Is public education increasing inequality? | Felix Ohswald | TEDxAthens
Felix Ohswald’s TEDx talk examines whether public education increases inequality by arguing that while public education aims to be accessible and equitable, in practice it often fails on three fronts: access (e.g., ~250 million children out of school in 2018; >90% affected by COVID school closures), inclusivity (UNESCO: many governments spend disproportionately on the wealthiest 20%), and affordability (≈10% of families borrow for school; up to 15% in some developing countries). He contends that simply increasing public spending has limited effect when systems are inefficient and advocates digital innovation and public–private partnerships (PPPs) — citing historical private roots of schooling and modern examples in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Espoo (Finland), and UK pandemic tutoring/tech initiatives — as scalable ways to improve access, inclusivity, and affordability.
Let me ask you a very important question. Who of you is in favor of public education? Show me some hands. Quite, quite a lot. A friend of mine recently told me a story about a kid, let's call that kid John for a second, going to a public school and the kid John, he's performing very poorly in mathematics. I think a lot of us can relate to that. And then the parents actually sent John to a Catholic private school. And one thing that all Catholic private schools have in common, you know, they have like a cross with Jesus in most of the classrooms. And then John actually suddenly John's performance in mathematics, it explodes. Like, John is starting to get really, really strong in mathematics. And then the parents ask him, like, John, like, what is it? Is it because of the teacher? Is it because of the school? Like, what is it? And John is saying, well, I'm seeing this guy stripped on a plus sign all day long. So they seem to be very serious with mathematics. Poor John, mixing up the crosses and the plus signs. Actually, nine out of 10 people are in favor of public education. And it makes sense. It is accessible. It lowers inequality. Right? Let me tell you three facts, why this is not always the case. First and foremost, access to education. In the year 2018, around 250 million children, that is 20% of the global student population, didn't have access to to any school at all. Two years later, when the COVID pandemic started, it affected more than 90% of school kids globally. More than 90% didn't have access to any physical school at all. So education is not accessible to everybody. Second point, education is not always inclusive. According to a UNESCO report From 2021, most governments spend twice their education budget to the wealthiest 20% of a society, versus the remaining 80%. Countries in which the spend is actually equally distributed include Finland, Denmark and Ireland, countries that we all associate having a really good education system. In some African countries, for example, some of the governments even spend four times of their education budget to the wealthiest 20% than to the remaining 80%. Third point, education is not for free to everybody. Almost 10% of families need to borrow money to pay for the education of their children. In some of the developing countries, it goes up to 15%. So how can we change that? What is the solution? Benjamin Franklin once said, an investment in education pays the best interest. So is the answer simply, a government should spend more money on education? Is this solving all of these problems? Actually, when you check the data to analyze when a government spends more money on education, do you see this in the student Performance is also the student performance, then better. At first it looks like it, but when you adjust for income inequality and you adjust for income per capita, the effect is actually very minimal. So when you invest more money into an inefficient system, you just inflate the inefficiencies, but you don't solve for it. I am truly convinced that innovation and digital innovation have the capabilities and the power to solve for these inefficiencies and create a system that has the power to reinvent itself. The answer how to do that is called public private partnerships. PPPs. And this is actually not something 100% new. The first schools when you look into the history, the first schools, the start of the education system was actually 100% private. And at that time, the education system and schools reinvented themselves several times. Yes, it was not accessible for everybody, but it had the ability to reinvent itself several times. Let's make a quick excursion into history. Today we are here in the beautiful city of Athens in Greece. The word school comes from the Greek word zholi, but please excuse my pronunciation here. And zholi means leisure. Don't tell this to your kids. When they find out that school stands for leisure, they don't take school serious anymore. But actually in ancient Greek, learning was associated with leisure and most of the knowledge was transferred via speech. So you really need to have good memory skills to actually learn something. One of the first inventions, probably by somebody who didn't have that good memory skills, was a writing board to actually write down what a person was saying. The Romans, for example, introduced wax covered writing boards, or in Middle east, they were using clay tablets to write down something. Later on, at the end of the Middle ages, that was after the invention of printing happened, schools became much more common across Europe. And the main purpose of schools at that time was to ensure that that children can read and write. And most of these efforts, they were driven by private institutions and they were driven by the church at that time. Then later ON in the 19th century, something happened. Education was no longer seen as a purely private and religious good. It was seen as a public good that everybody should have access to. And basically the education system in the 19th century got nationalized. And then in the following 200 years, up until today, not so much innovation happened. And also us, right? When we sit together with family and friends, we often joke about it that the way you went to classroom, the way you perceived school was very similar than your parents perceived school, than your grandparents perceived school. The concept of a classroom and the concept of teaching did not fundamentally change in the last 200 years. According to the same UNESCO report that I mentioned before, without private actors in the education industry, if we would have no private actors at all, more than 350 million children won't have any education at all. And especially in the last 200 years, the public and the private efforts have decoupled from each other. They went different paths. Now, in the 21st century, we have all the tools available in front of us to bring them together and combine the best out of these two worlds. Imagine you live in a city called Belo Horizonte. See in your faces like, what the hell is Belo Horizontal? It's the capital city of the second largest industrial state in Brazil. And imagine you work really hard to provide for your family. You have children, you work really, really hard to make sure that your kids have everything that they need. And no matter how hard you try, your kids cannot go to any school at all. Because the city lacks the physical infrastructure, it lacks the human resources. Not having enough teachers, just lacking everything they need to provide your children to have access to a proper school. That was the case in 2011 for more than 11,000 children that were living in Belo Horizonte. They couldn't access any school at all because of a public private partnership. It allowed for the creation and building of several schools and daycare centers to eventually ensure the education of more than 18,000 children in that place. In the year 2020, in a city called Espoo, which is in Finland, they also started one of the first public private partnerships to invest and support the public education infrastructure. Because of that partnership, it eventually allows more than 4,000 children in Espoo to deserve and access a proper education. And there are countless other examples globally that go into that direction. Especially in the last two years, when most schools globally were closed, a lot of governments were forced to into public private partnerships. The United Kingdom, for example, they opened a budget of several hundred of millions of pounds to pay for tutoring services for families to make up for the loss of knowledge when schools were closed. Some states started partnerships with systems like Microsoft Teams to provide a better online infrastructure. Some states opened up budgets to better train the teachers to cope with the new situation. We tried out a lot of things and we will see only in the next months and years which of these efforts will actually be very helpful, which will pay off, and which of these efforts will not pay off at all. But at least we tried. You can take this concept of public private partnerships even one step further. You can think of VOUCHERS that the government hands out to the families so that you can use them to pay for extracurricular services, to pay for tutoring services. You can think of the creation of alternative school models that also have the right accreditation. You can think of investing in school infrastructure like a CRM system that most people here in companies use to better train the teachers, to better hire teachers, to better create learning materials. So without a doubt, public private partnerships have the potential to help that education system to reach new heights and to reinvent itself. So coming back to my initial 3 points. Why education is not accessible to everybody. With public private partnerships, we can ensure better access by investing in public infrastructure. We can make education more inclusive because the money that the government spends can be spent more efficiently. And we can make education more affordable because we can provide innovative solutions on a large scale globally. Nelson Mandela once said, education is the most powerful tool to change the world. You can take this one step further. Public private partnerships can change the world today in education. Let's start with that. Thank you.
