A rare non-ideological argument against for-profit schools

To [Samuel] Abrams, the problem with for-profit operation of schools is not that businessmen are making money off the provision of a public service such as education. Textbook publishers, software developers, and bus operators all make money from schools and should, he said, but they are all providing a discrete good or service that can be easily evaluated. “School management, on the other hand, is a complex service that does not afford the transparency necessary for proper contract enforcement,” he said. “Without such transparency, there’s client distrust: parents, taxpayers, and legislators can never be sure the provider is doing what was promised; and the child as the immediate consumer cannot be in a position to judge the quality of service. Regular testing has been promoted as a check on quality. But teachers can teach to the test. And worse, as we know from cheating scandals in Atlanta and many other cities, teachers can change wrong answers to right answers on bubble sheets once students are done.”

From the International Education News blog at Teacher’s College, Columbia.

The trouble with the argument is that it rests on the empirical question of whether student test-based accountability systems for schools can work, and though the question is not conclusively settled, my reading is that the evidence seems to be leaning in the direction of roughly “yes".

The right to education is a right to learning

Kishore Singh, the "UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education” is totally freaking out that apparently the government of Liberia is planning to outsource all of its primary schooling to Bridge International Academies.

“education is an essential public service and instead of supporting business in education, governments should increase the money they spend on public educational services to make them better.”

Kishore is of course commiting Mike Munger’s unicorn fallacy. The public primary school system in Liberia was frankly pretty rubbish, even before the Ebola crisis hit, and there is no evidence that just spending more money is likely to improve things.

RTI did a baseline for their early grade reading intervention project in 2008. They found that children in Grade 3 in Liberia could read 28 words per minute. To put this in perspective, in the US children are considered to be at risk if they can read fewer than 70 words per minute at the end of Grade 2. Clearly there is nothing inherently wrong with Liberian children, the schools just aren’t working (I should also be clear that I’m not beating on Liberian teachers either, it is the system that is not functioning - don’t hate the player, hate the game). The children attending free public primary schools in Liberia might be exercising a right to schooling, but they certainly aren’t exercising a right to learning or any meaningful definition of the word education.

It should be in this context that we note that AllAfrica reports that "The deal will see the Government of Liberia paying over $65 million over a five-year period.” That is $13 million per year then, to cover a full population aged 5-14 of 920,000, or roughly $14 per student per year. That’s an absolute bargain. That’s an absolute bargain, even if Bridge are only actually covering a small fraction of that full population (Normally Liberia spends around 2.5% of GDP on education, which is around $47.5 million).

Clearly the jury is still officially out on whether independent estimates will show better learning outcomes from Bridge schools, but there is a hell of a lot of research which backs up elements of their theory of change, from how teacher qualifications and experience matter so much less than the type of contract a teacher is on, to the importance of feedback for teachers on student learning.

Meanwhile over at Kishore Singh’s website, he highlights 8 key priorities, none of which include the global learning crisis, in which there are 250 million children without basic skills, the majority of whom have already sat through 4 years of school. I’m frankly baffled by the inordinate amount of hostility shown by campaigners to social entrepreneurs who are still educating absolutely tiny proportions of the global poor, and how little attention is paid to the totally failing free public systems of schooling that millions of children are enduring.

Why governments don't like private schools?

Here are a few excerpts from the new textbook delivered to millions of primary school children in Venezuela:

1. The first page of each [book] starts with the words “Hugo Chavez: Supreme Commander of the Bolivarian Revolution.”  

2. They describe Chavez as the man who liberated Venezuela from tyranny, at times making him appear more important than 19th century founding father Simon Bolivar.  

3. The books present a 2002 coup that briefly toppled Chavez as an insurrection planned by Washington while playing down the role of massive opposition protests in this deeply divided country.

via Robin Grier

The Political Economy of Privatisation

Adam Smith or Machiavelli? Political incentives for contracting out local public services 

Why do some local governments deliver public services directly while others rely on providers from the private sector? Previous literature on local contracting out and on the privatization of state-owned enterprises have offered two competing interpretations on why center-right governments rely more on private providers. Some maintain that center-right politicians contract out more because, like Adam Smith, they believe in market competition. Others claim that center-right politicians use privatization in a Machiavellian fashion; it is used as a strategy to retain power, by ‘purchasing’ the electoral support of certain constituencies. Using a unique dataset, which includes the political attitudes of over 8,000 Swedish local politicians from 290 municipalities for a period of 10 years, this paper tests these ideological predictions together with additional political economy factors which have been overlooked in previous studies, such as the number of veto players. Results first indicate support for the Machiavellian interpretation, as contracting out increases with electoral competition. Second, irrespective of ideological concerns, municipalities with more veto players in the coalition government contract out fewer services. 

Yikes!