Why Kenya should partner with private schools to achieve Universal Secondary School

Op-ed for the Daily Nation.

What should NGOs say & do about private schools?

Susannah Hares from Ark and I attended a meeting with the senior staff of an INGO last week, along with a couple of other external invitees, to help them think through their position towards private schools and fees in education. We wrote up our recommendations & takeaways on the Huffington Post.

First and foremost, it should reaffirm its principles: that education should be free; that government should be the guarantor but not necessarily the sole provider of education.

Second, it should focus its education reform efforts on setting high expectations for all children and improving accountability for all schools, whether public or private. School inspections, good data, robust assessments: these are all critical components of a good system accountability and should apply to public and private schools alike.

Third, in contexts in which substantial numbers of children already do attend private schools, the INGO could see if there are any clear market failures in the private sector that could be improved by government or NGO intervention. For example, training of teachers, or addressing information asymmetries through better community engagement.

Fourth, where public-private partnerships are planned or in place, the INGO should challenge government and private sector partners to place equity and quality at the heart of any programme. The UK academy programme started out under the Labour government with a very clear objective: to turn around the 200 worst performing secondary schools in the most deprived areas. This laser sharp focus on closing the achievement gap between rich and poor has changed the conversation about education in the UK: a school cannot be rated as “outstanding” anymore unless it can show it is delivering learning gains for children on free school meals.

Finally, and perhaps most radical of all, the INGO could set up its own network of non-profit PPP schools in a developing country. Demonstrating what high quality education for disadvantaged communities looks like would be a significant value add to any system, particularly if delivered through a PPP with the sustainability and public accountability that should bring. The experience of PEAS schools in Uganda shows that it is possible for an NGO to deliver better management practices and improve performance, at the same cost as local operators and with the inbuilt sustainability that comes from domestic government financing. And Ark’s own experience of running a high performing network of non-profit PPP schools in the UK shows how much an organisation can learn from actually running a set of schools, and how much more effective advisors to governments this can make them. Finally, establishing more non-profit providers in this space might calm some of the heated rhetoric around some of the international for-profit providers.

Problems with private schools

There were a few good comments on my Guardian piece the other week that are worth highlighting.

One of the most most important points is that when private schools get the same results as public schools for a fraction of the cost, they are still getting woefully bad, unacceptably poor learning outcomes.

Suvojit and Heather raise the issue that results are only going to be comparable when teacher effort can substitute for training - this is possible at lower grades but likely to get more difficult at higher grades with older children and more difficult material.

But neither of these for me damage the case for directly supporting private primary schools if they are still doing the same job substantially cheaper.

A criticism that might do this is one that Anurag Behar (CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation, a leading organisation on education research) makes in a Mint column, which strikes at the heart of the private school business model. His argument is that private school teachers only accept such low wages because they are "queueing" for a government teacher job.

It’s clear that the salaries of teachers in most such private schools are very low, bordering on the exploitative. The reasons why they get teachers at these salaries are fairly simple. Most of those who join private schools as teachers are those who are waiting and trying to join government schools. Since recruitment of government teachers has its own pace and scale (though it has become “cleaner” in many states), many keep waiting and trying for years, and it’s this lot that largely feeds the private schools. Eventually of those who don’t make it to the government system, many leave teaching to do other things, which is not surprising, given their salaries.

One reason to doubt this story is that if those private school teachers are unqualified then they aren't eligible for a government teacher job. But I'm open to persuasion if there is any data here?

How to fix education in developing countries

Annie Lowrey interviews Lant Pritchett in the NYT, who argues

1. We need to think about the whole system rather than just single interventions
2. We need clear goals in terms of learning outcomes, what we are trying to achieve
3. We need local flexibility to come up with solutions to achieve those clearly agreed goals

I'm struck that if we believe this (and I think I do), then effective management of systems of public service delivery looks a lot like effective management of individual people - set clear outcome goals but don't micromanage the process.

Well worth reading in full.

On private schools, Lant has this to say:

"You can get local control by increasing the number of private schools — I’m not advocating privatization as a solution, but those private schools are freed from being in a top-down bureaucracy, and in India and Pakistan, they do better with less resources."

Do iPhones increase gender inequality?

DFID have just published a new "topic guide" (quick evidence review?) on low cost private schools by Claire Mcloughlin of the University of Birmingham.

This isn't a criticism necessarily of Claire, but I am struck by how strange it is that the focus of the debate leads with how private schools affect equity. We are talking about countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan with net primary enrolment rates of less than 75%. I struggle to see how it could be a bad thing in such a context if some parents choose to spend their own money on private schools for their kids, even if no poor parents could afford it and all girls were totally excluded. Doesn't that just mean fewer kids for the state sector to fund? Of course in reality the data suggests that private schools in many countries have roughly similar gender access as public schools, and many poor people (though perhaps not the very poorest) also access private schools. 

Of course when we are talking about aid or government-funded places at private schools then equity should be a key concern, but for privately funded places, who cares? Isn't this totally missing the point? Do we worry about the equity implications of the new iPhone 5s for access to smartphones in the UK (actually I shouldn't be so hasty, soon being smart-phone-less probably will be the official definition of relative poverty). And when did I become so conservative?

"Only a parent that doesn’t love his child will send him to a public school"

This comment made by a highly educated principal of a private school shocked me greatly. This was before I interviewed public school teachers. Their responses perplexed me even more. ‘Corrupted’, ‘miscreants’, ‘thugs’, ‘wretched’, ‘from bad homes’, ‘don’t value education’ …were some of the common terms with which public school teachers described their pupils.

Fascinating stuff on low fee private schools in Lagos from Modupe Adefeso-Olateju

"Poverty Barons"

From the independent review of DFID's use of consultants:

ICAI reviewed the DFID Central Procurement Group and a range of programmes with a combined contract value of £264 million. The case studies show that contractors are an effective option for delivering aid. DFID has selected contractors that have delivered positive results at competitive fee rates. DFID’s poor end-to-end programme management, however, has led to delays. In the case studies that we examined, this has had the greatest impact during the mobilisation phase and is exacerbated by a lack of ‘whole life’ individual responsibility for programmes. In addition, learning is not being captured from contractors or used to inform future programming. 

The reform of DFID’s central procurement group has improved processes but is too slow and lacks prioritisation. As a result, decisions to use contractors are not guided by a strategic plan to deploy the right contractors, including major, niche and innovative new entrant organisations, to best effect.

via TNL