Don’t kill the private schools

[Yusuf Mansur]

Jordanian policy makers, lacking the resources to promote world-class educational systems, have focused their attention on overregulating the private schooling system.

The Ministry of Education decided last week to place a ceiling on the tuition of private schools. The decision will destroy the high quality achieved by private schools, reduce investment in this thriving venue, drive away potential and future investment, and bring private schools down to the level of public schools. The introduction of such infantile regulations should be stopped.

A few years ago, the then minister of education decided that Jordan should not equate the SAT (a world-accepted US standard for admission to universities anywhere) with our Tawjihi exam. Jordanian students who, based on their SAT scores, were accepted at the likes of Harvard, Columbia and other world-renowned universities could not gain acceptance to the understaffed, underfunded, and clearly unranked Jordanian universities (none is in the world’s top 1,000 universities).

Another minister decided that private universities should be regulated because they are motivated by profit and thus proceeded to overburden them with regulations through tuition ceilings and investigation by the faculties of our “elite” public universities. The result was that private universities, after showing early promise, began to decline in terms of quality standards.

The Ministry of Education is trying to do the same to private schools. Any minister should understand that tuition is the main source of revenue for private schools, which, unlike public schools, receive no subsidies from the government - even though they should.

The ministry should also learn to properly diagnose a problem. Private schools, which reduce the government burden by teaching over one-fifth of the students, should be subsidised in order to make their services affordable. Instead, they are taxed and treated as a rich cousin whose presence is not that welcome. They are constantly accused of this and that, but the fact of the matter remains that citizens choose to place their children in these schools because the public schools, which all working Jordanians pay for through their taxes, are not very good.

Private schools, like most businesses in Jordan, increased prices in the deflationary era (2007 and part of 2008) and refused to bring them down. Like the government, private schools, too, have expanded spending and reaped the rewards of a hyper-inflationary economy. Consequently, many parents complained that the schools did not lower tuition fees after the prices of oil and basic commodities fell and, with them, the inflation rate.

The proper policy answer should have been the introduction of the Consumer Protection Law (which has been in the making for over a decade now) to enable parents to complain of price gouging and sue for recompense. Another possible policy venue would have been to use the Competition Law if there is evidence of collusion among schools.

Instead, the ministry, obviously not in communication with other ministries (a sad empirical observation and a growing trend in this and recent governments) decided to go with the obvious solution, a price ceiling on tuition in private schools.

But seriously, (and I am obviously repeating myself here, since many other ministers in this and past government Cabinets have heard this statement before) had they asked a first-year student of economics, she would have lectured them on the follies of price ceilings. Since they haven’t bothered to ask, let’s tell them here.

Never mind that the ministry will not be able to fathom what some of our excellent private schools do; a ceiling on tuition (revenues) means that schools will have to hire lower-quality teachers, use substandard textbooks and equipment and cut on costs everywhere. Furthermore, some schools will not upgrade their buses in order to slash costs and thus endanger our children. Others will not upgrade facilities and decrease extracurricular activities. Some will try to find ways to compensate for the loss of revenue through other revenue streams and fictitious activities. The overall impact of such a policy is that the children will suffer, and so will Jordan and its future.

Obviously, ministers should really try to find an answer to their dilemma by talking at least to each other. There are several characteristics that are necessary in any policy to be considered or labelled as modern: strategic (looks ahead and contributes to long-term government goals), outcome-focused (aims to deliver desired changes in the real world), connected (can work across organisational boundaries), inclusive (fair and takes account of the interests of all), flexible and innovative (tackles causes, not symptoms and is not afraid of examination and experimentation) and robust (stands the test of time and works in practice from the start).

Clearly, this new ad hoc invention fails in all aspects.

JordanTimes June 16, 2009

[Yusuf Mansur]

They are made under partial instead of aggregate scopes.
‘Absolutely, the transfer may have also been due to economic reasons other than the fees of schools. With tremendous pressure on the after tax income of the household in the face of rising inflation, parents gave up on providing the best education to their children. The solution was higher incomes not price ceilings. Failing to promote and increase incomes, ceilings came--this is similar to what occurred in some African countries.

Policy failures truly occur when officials fail to speak to one another. Had there been a convo among officials and true cooperation among ministries as would be expected from a functional cabinet, there would have been less of this chaos.