Education

Private Education for the Poor Part 2: Evaluating Vouchers

In response to my last post, Private Education for the Poor, Alex pointed me to an article in The Hindu (The Farce of School Choice) specific to the Indian case that is worth discussing. The author Jayati Ghosh shows candidly the limitations of vouchers.

Limitations of Vouchers

One weakness is simply that the problem of poor education in India is not that schools are bad, but that there aren’t enough of them. Even where they are present, school exclusion occurs for a whole host of non-economic reasons, such as social discrimination based on caste. Worse, private schools - where they do exist - tend to increase the exclusion of undrepresented groups rather than acting to minimize exclusion. The solution of giving people vouchers, is therefore no solution at all, because the resulting ‘choice’, is only be presumed.

The author is absolutely right. The Indian education system suffers from poor quality, but even more so from the inability of many to access it for non-economic reasons. As Jayati points out, vouchers work only in the former case, and only in limited cases:

Even votaries of the system admit that it presumes a great deal of institutional capacity. Obviously, such schemes make sense only when there are sufficient schools in the local area to create a real possibility of “choice”; when it is possible for parents and children to make informed judgments about quality on the basis of easily accessible information; when schools are not allowed to discriminate between students on non-financial grounds; and so on.

given the overall context of social discrimination, private schools in India will continue to exclude children from deprived and marginalised sections unless they are forced to stop doing so. The voucher system has no element of compulsion for schools, only supposedly “free choice” for all.

Presuming the Need for Public Education

There is only one problem with this article. It presumes the need for the public sector to operate education. Jayati suggests, for instance, that the expansion of private schools may in fact weaken public schools. Yes, that is quite likely. But I ask her why the public school must exist? Or rather, where education can be provided by the private sector, why not let it?

Jayati’s core argument is right - that vouchers do not address the many non-economic and systemic challenges. However, vouchers are not meant to do so. They are designed to improve quality where the conditions are right. As pointed out by the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation, they are “separating the government financing of education from the government operation of schools.”

If we no longer presume that public operation of the education system is necessary, all that remains is to ensure that the private sector is not allowed to discriminate on non-economic criteria, for instance through legislation (the Right to Education bill) and public oversight. Where the private sector cannot tread, because it is uneconomical, the public sector still remains the “provider of last resort”.

European, particularly Scandinavian countries, have amongst the best education systems worldwide, which are also public. So free markets in education are not a no-brainer, as some would have us believe. Private education and vouchers must, therefore, be approached cautiously, with a clear understanding not only of what free market proponents preach, but of the market failures that they do not talk of.

© 2007 The Discomfort Zone.