The front-page of the Washington Post’s latest Outlook section features a review of James Tooley’s wonderful book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. From the review:

The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. “There are no private schools for the poor,” a bureaucrat in China’s Gansu province told Tooley, “because the People’s Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility.”

Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools…. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. “Why wasn’t anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?” he asks.

… Tooley, meanwhile, with a Rough Guide in one pocket and an endless supply of exclamation points in the other, drowns readers in local color, detailing every “bright-eyed” school child and every “thin drifting smog” above a shantytown.

Still, Tooley’s passion comes off as genuine.