Choice From the Ashes

In the search for silver linings, school choice advocates can look to the hope that emerges in devastated regions. Currently school choice programs remain at the proposal stage across the United States.

Meanwhile, as we’ve reported, in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, charter schools came to dominate the crescent city’s educational landscape and test scores went up. Similarly, in perpetually strife-torn Nigeria, three-quarters of students are now in private schools, James Tooley said at the Atlas Foundation’s International Education Forum in Indianapolis last weekend. Tooley is the author of From Village Schools To Global Brand.

“Teachers in Nigerian public schools might be asleep if they’re even there,” Tooley noted. Tooley is the chairman of Omega Schools, a chain of low-cost private schools in Ghana. How low? Fifty cents a day including meals compared to that same amount for lunch alone in public schools, an expense parents shoulder themselves.

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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