeasable for the poorest kids to attend school.

7

Well, I suppose those affluent schools are not the main focus of the report, and in fact it goes out of it’s way to distance itself from that particular subject. Again, I think what the author is porposing is that 1) Western aid be plowed into sponsoring local, comunity run schools instead of being sent to the goverment, in order to affect a direct improvement on the education available to those communities, and 2) that the goverments themselves start subsidizing and recognizing the local private schools.

8

Note how these countries have had private schools for the rich. A civlilzation is only as civilized and as progressive as they treat their lowest common denominator. This is one of the big reasons why these countries in question are in the gutter. They can’t (or aren’t able to) account for the lowest common denominator.

Public education is a hallmark of a democracy.

9

Appreciated, but once again, I don’t think the authors are opposed to universal education, they just think that wiht very poor communities, a less regulated (than a government monopoly), market based solution will serve them better. I think there is some merit to their argument, but certainly not to justfy the goverment simply abandoning the people to ignorance.

10

So basically they want the large aid-giving countries to control the schools.

A: We can’t even handle our own schools
B: I don’t think the countries in mind are going to go for it. Countries like sovreignty.

11

As far as as I can tell, that’s it. The authors conclude the report by saying that a revoling credit facility is being set up to offer micro-loans to small, private schools like the ones outlined. I think the Nigerian and Indian goverments may not think very highly of this practice if it becomes more widespread.

12

Let’s look at it from another perspective.

Let’s say that right here in the United States there are desperately poor, bankrupt public school districts that do an atrocious job of educating students.

Now let’s say that there’s an oil-rich country out there with, say, $500 billion to spare. And that this oil-rich country believes it’s in its own best interests to make sure that even those underserved American students deserve a decent education.

So the oil-rich country announces it’s going to invest $500 billion in building free, universal schools with highly qualified staffs in the poorest school districts in the United States.

Oh yeah, the schools will, of course, teach according to the principles of Islam. Teachers and administrators will be required to be Muslim. Students will be taught that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.

Philosophically, this is a perfect scenario of bringing efficient, market-based education to people who need it, right? After all, students won’t be forced to attend these schools. They can stay in their local, albeit woefully inadequate, public school, right?

13

I was going to say something similar: Somehow I don’t think the plan would work very well in very religious/conservative states or communities. On the other hand, I suppose if you lived in a state like that, you have other things to worry about besides free schooling.

Of course, I don’t think your analogy is quite accurate, because in the US, there’s no reason why you CAN’T set up Islamic schools, and students do, indeed have a choice. They won’t be popular, and they won’t really teach anything useful, so really no-one is better off. Obviously, the approach envisioned by the authour isn’t quite the same. They are assuming that the state has already commited itself to a western-friendly curriculum.

14

My point with the analogy is that it fulfills all the requirements of the premise, but it could be interpreted as negative to society as a whole.

(And I apologize to anyone who is offended by my Muslim example. I could have made the same point with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites, followers of Lyndon LaRouche or any other number of examples.)

Let me try putting it this way.

Market-based private schools are free to follow any ideology or format for which a market exists, whether or not it agrees with society in general. A government-controlled educational system will be accountable to government, which, in theory, is accountable to society in general.

A wealthy, established pluralistic society is better able to absorb and assimilate a diversity of experience and opinion, while an impoverished, barely functioning emerging nation might well achieve its goals more efficiently through orthodoxy and central planning.

I realize this can be construed as justifying totalitarianism, but I admit I’m painting with a broad brush.

15

I think one of the assumptions in the premise is that basic education for the poor is a good thing regardless of who provides it, and that there is not way of inserting political machnations into the teaching of basic math and literacy.

I’m not saying that I agree with it, I don’t and it is one of my issues with the article, but that seems to be the authors’ assumption, and I don’t think it is unreasonable.