The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education

18 THE ROLE AND IMPACT OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS IN EDUCATION
also lease property from school boards or
nonprofit organizations (Minnesota House
of Representatives 2005). Private contractors
usually receive payments equivalent
to the per student cost of providing education
(World Bank 2006). Other examples of
countries with an “engaged” PPP environment
include Qatar, with its independent
schools, and the various Latin American
countries where the Fe y Alegría network
operates (Allcott and Ortega 2007; Brewer
et al. 2007).
In the strongest or “integral” PPP environment,
the public sector funds private
schools by providing students with vouchers
that will pay for their education at the
school they choose to attend, thus encouraging
student choice and school competition.
In these countries, governments largely rely
on the private sector to provide and administer
education but retain regulatory and
financing responsibilities. The rationale is
that parents can send their children to the
most productive school based on their preferences
(Hanushek and Woessmann 2007).
If private schools are more productive,
then their enrollment will tend to increase
while improvements will take place in all
schools as they try to compete for potential
students. Countries with an enabling
environment have also devolved autonomy
to schools on the grounds that keeping the
locus of decision-making as close as possible
to the locus of schooling produces the
best learning outcomes because this makes
schools accountable for their actions and
outputs (World Bank 2003a). Examples
include countries such as Belgium and the
Netherlands, where private schools receive
public funding and where 68 percent and 83
percent of secondary education enrollments
are in private schools (World Bank 2008),
and Chile, where one of the largest universal
vouchers programs covers 38 percent of
the student population (Bellei 2005).
Good outcomes can also be obtained in
countries that rely on public provision. In
Finland, for instance, 97 percent of enrollments
are in Delivered public schools by The World and the Bank country e-library to:
unknown
is one of the top performers IP : 192.86.100.35 on the OECD’s
international student Mon, 30 assessment Mar 2009 12:16:23 known
as Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA) (OECD 2007a). Finland
has had public choice since the 1990s, and
a high degree of autonomy is devolved to
schools (Rinne, Kivirauma, and Simola
2002), which means that the education system
is under public control but has strong
autonomy and accountability features.
Public-private partnerships and the
funding of existing private schools
Public-private partnerships are widespread
in demand-side financing of private school
operations, including vouchers, subsidies,
capitation grants, and stipends; and, more
recently, in contracts for the provision of
education (World Bank 2006). The main
objective of these PPPs is to increase access
by giving families money to invest in their
children’s schooling by compensating them
for the cost of education (Patrinos 2000).
In addition, demand-side mechanisms
promote parental choice, school competition,
and school accountability (Gauri and
Vawda 2004). Parents can choose the best
schooling alternative for their children,
which may induce pressure on schools to
increase enrollments and to achieve better
academic results at a lower cost (Hanushek
and Woessmann 2007; Hoxby 2000).
Moreover, by funding parental choice,
schools become accountable to families
rather than to the central government, thus
giving them incentives to develop innovative
approaches to learning (Hanushek
and Woessmann 2007). In Haiti, where
socioeconomic and political problems have
weakened the public sector’s capacity to
deliver adequate education services, 80 percent
of education providers are private. One
alternative way to improve access, quality,
and equity outcomes is to channel public
funds to nonpublic education providers
within a regulatory framework that holds
schools accountable for the funds that they
receive and to offer support (in the form
of training and technical assistance) that
strengthens schools’ educational and managerial
capacity (box 2.1).
Critics of such policies argue that, when
public funding flows to private schools,
the distribution of socio-economic and
educational characteristics is important in
determining parental choice and that this
(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank