A School for Everyone

The growth of private schooling for the poor has inspired research, articles and books. The author discusses The Beautiful Tree, a definitive book on private schooling by James Tooley.

In The Beautiful Tree, James Tooley talks of government regulations in relation to private schooling across various developing countries. He also drives home several points such as the prevalence of low-cost schools, their advantages over public schools, governments’ reluctance to recognize their existence and poor parents’ clear preference for them. The author in this article also highlights certain issues which Tooley’s book has not emphasized, such as:

• Aspiring parents’ insistence on English education;
• Hurdles private schools face to gain recognition and their prevalence only in primary and middle school levels;
• Hurdles students face in moving schools for secondary education;
• Stagnant drop-out rate in middle school despite increase in enrolment rate in primary school in the past decade;
• Prevalence of coaching classes and their impact on government school performance.