Dr. Tooley: His conclusions on Private Education and Entrepreneurship

Professor James Tooley criticized the United Nations’ proposals to eliminate all fees in state primary schools globally to meet its goal of universal education by 2015. Dr. Tooley says the UN, which is placing particular emphasis on those regions doing worse at moving towards ‘education for all’ namely sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, is “backing the wrong horse”.1

On his extensive research in the world poorest countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, India, and China, Dr. Tooley found that private unaided schools in the slum areas outperform their public counterparts. A significant number of a large majority of school children came from unrecognized schools and children from such schools outperform similar students in government schools in key school subjects.2 Private schools for the poor are counterparts for private schools for the elite. While elite private schools cater the needs of the privilege classes, there come the non-elite private schools which, as the entrepreneurs claimed, were set up in a mixture of philanthropy and commerce, from scarce resources. These private sector aims to serve the poor by offering the best quality they could while charging affordable fees.3 » Read more: Millennium Education Development – Ways To Achieve

Since the early days of the 1990s, the accountability in college education has increasingly become a difficult concern for educational institutions. As the student population increases in number, colleges and universities of higher education need to provide board members and administrators important information, such as performance indicators, empirical values to alumni, state, target students, and outside stakeholders. State commissioners of college and graduate education have developed, in so many ways, information cards that rate universities and colleges based on their rank of performance shown in different categories. Popularity of schools, which media presents as surveys on print or the Internet, based itself on graduation rates, retention rates, academic reputation, and resource. All of these indicators are within the envelope of BSC for education or balanced scorecard for higher education.

Most business people usually see the balanced scorecard as a useful strategic management approach for the commercial industry. Now, business experts and statisticians are developing and enhancing it as a useful assessment tool for educational institutions. The balanced scorecard of colleges and universities are no different from that found in most commercial businesses. However, the measurement units or the performance indicators are more specific. Performance indicators can give substantive reports for tactical decision-making. Another notable significance of education BSC indicators is the difference between the uses of indicators for externally- and internally-driven assessments. » Read more: Important Areas to Focus When Using BSC For Education