Poor neighborhoods around the world embrace a surprising idea: incredibly low-priced private schools
May 13, 2010
The end-of-day bell has just gone off at MA Ideal High School, and a Grade 4 classroom on the first floor explodes into a rush of activity. Pig-tailed girls and boys in indigo shorts jump out of their benches and jam through the doorway. But in a corner toward the back of the room, 10-year-old Sanaa Sultana ignores the shrill ringing. She continues reading aloud quietly from her English textbook. Next to her, 11-year-old Mohammed Majid–a hulking, towering contrast to Sultana’s tiny frame–follows her in his own book, repeating after her, sentence for sentence. Sanaa is Mohammed’s partner in the school’s peer-to-peer learning program. When he joined MA Ideal a year ago, Mohammed didn’t know more than a few rudimentary words of English. Now, after a year of sitting with Sanaa, one of the class’s brightest students, Mohammed almost effortlessly makes his way through an entire sentence.
One floor above them, young teachers in salwar kameezes–long, loose tunics paired with drawstring tapered pants–assemble in neat rows in a classroom, waiting a monthly training session to begin. Today they will learn how to encourage class participation. On the ground floor, Mohammed Anwar, the school’s proprietor, is talking to a group of parents. He’s telling them about his plans to introduce Genki, a phonics-based teaching method that will help first-generation English learners speak the language more fluently. The burqa-clad mothers are unconvinced, preferring instead the more conventional method of teaching by textbook, but Anwar, with his energy and zeal, manages to be persuasive.
MA Ideal also offers its students free karate lessons, computer classes, soccer training, and health camps. But the school–a private, small-scale venture–is not situated in a plush upper-middle-class neighborhood. Instead, it is tucked away in Kishanbagh, a sprawling slum of low-slung concrete huts, tin-roofed shanties, and bare-bellied children who gambol with skinny, underfed dogs. And the average fee at MA Ideal High School? About $3 per month–one-20th the cost of a typical private school in India.
MA Ideal is part of a grass-roots private school movement that has spread through India in the last two decades. Kishanbagh, a 5-square-kilometer patch of land, has 28 low-cost private schools, while India itself has some 300,000, each a buzzing hive of teaching, learning, and extracurricular activity. These schools offer poor residents across the country an alternative to the inefficient public school system. In Kishanbagh, for example, the local public school is a cavernous building where teachers rarely show up, toilets regularly overflow, and classes are almost never held. In the western world, private schools are associated with high fees and plentiful resources, but Hyderabad’s schools succeed by focusing on efficiency and accountability.
Principals like Mohammed Saleem of the nearby Adams High School say that fierce competition between schools forces institutes to strive toward providing the best education they can. ’’We have to listen to parents because otherwise they will admit their children to a different school. I have to constantly find new ways to keep parents interested in my school,” says Saleem…
