Privatisation of Compulsory Education in Ghana: Examining the Developments so Far
In Ghana, privatisation of education is seen as a complementary strategy by government to address the educational needs of the populace. This is against the backdrop of the claim that privatisation constitutes a formula to expanding school choice, increas
- PDF / 410,774 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 17 Downloads / 288 Views
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany M.A. Aziabah Department of Community Development, University for Development Studies, Wa, Ghana © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017 T. Koinzer et al. (eds.), Private Schools and School Choice in Compulsory Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-17104-9_9
133
134
M.A. Aziabah
the developing world where significant gaps in access to and equity in education remain. However, the effects of privatisation of compulsory basic education in Ghana have been mixed. Whereas private schools are believed to deliver quality basic education and offer conducive learning environments, issues of access and equity remain contentious. On the one hand, an analysis of access to top rank secondary schools in Ghana in the past revealed that majority of students gaining admission to such schools emanated from private schools (Addae-Mensah et al. 1973), a situation that has not significantly changed even in the present. On the other hand, private schools charge fees which are normally higher than public schools will demand and thus limiting access to mostly the middle class, leaving out a huge cohort of the poor who need education to improve their chances in life. In this article, applying an historical institutionalism approach (Mahoney 2000; Pierson 2004), I examine the evolution of private schools in Ghana by highlighting the historical, legal and institutional contexts of their development. The paper also discusses issues of educational access and academic performance using results of national standardized tests among private and public schools. The goal is to gauge the consequences of these developments for overall institutional change and educational inequality in Ghana. To achieve the following, I draw on a pool of literature on educational development in Ghana (Aziabah 2017a, b; Foster 1965; McWilliam and Kwamena-Poh 1975), education sector performance reports, and empirical data on school statistics generated by Ghana’s Ministry of Education (GoG 2012, 2013, 2015) as evidence supporting my arguments. This is supported by scholarly work in the field of privatisation and educational change at both national and global levels.
2 Historical Development of Private Schools in Ghana Private education has a long history in Ghana, tracing its roots back to early missionary and colonial incursions in the Gold Coast (Foster 1965; McWilliam and Kwamena-Poh 1975). During these long and chequered periods of its experimentation, education as an institutionalised system of knowledge acquisition and transfer generally began as a private business in the country in much the same way it did emerge in western industrial countries until the onset of formal colonial rule. Between the start of formal colonial rule in 1844 and the end of the 19th century, three main education acts were passed in the Gold Coast. The E ducation
Privatisation of Compulsory Education in Ghana …
135
Ordinance of 1887, the second ordinance to have
Data Loading...
