The extraordinary grassroots revolution of low-cost private schools | James Tooley | TEDxNewcastle

good afternoon Newcastle Malala Malala you've all heard of Malala when her story is told and when we hear of her work a really important detail is curiously omitted Malala she was on her way to school wasn't she when she was famously shot by the Taliban I bet most of you I bet most of you think the school she was going to was a government school a public school as people say internationally it was not it was a low-cost private school a private school charging a couple of US dollars equivalent per month it was set up by her father and her father eventually became the president of an association of 400 low-cost private schools in the Swat Valley in Pakistan and I first discovered this phenomenon this extraordinary phenomenon of low-cost private schools 15 years ago when I was in Hyderabad city in South Central India I was there as a herb said I was I was well known for private education I was an expert on private education but I was there raising funds for elite private schools the Indian School of Business triple IT these were the schools that I was what raising money for and I felt dissatisfied because for whatever reason I thought my life should be about the poor and so one day I read in my rough guide to India that the slums of the old city were behind the Charminar this Arc de Triomphe of southern India and so I went looking there perhaps with a hunch about what I might find and there down one backstreet down one alleyway I found a school a private school in those days charging about one u.s. dollar a month then I found another and then and soon I was part of a meeting with a Federation of 500 of these low-cost private schools I talked to parents I met mostly mothers mostly Muslim mothers in the old city of Hyderabad I said well why are you sending your children to private school you have to pay a couple of dollars a month of the government school is free the government school you get free lunch maybe free books and mother after mother told me the teachers don't turn up in the government schools the teachers if they do turn up they don't teach but get our children to do chores or in our in the government school our children are abandoned so I went to see one of the government schools it was a very nice building a very nice building I went with the district educate education officer and he was remarkably candid to me he said today James there are just two teachers present in the school there should be seven but there are just two today every day there are just two teachers I went into a classroom with a hundred and thirty kids bright-eyed and sitting on the floor amongst the mosquitoes doing nothing so pleased to see a stranger come and greet them but doing nothing and I saw what those mothers were saying about the abandonment of these children waiting and contrast that with what was happening in the private schools so I went back to Washington DC I was working doing consultancy for the International Finance Corporation the private arm of the World Bank I went back to Washington DC DC really animated I said look there's something amazing go going on in the slums in Hyderabad people said calm down to the calm down dear you've seen maybe one or two businessman ripping off the poor I thought this has been ripping off the poor I've seen people running sports days and and science fairs on their weekends how can that be the case so I managed to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation I was determined to see what was going on and went to places like macoco this shanty town built on stilts into the dark waters of the Lagos Lagoon we weren't looking there driving over the bridge here looking down asked my guide you said it's too dangerous to go there you can't go there so the next day I took my colleague down there and we went down there every all right it was the meaning can I do what can a deep private school yeah this dear school so going into that shanty town on canoes finding children asking that little girl Sandra where does she go to school KPS she says what is KPS mean Kennedy Kennedy what Kennedy private school and there it was not Kennedy like the the American President but Kennedy and Nigerian word one of 32 low-cost private schools in that shanty town alone we went to Nairobi to kubera one of the most notorious slums in Africa in fact and in in the days before we started this work see Frank there where does he go to school people would assume a government school or he's out of school but actual fact follow him into the slum there and you'll find he to is that a low-cost private school one of nearly 100 in the slums and even in remote rural China I thought I'd met my nemesis here I went there looking for low-cost private schools I went with one of my doctoral students there Leo Chang now a professor at Beijing Normal University we went asking people we had to abandon a car we went into the mountains of Gansu Province traveling for two days and at the very end of this seeing people harvesting as they'd done for hundreds of years through narrow gorges we found our low-cost private school one of 586 low-cost private schools in those remount map remote mountains of Gansu Province in China here's an um some numbers for you them we've done surveys household surveys surveys of schools how many children are in these private schools in the urban areas it's quite extraordinary --scent household survey from Lagos State fully 75 so sorry 70 percent of the children aged 5 to 14 are in private schools a great success story in Lagos State but in government schools just 20 26 % of children there and a lot of these schools are unregistered so people assume the children are out of school no they're in low-cost private schools and they're learning they're learning better than in the government schools even in rural areas these are figures from rural India if you look at the bottom figure there there's all India 28% of rural villages in India have access to have a private school but they increase dramatically depending on the state going all the way up to Haryana Punjab which are well over 50% of children there in private schools and there if you test the children we've tested so many children 35,000 children now in different subjects and you find the same picture the children the blue the government school marks the yellow the low-cost private schools the children in the private schools do so much better than the children in the government schools so it's all a tremendous success story a tremendous thing to celebrate and I've been celebrating this for the last few 15 years really since I discovered it it's been my life's work I wrote a book about it the beautiful tree you can downloaded on your Kindle I'm sure in the in the interval but when I read that book I got the criticism okay you've been talking about Kenya you've been talking about Ghana India these are not the poorest people are you serious you're talking about how the world's poor are educating themselves you know there are that's not really the poorest people so I I took this criticism seriously and got more funding to look at this in the most world's most extreme places in conflict and post-conflict states in Africa South Sudan Somalia Sierra Leone these are children of stone breakers just outside Freetown and Liberia we did Studies in the five slums of Monrovia some of the poorest slums in the world one of them is called West Point you probably saw that slum on your TVs recently the government shut it off to try and contain the Ebola in that very crowded community another one's called chicken soup factory and I'm sure you can guess why it's called chicken soup factory and there's one called red light now you'd be wrong if you thought you could guess why that's cool red light is named after the the only functioning traffic light in Monrovia and there we find again we've done household surveys again that extraordinary number a number bigger than 70% 71% of children aged 5 to 14 years in the some of the poorest slums in the world are in low-cost private schools this is quite extraordinary and if you look at those schools well over 60% of those schools are provided by proprietors could call them for-profit run by a man or woman or a couple not run by churches or mosques or NGOs so this is really a private enterprise initiative that's serving the poor now this slide here is to show you that I've been busy with numbers I really don't want you to read it but I have been busy but it shows some of the multi-level modeling we've been doing comparing how the children are doing in these schools and you can see these predicted scores for their reading if you come closest to me the government school children are the worst right next to the government school children you've got those children in government assisted private schools and then at the far end outperforming those children with predicted scores you've got the children in the low-cost private schools as I say it's something to really celebrate but why are parents our parents able to afford these schools well that's interesting because of course they charge fees this is from DOE community in the slums of Monrovia Liberia and if you look at the fees yes the fees and the private schools far away from me over here are the closest to me this side of us because the the the the fees are three times higher than in the then in the government schools private schools are more expensive but government schools are not free you've got to provide uniform you've got to get books you've got to do transport and all these extra things and when you put those into the mix you find those columns in the middle there where the cost to parents of the extras is roughly the same in private and government schools add them together and you get this extraordinary figure that in the in these slums in Monrovia the cost of sending a child to government school is 75 percent of the cost of sending a child to private school so these schools are better and they're nearly as affordable to parents as the government schools I've been doing this work as I save for fifteen years but a few years back people were saying to me okay you're saying the private schools people in the private schools were saying these private schools you're saying we're better than the government schools but that's a very low bar to set us that's a very low bar so can we improve more and I've been trying various ways of working together with schools creating schools trying to see how we can raise the standards even further one was with my gun in companion Ken Danka a brilliant Ghanaian entrepreneur we created Omega schools in four years we grew to nearly 40 schools with 20,000 children and trying to show how a for-profit model could raise millions of dollars investment and improve educational standards in Sierra Leone and we started something similar alpha schools and unfortunately of course the Ebola crisis came and our schools were closed for some time but nonetheless we were at least able to get started there and both Omega and alpha have an all-inclusive daily fee model based on the idea that the cash flow of the poor is daily so if you want to if you want to serve the poor fit in with what your clients can afford and finally I've been working with Federation's there's one in Nigeria very nigeria named aphid the association of formidable education development i'm the one in the middle if you can't spot me and we'd be we've got 3,000 private schools 600,000 students and we are working to raise standards but also to fight government because government often sees these schools as a problem and in Nigeria but in India in particular there's new legislation which is saying which is condemning these private schools to closure and in Punjab where I was speaking to the Punjab private school organization recently 3,000 of these private schools with probably five or six hundred thousand students in them have been closed by government because they don't meet some arbitrary standards but remember poor parents have chosen those schools poor parents have chosen those schools because they say they are better than the government schools what we've what I've been showing you today is that they are better their instincts are correct those schools are delivering better outcomes and it's a crying shame when government comes along and starts closing schools that parents have chosen as a matter of preference over schools there now consigned to I was saying those sort of things and worse as I unveiled my Sikh ceremonial dagger and one day I might tell an audience like this of some of the problems you get into when you talk like that about governments in foreign parts but let's go back to Malala remember when you hear malala's story again Malala she didn't go to what you expect she went to she wasn't shot on her way to a pride to a government school she attended a private school and her story is not alone there's this grassroots revolution sweeping the developing world I'm really pleased to be telling you about it today thank you thank you very much phones fascinate I just quick if he props obvious question I'm sure he just asked us a lot is this an argument that you know in the UK in the US and if you will sort of modern industrialized countries that that really we should be pushing as well for private education in in what's currently against the public space I only get that asked by very awkward people because I don't want to talk about what's happening here but I think it could be an argument for here couldn't go it depends what's happening in those countries I describe the government system is failing the poor are not willing to acquiesce in the mediocrity of government education and that's why these grassroots initiatives of all these pirate private schools develop now is that is it the same here our government schools so bad that the you know the poor in society want to exit I don't know what fun enough I am having discussions with some people about whether we can create something similar here but it's one of those things I'm not sure I'm not sure it will work here I know it works in India Ghana Sierra Leone Liberia and wherever else you want to put me in Africa and Asia I start saying James thank you so much thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 7,746

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Education, Africa, Children, Development, Learning

Id: XuYFgkYZfvU

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2015