Can a government, wrong about GLOBAL WARMING, be trusted to be right about anything?
More from The Beautiful Tree, an investigation of private schools in poor countries.
In the Middle Ages, so the story goes, monks were debating the important question about the number of teeth in a horse”s mouth. The learned, aged monks divided into factions concerning the best sources for this information. Some were in favor of Aristotle, others of other scholars. A young monk, naive in his simplicity, suggested they look in the mouths of a few horses. He was immediately excommunicated.
Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.
Tooley went to several countries and studied the results from private and government schools, dividing the private schools into “recognized” (usually meaning those which paid bribes and “unrecognized” (ones which didn’t).
He points out that the thorny “pay for performance” scheme, so beloved of reformers, cannot be solved in government schools, but is easily solved in private schools. He mentions a poor school in Hyderabad, India, where the owner installed a closed circuit TV system to watch teachers. This solution would never be possible in government schools.
“All I read pinpointed the problem clearly: the incentive structures are all wrong in the public-sector schools. In the private schools, on the other hand, the incentive structures work in the opposite, positive, direction for each school owner. All school owners depend on parents’ (sic) using their schools; if parents don’t, the school owners are out of a job. So this invisible hand of the competitive market keeps all school owners on their toes, constantly monitoring the performance of their teachers, without whose high performance school owners will suffer. It’s this invisible hand that is working in the educational market in exactly the same way that it does, as the World Bank points out, in the market for sandwiches. (p. 166).
The international experts discount this because, “The development experts didn’t appear to trust poor parent’s judgment, so accountability to parents couldn’t possibly be the answer.” (p. 167).
Tooley “looked in the horse’s mouth” with a massive study of schools in India, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. He found:
Unannounced visits showed more teaching in private schools.
Playgrounds were better in government schools.
Private school students scored higher on standardized tests.
Private schools cost a small fraction of government schools.
Government school teachers had much more formal schooling than private school teachers.
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?, Groucho Marx.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
October 24, 2009 at 6:22 pm |
Spot on, Grant! I like James Tooley’s stuff very much.
The sooner it’s made easier for parents to set up schools in UK, the better. Anything to shake the complacency out of underperforming schools, each one of which spells disaster for the many children they let down.
John
October 25, 2009 at 8:39 am |
John,
When someone becomes a government expert, so called, he/she falls into the trap of believing that assumptive knowledge is real and no more work need be done. Private enterprises, including private schools, must try really hard not to be better. The trap is not to use the same assumptive knowledge base, which is merely fable agreed upon, as the official expert, then you’ll always be wrong.
Cheers, Grant
August 8, 2010 at 2:07 am |
[...] from James Tooley, who wrote ,Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute referred to here several times a few months ago. The following is from a recent article. The graphs refer to performance data from [...]