dendrite studios

With the announcement of another set of disappointing matric results at the end of 2007, voices from various sectors are calling for government to do more. Spend more money, have more programs, get more involved. These cries come despite 20% of government spending already being allocated to education with the vast majority of it to primary and secondary schools.

It is however doubtful if more spending will improve matters. A 2007 research paper by Prof Servaas van der Berg of Stellenbosch University concluded: “Regional comparison shows that the weak performance of the school system cannot be ascribed to the resource endowment of the school or even to the poverty of the households from which their students are drawn.”
The study does however find that weak performance in South African schools’ can be associated with school management and functioning.

This beckons the question: If government is failing to provide better education, should the private sector not play a greater role? Two international academic studies shine light on the qualitative and quantitative value of private for-profit education.

Firstly work done by Prof James Tooley  of the University of Newcastle in 2006 indicates how private for-profit schools are catering for the needs of the poorest of the poor around the globe. From the shanty towns of Lagos, to the rural areas surrounding Accra or the slums of Hyderabad, poor parents are abandoning public schools for budget private schools.
In testing 24 000 students in some of the poorest areas, they found academic achievement much higher than in public schools (even after accounting for background variables). They also found teachers much more likely to be teaching when unexpected visits to classrooms were done. Furthermore, despite operating at a much lower per-pupil cost, these schools were more likely to have basic infrastructure.
According to Tooley, because these schools operate in highly competitive market, they are always on the look-out for innovation that leads to improved standards and thus potential increased market share.

A 2007 Harvard University study conducted in Philadelphia, USA, compared the performance of different schools under different ownership structures. All schools were previously poorly performing schools, thus the local authority’s willingness to take part in the experiment. 30 schools were given to for-profit companies to manage, while sixteen were given to non-profit organisations and another 16 remained under state control. After 4 years the results were clear – children in the for-profit schools were about 9 months more advanced in Mathematics and 2 months more advanced in reading than those in the non-profit and public schools. According to Prof Paul E. Peterson who conducted the study, “the Philadelphia results demonstrate that putting schools in private hands could lead to improvements in education. If results from the first four years continue to hold up, they make a strong case for giving the private sector a larger role in urban education.”

In South Africa less than 3% of school students are in private schools and with only a fraction of those in for-profit schools. This compares to percentages of student in non-public schools of more than 80% in Zimbabwe, more than 50% in Tanzania and more than 70% in Botswana. Tanzania and Botswana along with Seychelles, Kenya, Mauritius, Swaziland and Mozambique performed better than South Africa in the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality’s second survey (SACME QII) of 2003 (Zimbabwe was not included in the study).