Private education is good for the poor

A study of private schools serving the poor in low-income countries

By: Tooley J & Dixon P
Published by: CATO Institute, Washington , 2005
Via: Eldis

Can private education help meet the educational needs of poor children in low-income countries? Many observers believe that the private sector has little to offer in terms of reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of "education for all" by 2015. Private education is often assumed to be concerned only with serving the elite or middle classes, not the poor.

This paper, however, argues that private schools can play - in fact, already are playing - an important, if unsung, role in reaching the poor and satisfying their educational needs. In order to examine the role of private providers of education, the authors undertook research in India, Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. The authors found that in each area, the majority of schoolchildren attended private schools. In addition, the raw scores from the authors' student achievement tests show considerably higher achievement in the private than in government schools.

The paper concludes that the private schools for low income families could be improved even further by creating revolving loan programs to help infrastructural investment or, following the private schools’ own example, creating targeted voucher programs to enable the poorest of the poor to attend private schools. But above all, the existence and the contribution of private schools to education for all is a cause for celebration