School choice in developing nations works

As a public educator and a conservative, I have been interested in the ongoing debate over school choice. The teacher unions fear choice and fight against it fiercely. They have various reasons and scare tactics, but mostly they have money to battle against giving parents the chance to put their children into schools that will do the best job educating their young. A recent movie, Waiting for Superman, exposes the unions for their selfishness in this regard and holds out hope that parental choice would be a better option.

I thought about all this as I read an article in World magazine. By the way, you ought to consider getting this magazine because it acts like Time or Newsweek but without the liberal bias as it reports on news, entertainment, and politics. Anyhoo, World had a report on school choice I found interesting.

The magazine told about a professor of education who studied private schools in a dozen developing countries. He was surprised to learn of private schools existing without government money. Instead, they depended upon "$2-per-month fees paid by rickshaw pullers who scrimp and save to give their children a chance not to pull rickshaws." He found all sorts of for-profit schools created by poor but persevering entrepreneurs.

The professor was especially amazed to see the results when he compared these private schools with better-funded government schools. He found high motivation and better results where he least expected it -- in these poorer schools. Parents had genuine choices of a number of competing private schools that were close to their homes and were in competition to keep prices low. Educational entrepreneurs were responding to parental needs and requirements, with the result that their quality was higher than that of government schools provided for the poor.

A large grant allowed him to create research teams that went on to test thousands of schoolchildren in countries like India, China, Nigeria, and Ghana. They found that poor children in private schools scored 75% better than comparable students in government schools. Of course, this did not go over big with government "experts," who saw these schools as a threat to their bureaucracy.

Sound familiar? We encounter the same results and foot dragging here in the United States. The experts don't want to give up their monopoly on education, so they fight school choice whenever they can. But I think choice is the wave of the future, just like we have seen in the rise of for-profit higher education like the University of Phoenix. Competition is good in all fields, especially education.