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.