Livemint : THINKING IT THROUGH – FUND SCHOOLING, NOT SCHOOLS : Sept 20 ,2007
myview – THINKING IT THROUGH – FUND SCHOOLING, NOT SCHOOLS
Instead of pouring money into dysfunctional schools, we should empower
parents with a choice
AMIT VARMA
I read a news report a couple of days back that amazed me. It was about a
small village named Maji in the Yunnan province of China. The nearest school
lies across the Nujiang river. There is no bridge, though a steel cable runs
across.
How do the 500 children of this village get to school? The report states,
“They fasten themselves to the cable with a metal carabiner and a rope and
slide across the 200-metre wide canyon.” The youngest child, A Qia, is four
years old, and makes the crossing by herself. A five-year-old named A Pu has
been quoted as saying, “I used to dream of having a bridge, but then I
learned that my dream was too expensive.”
My column today is not about bridges-not the kind that go across rivers
anyway. It is about education. I never had to cross a canyon using a rope
and a metal carabiner to get to school, and if the prospect had come up in
my privileged home when I was a kid, I would probably have asked my dad if
the metal carabiner was chauffeur-driven. I always took education for
granted, the same way I took food for granted, and did not have to worry
about where my next meal would come from. Much of India is not so lucky.
Poor people want education for their kids desperately and viscerally. They
want their children to have a better life than they did, and they know
education is the ticket. And for 60 years they have been cheated. The state
has promised them quality education, has collected taxes for that purpose,
and has failed.
Studies on the state of education in this country confirm what we see around
us. A 2005 study of government schools by Pratham, an NGO, found that 35% of
schoolkids surveyed between the ages of seven and 14 failed a reading test
involving a simple paragraph, and 41% of them could not subtract or divide.
A 2006 study found that half the children who enrol in the first standard
drop out before reaching the eighth. A 1999 government report stat ed that
just 53% of the accredited public schools in rural North India were engaged
in teaching during surprise visits on school days.
The problem here is not one of funding. The government has thrown enormous
amounts of money into education, and continues to do so. The problem here is
of choice. Most poor parents across the country have no option but to send
their kids to government schools, which, because of the way the incentives
are aligned, are often dysfunctional.
The way out of this is to put parents in charge of the money that is
supposedly being spent on their children’s education. Parents have much more
at stake than the state, and are better equipped to take the right decisions
for their children. Milton Friedman first proposed a method of enabling
this: education vouchers. Under this system, the state does not directly
fund schools, but gives school vouchers to parents.
Parents use the vouchers to send their kids to a school of their choice, and
the school exchanges vouchers in return for cash from the government. As in
any other sector, competition then ensures that schools lift their standards
and minimize wastage.
This will give optimum results if competition is allowed to flourish.
Right now, it isn’t. A 2001 study by the Centre for Civil Society (CCS)
found that it takes 14 licences from four authorities to open a private
school in Delhi, a process that can either take years or much
under-the-table money.
Schools must conform to a number of unnecessary parameters such as
government-trained teachers and playgrounds of a specified size. Also, bi
zarrely, private schools are not allowed to operate for a profit-while many
work around this by setting up trusts and suchlike, others are simply scared
away.
But won’t private schools be expensive? That’s what I would have thought,
given the posh urban schools where my friends and I were educated, but the
reality is different. Entrepreneurs in the poorest parts of India, in slums
and villages, have started cheap schools with bare bones facilities to
fulfil what is obviously a raging demand. And studies have shown that, with
survival at stake, these schools use money twice as efficiently as
government ones.
In 2005, James Tooley and Pauline Dixon did a study that found that 65% of
schoolchildren in Hyderabad’s slums attended private schools instead of free
government ones. And last year, CCS conducted a study that revealed that 14%
of households in Delhi earning less than Rs5,000 per month chose to send
their kids to a private school.
Their studies showed that even the poorest of the poor, from maids to
autorickshaw-drivers to peons, expressed their preferences clearly, even
when they could barely afford it.
There is one clear reason for the miserable state of education in this
country: the state has funded schools, not schooling. For India’s sake, that
must change.
Amit Varma publishes the website India Uncut, at http://www.indiauncut.com.
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