Don’t uproot our Beautiful Tree – Why voucherisation is not the answer

 John Fowler https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowpeak/7795721200/in/pool-creative_commons-_free_pictures/I came to James Tooley via Sugata Mitra. They both work in the same university. Tooley and Mitra are connected by their recognition of the problem that good teachers do not like to teach in poor, remote areas. Both come up with different solutions to that problem. Tooley’s book, The Beautiful Tree, proposes a voucher system to support the established network of private schools for the poor but then unaccountably extrapolates that to western education. So I loved the book right until the last chapter when this was proposed.

Before I am accused of Nimby-ism, let me explain that Tooley’s main diagnosis of the problem with state schools in developing countries is the lack of transparency and high levels of corruption which lead to a lack of accountability and no incentive to improve in the state sector. His accounts of teachers arriving late, if at all, sleeping or reading the newspaper at their desks while they get the children to do household chores bears absolutely no resemblance to my experience of state education in Denmark, UK, USA or Canada. Especially in the last two years I have been working with stellar teams and individuals who are continually examining their practice in order to improve it. I see absolutely no reason to sweep away that cycle of continuous improvement for the dubious merits of market-based solutions. Of course I see room for improvement, both as an educator and as a parent, but in the end, public provision in the countries that I have some experience of succeeds on many levels such as near universal literacy, personal development and work preparedness.

I enjoyed Tooley’s account of the discovery of a spontaneous phenomenon across the poor world for the poor to open their own schools. According to the book, back at the turn of the century, ministers and officials would routinely deny that these even existed. Either because they were not visible in the official records or because they were visible but deemed too bad to count. The effective private school network of the poor was described in sharp contrast to the hopeless state schools, with overpaid and demotivated teachers who had no social connection to their pupils. This pattern of undocumented but effective schools, set up by community members who recognised a need and who charged reasonable fees and offered scholarships for those fallen on really hard times, was uncovered through thorough research and in the face of objections from the authorities across India, Africa and China.

It was also sobering to realise that this phenomenon has existed for centuries. The title of the book, A Beautiful Tree, is a reference to what the British did in India, according to Ghandi, where they dismantled a functioning system of village ‘native’ schools to be replaced by the British model. Hence the Beautiful Tree was uprooted. All this Tooley confirmed in his research.

But Tooley’s proposed solutions make me uneasy. Where does the voucher system lead these days? Not only to more small enterprises running one or two schools but also to international chains run by, for example, Pearsons who will supply the books. And this is already happening. The few instances where state overview has been reduced in the west seem to lead to much less stability of standards and transparency for parents. I’m thinking here of the UK where freedom has resulted in school chains supporting Creationism on the one hand and Islamisation on the other.

I am all in favour of acknowledging, recognising and supporting a system which seems to have stood the test of time and which seems to arise spontaneously all over the world. I am much less sure of initiatives which are backed by global companies which are busy supporting initiatives of dubious value to students eslewhere in the world (such as testing in the USA which is multiple-choice, hence can be automated, hence a scalable and saleable product – by Pearson). But I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in the end I cannot see why countries such as the UK or Finland (to which education experts are flocking to find out the secret of its global success), which have mostly transparent and uncorrupt systems (Tooleys main criticism of government schools in the poor countries) with balances and checks in place, should throw the whole system out for an untried alternative which few are asking for. One of Tooley’s main criticisms of the lazy state teachers was that they had no appreciation of the context they were trying (or not trying) to teach in. I would say that a blanket recipe to voucherise education in the western world shows a similar lack of appreciation of context. Please don’t uproot this Beautiful Tree!

Image credit: John Fowler