Paying for school on $2 a day

When James Tooley first discovered low-cost private schools for the poor in urban slums and rural areas in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and China, aid agency officials and local government administrators did not receive the news warmly. Most flat out denied that such schools existed. Even if they do exist, said the experts, they can’t possibly be any good. School owners that run for-profit schools in shantytowns and poor villages are just exploiting poor communities. Their teachers are untrained and poorly paid. Their buildings are cramped, dark and filthy. Worst of all, kids don’t learn anything there—they come out “half-baked,” one education official told him.

But what Tooley found, in four years of site visits and a five-country study described in his book The Beautiful Tree, throws a wrench in this familiar-sounding reasoning. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of students in the impoverished areas he studied were in fact attending these allegedly nonexistent schools, even when public options were available.

Why on earth would a poor family just getting by on the meager wages they earned fishing or pulling rickshaws choose to pay between $1.50 and $7 a month to send their children to private schools if they didn’t have to? In some isolated villages, the closest public school was still too far away, or impossible to get to during the rainy or cold seasons. For other families, the hidden costs of “free” education outweighed the very low cost of schools in their communities (in Kenya, for example, one parent described high up-front costs for a building maintenance fund and two complete school uniforms required by the public schools in her area).

Most reasons that the parents gave for their choice had to do with what the World Bank calls the “short route” to accountability (as opposed to the “long route” which works through the political process). Because school owners’ profits and reputations in the community depend directly on whether parents are happy with their children’s schooling, they paid attention to parents’ complaints. Because teachers in private schools can be fired, they were less likely to be late, idle or absent.

The most surprising thing to those of us who harbor prejudices (hidden even to ourselves?) that illiterate, unschooled parents can’t possibly know more than education experts, is that these parents were making smart, informed decisions. Not that the private schools were perfect—far from it: many of the schools Tooley visited were tucked away in poorly lit, dilapidated, smelly buildings without toilets, and teachers there did lack government training certificates, and were paid less than in the public system. But Tooley found that in low-cost private schools, across the board, classroom sizes were smaller, and teachers were much more likely to be found teaching during an unannounced visit. They are also achieving better results: the students in private schools outperformed their public school peers in nearly every subject they were tested in.

Tooley’s is just one study, and this post has given only a very general outline of its findings. (For a more in-depth look, buy the highly readable and entertaining book, or delve into the academic papers). But one lesson seems clear: Tooley’s work should open the door to more open-minded research on how private schools for the poor can play a part in achieving education for all.

Telethon: "We've seen the earth quake but the soul of the Haitian people it will never break."

You might expect a certain critic of celebrity-aid to make fun of the Haitian telethon last night. And there were indeed some cringe-inducing moments in this 4-minute video summary I just watched.

But it's a little-known dark secret that crotchety skeptics often have a sentimental streak.  So what's really wrong about some well-meaning gushy-anthem-belting megastars raising money for some currently very needy people?

I just hope that some day we will get to the point where there will also be an anthem about accountability. Here's some lyrics by an anonymous contributor, for which I take no responsibility:

So clear the fogs/Listen to the blogs/Don't just throw dollars out the door/Make sure them reaches the poor.

MADE-UP MALARIA DATA ROUND 2: Gates Foundation responds, WHO graciously offers not to respond

The modest aim of an initiative like Aid Watch is to be one more small voice holding aid agencies and foundations accountable for doing good things for poor people. The aim of more accountability is to induce improved behavior by those guys, so that aid will work better. The Aid Watch blog already has had its first small test on trying to induce accountability. This post took Bill and Melinda Gates to task for claiming in the Financial Times that foreign aid had big victories over malaria in countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia, because the WHO country data they based it on was made up and later contradicted by the WHO itself.

The Gates Foundation did respond to this criticism, to their great credit (not directly, but that’s OK, it was visible enough in a response to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s coverage of this controversy.)

What was their response to criticism for using invalid country data? Oops, they offered more invalid country data. The Gates Foundation spokesman offered the country data on Rwanda and Ethiopia from this journal article as defense for the Gateses’ claims on those countries' victories over malaria.

What does the cited article actually say? “Districts and health facilities were not randomly selected, but constituted a (stratified) convenience sample, selecting those sites where intervention scale-up had been relatively rapid and successful … Therefore, estimated impacts cannot be extrapolated to the countries nation-wide.”

Still, the Gates Foundation was a tad more responsive than the WHO, whose malaria chief first led astray the Gateses and the New York Times with false reports of victories over malaria based on made up country data, then the WHO issued totally different data in its official 2008 Malaria report a few months later, without ever retracting the New York Times story.

When Aid Watch’s intrepid investigator Laura Freschi approached the WHO for comment, she got the following response from the WHO Project Leader for Information Management & Communications, Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response (EPR):

“Hello. I have received your emails and phone call. However, WHO does not participate in blog discussions.

Thank you.”

It may seem obsessive to insist on good data, but bad data costs lives. The sad thing is that there have been SOME victories against malaria, and that solid data on WHAT is working WHERE is vital to guide the campaign against this tragic disease. Would Americans put up with the CDC using made up data to respond to a salmonella outbreak?

I guess Aid Watch is going to have to work a LOT harder to do our part to get a bit more accountability.

Everyone Should Be Responsible...(except the aid agencies)

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is. Alas, there is far to go. Take World Bank President Robert Zoellick’s oped (A Stimulus Package for the World) in last Friday’s New York Times and another one in today’s Financial Times (It is Time to Herald the Age of Responsibility).

The more you promise, the more you are telling us you don’t expect to be accountable for promises

In the NYT, President Zoellick requests an additional $6 billion from the US in foreign aid, which will “speed up global recovery, help the world’s poor and bolster [America’s] foreign policy influence…facilitate fast and flexible aid delivery…create jobs while building a foundation for productivity and growth…increase demand for American-made equipment...[and] limit the depth and length of the international downturn, prevent the contagion of social unrest and help save a generation from a new poverty trap.”

The more actions you list, the less you are serious about each action

Right after saying “priorities” for actions in poor countries (NYT), President Zoellick manages to touch on agriculture, health, education, nutrition, infrastructure, banking systems, small-and-medium-enterprise development, microcredit, global warming, and private sector development. Mr. Zoellick (FT) also wishes for international action on the Millennium Development Goals, the Doha trade round, the Copenhagen climate change agreement, humanitarian food supplies, energy conservation, and more G20 meetings to agree on fiscal expansion and reopening credit market agreements.

It’s not about aid money to reach objectives, aid money IS the objective

NYT: “The United States could begin by pledging some $6 billion…0.7 percent of its stimulus package.” FT: “How we respond to the crisis…will set the course.” The “first step” is to give more aid.

President Zoellick does mention briefly the critical issue in both the NYT and FT: some “safeguards to ensure that the money is well spent,” which don’t currently exist. In the FT, he makes the inspirational call for an “Age of Responsibility,” but the Responsibility seems to apply only to rich donors, there is nothing about holding the World Bank responsible.

If you are not accountable for promises, if you try to do everything and focus on nothing, and if you obsess about aid money raised rather than results achieved, haven’t you already told us that the money will not be “well spent”?