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Few people believe that private schools exist in the impoverished, rural areas of China. Private schools are normally assumed to be only for the rich, situated in the developed cities. Moreover, most education in China is administrated and funded by the central government, which leads people to believe that there was little or no private education — especially for the poor. And development experts have largely ignored private schools for the poor as an irrelevancy, so no outside statistics on the subject have been available.

Until recently, that is.

An Official from the DfID (Department for International Development, UK), who was working closely with local government in Gansu Province, one of the poorest provinces in China, told Professor James Tooley (Director of the E.G. West Centre) that there were definitely no private schools in the poor areas where they were working. Furthermore, officials in the Education Bureau of Gansu Province in Lan Zhou city told him that the existence of private schools for the poor was “logically” impossible — because China has universal public education, and the poor wouldn’t waste their limited resources on education. However, he wanted to see for himself.

Prof. Tooley and I conducted the research in Gansu province to find out whether private schools existed there or not. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, we carried out our work in the whole of the province in September 2004. The area is equivalent in size to the State of Texas, so this was a great effort. We employed 380 researchers and 40 supervisors who visited every village, county, and city.

In total, we found 689 private schools in the whole Gansu province. Among them, 586 private schools serve the poor, even in the remote villages. By contrast, the official statistics reported only 44 private schools in the whole province, all located in the big cities — for the privileged. Evidently, the role played by private schools has been ignored and neglected by the government for some time.

What kind of parents and students are using the rural private schools?

Our findings showed that it is the poorest of the poor who are sending their children to the private schools, with the very poorest families usually preferring private schools run by businessmen. The mean family income in private schools managed by proprietors is RMB 2692.26 ($332) per year. In private schools managed by villagers, it was RMB 2,715 ($335) per year. Families that sent their children to public schools had a median income of RMB 3,354 ($414) per year.

How about teaching quality in different types of schools? We tested 2,640 students in a stratified random sample of 110 private and 110 public rural schools, in Chinese and Mathematics. The results illustrate that, in both mathematics and Chinese, student academic achievement was higher in the for-profit private schools than in public schools. We also found that students in the proprietor-managed private schools had significantly lower IQ scores going in than students in public schools, which makes the accomplishment all the more impressive.

Our research clearly indicates that private schools in rural Gansu province are providing parents and children with more choices and higher quality than the public schools. The market for proprietor-managed private schools seems large. And research conducted in Beijing during a December 2005 study reached similar conclusions.

Obviously, there is huge demand for private schools in China, because people see investments in their children as one that will pay off in the future. Chains of for-profit private schools are appearing to satisfy the desires of parents and students, such as Beijing New Oriental Education Group and Guang Dong Ying Hao Education Group. In fact, the Beijing New Oriental Education Group successfully obtained $1 billion from overseas for its further development.

Private education, like so many other sectors of the Chinese economy, is booming, as people’s demand for quality education outstrips what the government is willing to provide.

Qiang Liu is Head of Research in the E.G. West Centre, University of Newcastle upon Tyne.  This article previously appeared on TCS Daily.