10-year Study Published

Donald Holsinger

Private schools in Uganda, East Africa are more cost-effective than government operated or public schools according to a recently published study by emeritus professor Donald Holsinger published in the prestigious Teachers College Record. Holsinger was Director of BYU's Kennedy Center for International Studies and a past president of the Comparative and International Education Society.

His research and subsequent article have been in production for a decade. "It was a stunningly difficult ten-year effort, from start to finish," Holsinger said. Part of the difficulty of the research lies in the subject matter: privatization of education in Uganda, an east African nation. "Some journal editors simply don't believe schooling should be privatized and reject the topic on ideological grounds without knowing anything about the research itself or its policy significance, " said Holsinger in reference to the Comparative Education Review, the journal of the society of which Holsinger himself served as president. Holsinger began the project a decade ago, in conjunction with two students-now professors-James Jacobs and Christopher Mugimu, by collecting data from a random sample of secondary schools in Uganda.

The objective of the study was to determine how education policy for secondary schools should be determined in Uganda. "The question was whether or not public budget could best be used for government schools or the many new private secondary schools that were burgeoning throughout the country or some combination of both," said Holsinger. He and his colleagues designed the study to measure the cost effectiveness of each type of school where learning achievement was the measure of effect.

The question they asked themselves at the onset was, "How can we compare the relative efficiency of schools?" It is a tough question, but one thing that most people can agree on is that schools teach, and students learn. According to Holsinger, "if teaching is not going on, and learning is not going on, then you can say that the schools are failing in their very fundamental obligation."

It was determined that a measure of learning would be taken through standardized tests, and comparisons could be drawn between public and private schools. "We also measured the costs that were associated with the production of a single point gain on the tests," Holsinger explained, which figures led to the conclusion that private schools are more efficient or cost-effective on a dollar-to-point scale than public schools. Columbia University's Teachers College Record was very pleased to have the paper once Holsinger and colleagues finally sent it to them for review.

Holsinger also had a book published recently by Springer which he co edited with former student James Jacob (now Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh), titled Inequality in Education, Comparative and International Perspectives. The book is a compilation of research conducted on the inequality of education, both in access and quality, in a wide range of nations worldwide.

"This is a new research area," Holsinger said of their work, "and there is not a lot of research literature on this topic." Basically the distribution of education is explained in this way: In a perfect world, 5 percent of the people would have 5 percent of the education, and 75 percent would have the same percentage of the education. That is never the case, however. "You never see perfect equality," Holsinger said, "but just how unequal is it and what are the consequences of that inequality?"

Holsinger and Jacobs arranged the details with a publisher and began requesting articles and research. "Once we got the publisher in place we went back to research scholars we thought might be interested, invited them to be part of the book, tell us what their research interests were, and requested proposals for chapters in the book. Thirty or forty people said they were interested, and we ended up using twenty four."

30 April 2008