BOOK REVIEW: Private schooling for the poor

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By Marcus Winters

THE BEAUTIFUL TREE

By James Tooley

Cato Institute Press, $19.95, 291 pages

Reviewed by Marcus Winters

It's not hard to understand why the affluent might choose to send their offspring to private school, especially when the local public-school alternative is not up to snuff. They want their children to be well-educated and successful, and they can afford to pay tuitions approaching $30,000 in the hope of improving the odds.

Yet a willingness to spend money on education, even when a free alternative is available, can also be found among the less well-heeled. Of the 5 million children attending schools charging tuition, 1.9 million attended schools that charged on average less than $3,500 in the 2003-04 school year, the last year for which data are available.

In addition, nearly a third of private schools enrolled populations that were 30 percent or more minority, and a fifth of them enrolled majority-minority populations. Almost half of all children attending nonpublic schools happen to be enrolled in Catholic parochial schools, many of them for reasons unconnected to the religious instruction offered.

The tuitions that the working-class and middle-class parents of these children pay might seem modest, but the sacrifices they must make to do so indicate a commitment to learning and upward mobility equal to that of society's most privileged members.

In his new book, "The Beautiful Tree," James Tooley, an education professor at the University of Newcastle in England, informs us that even the very poor may harbor the same values as America's strivers. In many of the world's poorest nations, people living on less than $1 a day are escaping horrible public schools by paying to send their children to mostly secular, proprietary private schools. Among other things, these schools demonstrate the power of markets to step in when government has failed.

The peasants and slum-dwellers of India, Nigeria, Ghana and China have homes without toilets and one bed to a family. The way out of these circumstances, development experts say, is universal public schooling. The World Bank and large philanthropic groups have expended vast resources increasing the number of public schools in such nations. The facilities they have built rival those in the West, and they have made sure the teachers employed in them have attended education school and been certified.