James Tooley began researching the reach and performance of private schools for the extremely poor in India and elsewhere. What he found was startling, and it bears directly and profoundly on the relief of extreme poverty all over the world.

In Hyderabad, a city of more than 6 million people, Tooley and his team—confining their search to poor areas lacking amenities such as running water, electricity, and paved roads—counted 918 schools. Only about 40 percent were run or financed by the government; 60 percent were private. Remarkably, some of the slots in these private slum schools were offered free or at reduced rates: The parents of full-fee students, desperately poor themselves, willingly subsidized those in direst need.

What Tooley stumbled onto in Hyderabad turns out to be typical not just of India but of all the other places he subsequently researched—including parts of China, Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. In every case, private education is a principal lifeline for the abjectly poor. In the areas of Ghana and Nigeria that Tooley’s team has canvassed, an outright majority of poor children are attending private schools run without support from the government.

On the whole, dime-a-day for-profit schools are doing a better job of teaching the poorest children than the far more expensive state schools. In many localities, private schools operate alongside a free, government-run alternative. Many parents, poor as they may be, have chosen to reject it and to pay perhaps a tenth of their meager incomes to educate their children privately. They would hardly do that unless they expected better results.

Better results are what they get. After comparing test scores for literacy and basic math, Tooley has shown that pupils in private schools do better than their state-school equivalents—at between a half and a quarter of the per-pupil teacher cost.

Most of those who campaign for greatly increased aid to poor countries would wish to see governments spend much of that money on state-run schools. The goal is admirable, but the method may be counter-productive. Tooley’s research suggests that small-scale support for private slum schools—through scholarship programs, backing for school-voucher schemes, or subsidized microfinance—might do far more good than a big aid push directed at government-run education.

Government is inherently ineffective at providing services. As the above image shows, Government simply spending more and more money on the same flawed system does absolutely nothing to improve its quality because such spending will be reckless, inefficient and wasteful of scarce capital resources through bureaucracy. If allowed to flourish, the Free Market has shown to deliver a higher quality service/product than the government - and at a cheaper cost, as Tooley discovered in his research in developing countries.

The fact that poor people in poor nations are choosing to pay for private education while at the same time also donate so those even poorer than them can have private education really tells you something.

If you care about poor people getting a good education and rising out of their poverty, you should care about the Free Market. This top-down-one-size-fits-all system is not the way for education to be delivered, as the statistics of the last 40 years have proven. The fact that the US Senate just last week tried to ram through an 868-page Education bill providing only 48 hours to read that was formed with NO involvement from teachers, principles, superintendents or even the Education department of the US Senate just shows the level of ineptitude of government.