We've heard plenty about the outsourcing of American jobs to "Asian Tiger" economies and about the swell of graduate students from other countries (India especially) coming to the U.S. to take high-tech and research positions. While politicians have proposed all sorts of bogus fixes to this supposed problem, few want to look at one awkward cause: the high value that many residents of these countries place on rigorous education for their children - even if they must pay for it themselves. The Financial Times reports that in India, attendance at unregulated, unrecognized private schools is booming among the poor. (Private schooling has long boomed among the prosperous.) These schools, populated by the sons and daughters of rickshaw drivers and laborers, are popular because of committed teachers (India's state-run schools suffer from chronic teacher absenteeism) and because they instruct in English, seen as the passport to economic mobility. The schools are forced to bribe state inspectors to stay in business since they can't possibly comply with India's absurd school laws, which regulate everything from the size of playgrounds to the space between students' desks. Yet parents are willing to spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a year in tuition for private schooling in a country where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. British researcher James Tooley has also written extensively on this topic (read more here) and will publish a book on international private schooling for the poor (funded in part by a small grant from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation) this summer.
"A fortune at the bottom of the pyramid," by Edward Luce, Financial Times, January 3, 2005 (subscription required)