A lesson in bias on private schools

What’s wrong with low-cost education in poor countries? Quite a lot, you might think, if you read a new report from the Department for International Development. Low-cost private schools serve around 70 per cent of children in poor urban areas and nearly a third of rural children too. But the issue raises controversy among academics and experts, not least because it goes against 65 years of development dogma that the only way to help the poor is through government education, with big dollops of aid thrown in. Every aid agency and government has gone along with that. The only fly in the ointment is that poor parents disagree, which is why low-cost private schools are burgeoning wherever you look.

To its credit, DFID has recognised that if the poor are choosing private education in huge numbers, it would be worth finding out what research says about them. So it commissioned what they called a ‘Rigorous Literature Review’: researchers selected the best papers written about private schools in developing countries and review this literature ‘rigorously’ to come up with the truth.

Given all this, you’d reasonably expect if you were to read the resulting report — written by academics at top universities like Birmingham, UCL (Institute of Education) and Cambridge — that if it reported, say, that private schools are unfair to girls, that would be because the literature said so. Unfortunately, it’s not like that at all. Time after time, it reports one thing when the literature in fact says precisely the opposite, or is at best much more nuanced.

A typical example is a piece of research from Tanzania, which the rigorous review cites as showing ‘a smaller proportion of girls than boys enrolling in private schools’. That suggests the private schools are unfair to girls.