Strange, but ban on exam ranking is good cash for Kenya’s private schools

The present controversy over the Kenyan Government’s decision to ban ranking of performance of schools and candidates in national examinations will not last long.

The Kenya Private Schools Association (KPSA) in particular, has been very outspoken, saying the ban targeted its members.

The thinking is that because private schools use their placement in the rankings to market themselves, now that will be more difficult.

I think the ban is the best thing that could happen to private schools because the biggest threat to their business is not a market one, but politics.

Because private schools tend to do better than government ones these days in Africa (it used to be the reverse years ago), some countries have forced private schools to allocate a quota of places to “poor students”.

When you remove ranking, that disparity will now be hidden and the government will come under less public pressure to close the gap.

THE UGANDAN EXPERIENCE

The Kenyan Government, however, might learn from Uganda on this one. Embarrassed by the fact that only a handful of schools were topping the list all the time and whole districts were not getting first-grade passes, President Yoweri Museveni’s government also scrapped school ranking.

However, it was alive to the political risks because the issue was not just that schools in whole parts of the country were doing badly, but that students from some ethnic groups were not getting into the top rank.

It solved that problem by allowing the ranking of the best students.

How would it work in Kenya?

Under the new system, a Maasai politician could in future argue that his community is losing out in education. However, the son of a Maasai millionaire in Nairobi, who goes to Makini School, might be the best student for the year and there will be no way of knowing that.

Under the Ugandan system that ranks the best students, the performance of that Maasai student will be known and the Maasai politician, whose children also go to a private school, will now not make noise.

GOOD POLITICS

You see, the student ranking system is good politics, and the top students become more than just students — representatives of the rest of their community who performed badly. They can be content that “at least one of us is in the top 10”.

Of course the KPSA fellows are smart enough to know, as they said, that parents will still be aware of which school performed best and will take their children there.

This is because most parents do not actually base the decision to take their children to private schools on ranking.

I encountered this years ago in Uganda while travelling in a remote part of the country. We stopped under a mango tree to buy that most glorious of African foods — roadside roast maize.

I noticed that on the left side was a new gleaming primary school built with donor money under the Universal Primary Education programme. It was empty and silent.

Directly opposite it was a mud-and-wattle school in the banana plantations. It was full of life and children were running around in the gardens. I was puzzled and asked the maize roaster what was going on.

HARD LOCAL FACTS

He said all the teachers in the shiny government school taught in the mud school across the road, and all the parents took their children there for a small fee, and not to the government one where they would not have to pay any fees.

The mud school did everything the beautiful state school did not do; it paid teacher salaries on time and students did better. The people in the village did not read newspapers from Kampala or watch TV, so they did not base their decisions on rankings published in the media but on hard local facts when the results came out.

Something else happened. The ban on ranking lowered the cost of business for private schools and increased their profits because now they spent less on things like advertising.

They could afford to because the other effect of the ranking ban was that many parents now believed that the public school system was so bad, the government was ashamed of putting it on show.

The result was that private schools became the default for more parents and a new market segment grew. Private schools created “remedial programmes” through which students from government schools were helped to “catch up”, supposedly because they were behind.

It is strange how things usually turn out.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter:@cobbo3