This is great news forwarded from Pauline Dixon, who with James Tooley, have done amazing work on the breadth and quality of private schooling in developing countries. Here is part of the article in the Guardian:
Aid vouchers will be given to millions of people in the poorest parts of the world so they can shop around for the best schools and services, under Tory plans to inject free-market thinking into development policy.
A Conservative government would also spend part of the £9.1bn overseas aid budget on funding for private schools across the developing world, which it believes would achieve better results than state schools and drive up standards overall. The controversial plans are in a draft Tory policy document leaked to the Observer before publication this week of the government’s white paper on development.
Andrew Mitchell, the shadow international development secretary, confirmed last night that the Tories were “investigating” using aid vouchers “to empower people in developing countries”. He also said his party had no objection to supporting the growth of the private education and health sectors in the developing world.
“Governments have a responsibility to guarantee access to health and education for everyone, particularly the poorest,” Mitchell said. “We stand ready to work with public, private and not-for-profit sectors to help make that happen. I don’t have any ideological hang-ups about whether it’s private provision or public provision: I’m interested in what works.”
In his bid to promote compassionate Conservatism, David Cameron pledges to match Labour’s plans to increase development spending to 0.7% of GDP by 2013. The budget in 2010-11 will be £9.1bn. But the policy has not proved universally popular in the party, particularly on the right, where many believe too much aid money is wasted. A survey of Tory candidates found only 4% thought international development should be the policy most protected from cuts.
Cameron’s critics believe he is promoting Thatcherite policies for aid to appease the right and reassure them the money will be well spent. The draft document suggests planning for a voucher scheme is well advanced.
“The vouchers would be redeemable for development services of any kind with an aid agency or supplier of their choice,” it states. The paper also says that a Conservative government would “embrace the potential of the private sector, not treat it with suspicion” when administering the aid budget.
As a result it makes clear the Tories would support private education in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, India and China, where it claims it has delivered better results than state-run schools “even adjusting for children’s backgrounds”.
The paper states: “We will stand ready to work with the public, not-for-profit and private sectors. We will consider funding insurance schemes, bursaries or targeted vouchers for the poorest children to attend a school of their choice.”
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I’m not sure this is necessarily such good news.
With a worthwhile flow of foreign aid those little, private schools that’ve either enjoyed the benign neglect or survived the active hostility of the government may now become cash cows to be milked by that same government.
I doubt that’ll help them prosper.
If there were no existing aid programs, and thus the developed world were not currently having any impact on schooling in the developing world, that might be a downside.
As it is, though, existing aid programs encourage developing countries to be hostile to private schools. You get aid on the basis of the number of students in public schools. So the status quo is not neutral, it’s actively encouraging these countries to shut down private schools.
If we change from a policy that strongly encourages jackbooted crackdowns to a policy that mildly encourages parasitic cooptation, I say that’s a big net win.
Any resemblance here to the domestic politics of vouchers in developed nations is strictly coincidental.
On the basis of Dr. James Tooley’s work “jackbooted crackdowns” are the exception since the private schools in question serve the same people the extant public education system is ignoring. No harm, no foul and not much reason to go kicking down doors.
Create a pipeline to foreign aid money though and not only is the public education establishment embarrassed, much worse, it’s not getting a cut of that aid money. As has been demonstrated ad infinitum here in the U.S., educational outcomes may or may not be important to the people who run the public education system but when money’s at stake you’ve got their undivided attention.
Additionally, the poor who pay out of their own pockets to send their kids to their ramshackle private schools are rather more likely to concern themselves with getting their own money’s worth. As has been demonstrated here in the U.S., when someone else is paying it’s all too easy to assume everything is just fine.
Lastly, this proposal sounds very much like every other “money uber alles” Western aid program in that the assumption is the critical, missing component is money. As decades of aid to Africa has proven, that’s not true and the dawning realization is that poorly thought-out aid is actually quite destructive. I’m afraid wealthy Westerners, having discovered a new, and quaint, home-grown institution of the poorest people on the planet may be strongly motivated to love it to death.
But Tooley and Dixon also document how when international aid rewards countries for enrolling students in public schools, the private schools mysteriously dry up. Hmmm….
Hmmm indeed. Source?
Well, I heard Dixon go over this in a presentation on their work that she gave at a conference in September. Basically, they went back to one of their data-gathering sites a few years later, after a big UN push to enroll more kids in schools (that only looked at public school enrollment) and they found that while public school enrollment was up, private school enrollment had dropped so precipitously that total school enrollment was actually down. The UN effort to get more kids into school had kicked lots of kids out of school!
The papers from that conference are being assembled into a book, so when that’s out I’ll be able to cite that.
However, I had assumed this was covered in their other published versions of the work.
I guess I’m a little puzzled.
At first I thought you were disagreeing with me about the funding-driven focus of the public education system, that funneling funds to the poor, private schools via foreign-sourced vouchers wouldn’t result in a more aggressive suppression of those schools by the extant public education system so as to get their organizational hands on the money. Now I’m not so sure.
If the UN program was linked to getting previously ignored poor children into the public education system then the obvious place from which to dragoon those kids would be the private schools which they would have been attending. Hasta la vista Mohammed Anwar Ideal High School.
Why wouldn’t exactly the same thing happen if poor parents suddenly found themselves flush with education-money?
Ah, I see what you’re getting at. I think the answer is that the incentive to dragoon students exists under the current regime and would not be increased by the change the Tories are proposing. With or without the Tory change, the incentive exists.
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.
And I think I understand what you’re getting at.
Hi Allen and Greg,
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.
I suppose an idea like this was inevitable once Dr. Tooley’s discovery achieved some notoriety.
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.
Morning Allen, I think your points are very valid and James and I have had conversations along the way as how to protect the market and not to distort it. I do love your enthusiasm. I must say that I’m assuming this ‘proposed’ aid voucher idea could be in the form of targeted vouchers as I stated above. I would also hope that the voucher did not constitute the whole fee. Therefore retaining that link between fees and the parent and therefore accountability. I also need to point out that as you probably know private schools already provide their own scholarships and concessionary places. If some of this financial aid were to replace some of this then the school owners would be able to channel their resources elsewhere – improved facilities, new school branch in rural areas etc. There are also now companies such as the Indian School Finance Company (www.ifsc.in)(as well as microfinance companies) who provide loans for private schools, with well worked out lending rates. I hope that it might be that institutions such as these would somehow be part of this aid voucher scheme (a Grameen Bank for private schools). Therefore I think that an aid voucher has many possibilities.
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.
Oh yes and of course to stop the problem of fly by night school owners, a clause could be that vouchers could be allocated to schools that had been established for more than 5 years and already had a stable client base… there are ways around these problems, and as you say, as long as experts are involved in the initial setting up of the idea (and not just governments) then such issues will be addressed. If the market were still able to work, then if fly by night schools did set up, they would close once the parents figured out the school owner was just after the cash and didn’t care for their children. And would take their voucher elsewhere, yes it might take time, but at least its better than government schools taking the cash, being inefficient and ineffective for the poor and not closing down!
Here in the States, we’ve discovered that requiring schools to be in existence for a stated number of years before they can take vouchers isn’t a good idea. It freezes out the creation of new schools, so you’re not encouraging real competition, you’re just subsidizing the existing private schools – moving from a monopoly to an oligopoly. In other words, you’re empowering schools rather than parents. The “fly by night” problem is much more easily addressed by auditing. (Funny how nobody asks what we’re going to do about “fly by day” government schools, where the operators don’t disappear overnight, but during the school day nobody bothers to teach the kids.)
And auditing requires auditors who –
– know where to look for the schools they’re supposed to audit.
– are courageous enough to identify fly-by-night operators who, being criminals, might not be averse to the use or threat of violence to protect their scam.
– are honest enough to not accept the bribes of fly-by-nights.
– require logistical support, i.e. transportation, expense reimbursement, office space, etc.
– require oversight which has to be at least as honest, courageous and energetic as the auditors.
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.
Greg, in my opinion this wouldn’t work in developing countries as a bribe would get around the auditing initiative.
Note: for some reason, comments seem to be appearing out of order.
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).