James Tooley, in his book “The Beautiful Tree,” explores public and private schools in Third World countries and finds that the private schools deliver a superior education with less funding. Why are private schools better?

One government principal in Ghana says that parents choose private schools because public schools cannot fire bad teachers. She says private schools proprietors “are very tough. If teachers don’t show up and teach, the parents react. Private schools need to make a profit, with the profit they pay their teachers, and so they need as many students as they can get. So they are tough with their teachers and supervise them carefully. I can’t do that with my teachers. I can’t sack them…. It is very rare for a teacher to be sacked [in a government school].”

Another reason that private schools are better is incentives. Private school owners have to stay on their toes and constantly monitor the performance of their teachers. Leaders of private schools are constantly walking around their school, making sure teachers are teaching, and following up on parent complaints to ensure that students are learning. One private school proprietor in India decided to install a closed-circuit television system to monitor classrooms because he knew that if teachers were accountable to him, he could be accountable to parents.

Government schools don’t have this incentive. Tooley explains, “the chief problem in the government schools is that the principals and inspectors have no incentives to do any of these things. Principals will draw the same salary and same benefits if they sit in their offices reading the newspaper all day — or even if they don’t show up at all — as they would if they meticulously walked the corridors checking on their teachers.”

- Brooke Terry