Hiper-resumo em português: o pesquisador James Tooley descobriu que pessoas bem pobres nos países em desenvolvimento estão cada vez mais descontentes com a educação fornecida pelo estado, e dando um jeito de resolver por si mesmos, pagando escolas particulares. Essas escolas são praticamente míticas, tem sua existência não-contabilizada nos números oficiais dos países, apesar de em alguns casos serem até onde a maioria dos alunos estudam. Aquelas que são admitidas como existentes, também são desdenhadas pelas autoridades como algo das elites, apenas para uma pose de status, mas a verdade é bem diferente.
Trecho de documentário da BBC (video):http://www.cato.org/jwmediaplayer/player.swf?file=tooley-beautiful-tree.flv&image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato.org%2Ffeaturedvids%2Fcaptures%2Ftooley.png&duration=786&skin=http://www.cato.org/jwmediaplayer/nacht/nacht.swf&type=rtmp&streamer=rtmp%3A%2F%2Fflash.edgecastcdn.net%2F000873%2Farchive-2009MP3 do CATO institute:http://www.cato.org/jwmediaplayer44/player.swf?file=http%3A%2F%2Fne.edgecastcdn.net%2F000873%2Fdailypodcast%2Fjamestooley_thebeautifultree_20090416.mp3&image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cato.org%2Fdailypodcast%2Fimages%2FCDP.jpg&duration=546&skin=http://www.cato.org/jwmediaplayer/nacht/nacht-nobutton.swf&icons=false&type=soundhttp://ne.edgecastcdn.net/000873/dailypodcast/jamestooley_thebeautifultree_20090416.mp3Trechos de um texto do CATO:
Like a 21st-century Indiana Jones, University of Newcastle professor James Tooley travels to the remotest regions on Earth researching something that many regard as mythical: private, parent-funded schools serving the Third World poor. Government officials from across Africa, India and China repeatedly tell him that such schools do not exist in their countries — often after he has already visited those schools and interviewed their students and teachers. [...]
Despite the repeated denials of government officials, Tooley, Dixon and their teams of researchers found that outright majorities of schoolchildren in the urban slums of the developing world already attend private, fee-charging schools. Even in small villages, half of all students are typically enrolled in private sector schools, though private sector enrollment is lower in the countryside. The poor have decided not to wait for promised reforms in government schooling, which is regarded as corrupt and educationally deficient even by its advocates.
But is the rapid growth of for-profit schools for the poor a good thing? Most government officials in these countries, along with the international development community, seem aghast at the thought. Consider the reaction of Mrs. Mary Taimo Ige Iji, head of the public school district that includes the shanty town of Makoko. As part of a BBC documentary, Tooley interviews her on the balcony of a public school just outside the slum. Standing at a railing overlooking her brand-new white Mercedes, Mrs. Ige Iji explains to the cameras why most poor families prefer to pay for private schooling rather than frequent the free government schools: "The most important point is 'fake status symbol,'" emphasizing "fake status symbol" in finger quotes. She elaborates that poor parents "want to be seen as rich and caring, but in choosing private schools she believes they are, in fact, "ignoramuses." These poor private schools are "ill-equipped," she tells Tooley, and they're instruction deficient because they lack the "fully qualified" teachers of their government sector counterparts.
Needless to say, the poor parents who are choosing fee-charging schools over the widely available — and often free — government alternative do not see their decisions in the same light as Mrs. Ige Iji. "We pass the public school many days and see the children outside all of the time, doing nothing," one Nigerian father tells Tooley, "but in the private schools, we see them everyday working hard. In the public school, children are abandoned." [...]
In every region he studied, private school students were outscoring their government-sector counterparts in both mathematics and English, a language recognized in these countries as a valuable economic asset. The effect was both statistically significant and large in real terms, and persisted even after controlling for student background characteristics and IQ. Private schools were doing this, he added, for a small fraction of the per-pupil expenditures in the public sector. Fees at the private schools he studied in Hyderabad hovered around $2 per month, and at least 18 percent of students in these schools attended for free or at discounted rates — the poor were subsidizing the truly destitute.
As the messenger of such shocking, anti-establishment findings, Tooley did what any good scientist would do: He requested the reanalysis of his data by a respected independent body — the British National Foundation for Education Research. After a thorough review of his Hyderabad data, using the latest statistical methods for assessing educational outcomes, NFER agreed with Tooley's findings — except that they found the private sector advantage to be even greater than his original estimate.
In cases such as this, where the intellectual and institutional status quo enjoys massive inertia, it is not uncommon for radical new findings to be ignored, regardless of their inherent persuasiveness. [...]
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8650