Good point about auditing not being effective in the context of the developing world. My comment was shaped by what has been working in the States, where corruption levels are very low by world standards and the costs of logistical support are trivial (it’s a rounding error as a portion of the education budget).

All of which is overhead, reducing funding available for educating kids.

“Funny how nobody asks what we’re going to do about “fly by day” government schools”

The question’s been asked for decades. Until the advent of the idea of charter schools there wasn’t a politically feasible answer that wasn’t easily suborned by the educational status quo. Previous to the advent of charters the answer was, inevitably, more funding and the ease with which that’s misused is testified too by the passage of No Child Left Behind.

Pauline, unless serious consideration’s being given to *not* offering aid until such aid passes a “humanitarian Hippocratic oath” review to determine whether in helping more harm might be done then simply sitting by and letting things develop the implication is that such aid serves the interests of the funders or those promoting the program rather then the interests of those for whom the aid is being proposed.

I’m sure that James and I will have input into this proposed policy and therefore all of the concerns you are raising (as well as our own) we will obviously make the Tory party aware of and do our best to ensure that this is definately a good way forward, expand choice and the market.

The record of foreign aid in general has been less then stellar and there’s a rising chorus of voices, African voices, that are proclaiming “thanks but no thanks” due to the injury caused by aid programs.

For aid agencies it’s got to be a real conundrum.

If the money isn’t pushed out in aid programs it’s difficult to make a case to funders to continue to fund. Yet here are the recipients of that aid saying “stop helping us so much”. On the basis of that rising tide of discontent with the inevitable damage done by many, perhaps most, aid programs Dr. Tooley’s discovery presents a wonderful opportunity to refresh the reputations of aid agencies by the discovery of a new, unspoiled target for their largess.

Considering the sums involved there’s a sort of sad ludicrousness to the idea.

For a mere $24/year/child a 100% subsidy becomes available with which to distort what must be a fragile market. Certainly none of the schools I’ve read about in Dr. Tooley’s and your work look to have the sort of financial resources necessary to withstand the inevitable rush of fly-by-night operators intent on scooping up those pitiful, by Western standards, vouchers and if it’s one thing that brings the cockroaches out of the woodwork it’s the smell of government money.

Of course a $24/year subsidy might be a pretty tough sell to aid agencies on the basis of its microscopic size. What kind of education, considering what’s spent on public education in the developed nations and even the target nations, could a $24/year voucher buy?

According to what information I could scrape together Kenya is, as of 2007, spending 23.57% of per capita GDP per student on primary education (nationmaster.com) and has a per capita GDP of $1,700 (www.international.ucla.edu) which looks to put primary school per student spending at $402. Would aid agencies be willing to fund vouchers that are only 6% of the national primary per student funding level? What would vouchers at anywhere near public education spending levels do to the market in private education for the very poor?

I doubt anyone’s likely to give too much thought to my concerns but as counterweight to those concerns is the knowledge that aid agencies are unlikely to damage the private education market for the poor worldwide. The supply of poor people seems to be sufficiently large to frustrate any effort to provide such aid on any but a more or less local level.

The paper I think Greg was talking about is our Kenya paper which can be found at: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/research.html under country specific. This showed the results of the introduction of free primary education in 2003 on the children and schools of Kibera, which we estimated resulted in fewer children going to school owing to the transfer from one management type to another.

I know the idea is still in its infancy. I’m assuming that the aid voucher idea is to help those parents who at the moment don’t have the choice of sending their children to private schools because they are so, so poor, that is the poorest of the poor. Or maybe because they can’t afford to send all of their children to private school, but would like to. Although the private schools are very low fees and many poor parents are able to access them, there are still children who cannot leave the state sector but would choose to if their parents could afford the $2 or so per month to do so. I would hope that the aid voucher would target those children. You are correct that this would need to be carefully managed and it is hoped that it would not bring a whole load of regulations with it.

The Tory policy injects two changes:

1) The program would obviously require recipient countries to legalize private schooling. Right now, most of the private schools Tooley and Dixon are discovering are illegal. That will put a big brake on the dragooning process, which currently relies heavily on the illegal status of the schools.

2) The program would make more resources available to those parents who avoid dragooning, strengthening the private school sector.