Earlier this month, I remarked on the large amount of evidence that free school fees are unlikely to have much effect on school attendance in poor countries, essentially because the bulk of the cost of going to school is
Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.
Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.
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In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished fees for four children per family. His message that education was free sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3 million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling enrollment to 5.7 million.
Given the large amount of evidence that free fees do not make much difference, it is worth asking if there is more going on than the story reveals. But even if free fees get a lot more students into school, the problem hardly ends here. The Times piece admits there are imposing difficulties.
The track record is mixed.
Malawi's decade-old, underfunded and largely unplanned experiment is generally regarded as a disaster. The number of children in a first-grade class averages 100. Four out of ten of first graders repeat the year. Children's achievement scores are among the lowest in Africa.
Uganda, often held up as a model, also found that achievement fell as classes swelled with highly disadvantaged students.
But in the past eight years, donors have invested more than $350 million and the government also increased spending. Test results from last year show that achievement bounced back, though more than half of third graders still performed poorly in math and English.
Some experts worry that the drive to expand enrollment rapidly has overshadowed the push for quality. "Just herding kids into classes and counting that as education hasn't worked," said William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University who was a research economist at the World Bank for more than a decade.
Even those immersed in the basic issues of achieving universal primary education acknowledge the challenges. "You can get kids into school," said Paud Murphy, who recently retired as one of the World Bank's lead education specialists, "but keeping them there and making them learn involves a whole lot more than we've understood."
There is also the corruption and the politics.
Here in the Malindi district, the most crowded in the nation, the teacher to student ratio among the 100 schools ranges from 1 to 17 at the least crowded school to 1 to 111 at the most crowded.
Even within primary schools, teachers in higher grades have much smaller classes than those in lower grades, which are swollen with the huge influx of first-time students since last year.
In part, those chasms reflect the difficulty of getting teachers to work in remote rural areas and big urban slums. But the problem is also a legacy of political patronage and mismanagement, experts and officials said.
Money alone will not fix things. It will require political will. Transferring large numbers of teachers to understaffed schools will mean taking on Kenya's powerful teachers' union, as well as communities and their political patrons who resist losing teachers to other areas.
Attempts to improve the quality of teaching with incentive pay have not been successful because the system has not found ways to stop teachers from gaming the system.
And no discussion of schools would be complete without the petty, ugly stuff. I have no fond memories of primary school (scratch that: I hated every second of it), but it was a privileged utopia compared to this.
The students at Gahaleni Primary School, more than 900 strong, gathered for morning assembly under the spreading arms of cashew nut trees, their voices rising through the branches in sweet song.
But the moment of grace was shattered when the teacher in charge, Andrew Ngundi, ordered all children not wearing uniforms to come stand before the rest of the school. As part of its free education initiative, the government prohibited the expulsion of students who cannot afford uniforms - required for students in many African countries - but the new rule has not stopped administrators from pressuring poor children to get them.
"How come you're sitting there and you still don't have a uniform," Mr. Ngundi said sharply, pointing at a boy who was frozen in place.
Slowly, barefoot children in torn, filthy T-shirts and hand-me-down dresses with broken zippers separated themselves from students neatly dressed in orange shirts and green shorts or skirts.
Salama quietly slipped behind some taller students, hiding her shame - a skirt covered with big blowsy flowers she had bought used for about a quarter with her firewood earnings.
But Selina Malungu, a fatherless 8-year-old, stood before all her classmates in a grimy, red party dress adorned with torn lace and gay little bears climbing trees. It was her only outfit. The other children mock her for looking like a street urchin, she said.
The challenge is to find ways around the corruption and the other problems to allow this to prevail:
Twelve-year-old Asha Charo's mother, Kadzo Menza, a gaunt woman abandoned by her husband, makes 50 cents a day swinging a hammer to break rocks into small stones, a common building material.
"I'll break stones until she gets an education," said Mrs. Menza, who never herself got the chance to study. "When she finishes school and gets a job, I will rest."
