The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley Read Free Book Online Page A

Chuck would be leaving before my talk. So one morning, I cornered him, told him as much as I could about my findings in the slums of Hyderabad and about the tantalizing glimpses I’d had elsewhere. I told him that I thought I might be onto something interesting and said, why don’t we go out into the poorer areas of Goa, and you’ll see it for yourself. It was a big risk: I’d never been out to the poorer areas of Goa. Perhaps what I’d found in Hyderabad wouldn’t exist elsewhere in India? Perhaps Sajitha Bashir of the World Bank was right about private schools for the poor being only localized in India? We hired a car, skipped the morning’s lectures, and drove. We came upon a group of slender women in dowdy saris carrying heavy loads on their heads as they worked on road improvements. “Where do you send your children to school?” we asked. They didn’t understand a word we said. We drove on, off the main road and into a little village: I needn’t have worried. In front of us was a private school of the sort I’d described. Then we found another, and another. Driving back to the plush hotel where the conference was based, Chuck told me that I should submit a proposal to the foundation, and it would receive a sympathetic hearing.
    Over a year later in April 2003, I was ready to start the research—promising to examine in more depth the phenomenon of private schools for the poor in India, in a range of African countries, and in China, too. The John Templeton Foundation was taking a risk: I might find nothing at all—perhaps the few schools I’d seen on my sporadic visits were just that: not the tip of the iceberg but the totality of what I might find. I suspect some of their academic referees told them that. But they funded me anyway. Beside me from the beginning was Dr. Pauline Dixon, the vivacious and entertaining economist from Newcastle University, who had come to academia later than most after spending several years as a jazz pianist. She was my indispensable support throughout, involved in researcher training, data collection and analysis, and writing up the final results.
    The first study up and running was in the Old City of Hyderabad. We created a research team based in a small nongovernmental organization, the Educare Trust, in Hyderabad and trained them in how to collect the data. We then selected 3 (out of 35) zones, Bandlaguda, Bhadurpura, and Charminar, to which the secretary of education, Dr. I. V. Subba Rao, had directed me as being amongst the poorest. These three zones together had a population of about 800,000 and covered an area of about 19 square miles. Finally, within these three zones, I instructed the team to focus only on schools found in the “notified slums,” according to the latest census and municipal documents, defined as areas that lacked amenities such as decent sanitation and clean water supply, adequate roads, and electricity. 6
    In addition to looking at urban Hyderabad, I also wanted to see what was happening in rural India. Again directed by the secretary of education, I sent my research teams four hours down the road to the Mahbubnagar district, one of the two worst performing of the 23 districts in Andhra Pradesh on a range of educational indicators, such as literacy rates, proportion of children in school, and retention of students. My team selected five subdistricts in Mahbubnagar, three of which were wholly rural, and two of which had some urban population in small towns. Again the focus was on these poor areas, through which we could usefully effect comparisons between both rural and “small-town” India with metropolitan India. Also in India, I conducted research in the notified slums of North Shahdara, East Delhi, reportedly one of the poorest areas of the capital city.
    The studies were up and running in India. My teams were going down every street and alleyway, calling unannounced on every school they found, to collect its details and to see what was happening