Praise for The Beautiful Tree

August 03, 2009

"With this important and passionately written book, James Tooley has joined the late Milton Friedman as a name to be reckoned with in support of ‘market solutions' for providing quality education to poor children."
-Hernando DeSoto, author of The Other Path

"Schools for the poor are the obsession of James Tooley, an education specialist with a severe case of wanderlust. He came across an unexpected phenomenon: an unending line of small, no-frills private schools catering to poor kids. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores, and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools. With the zeal of a convert, Tooley invokes the market's ‘invisible hand' to explain why private schools perform better: When parents pay the fees that keep a school afloat, he reasons, the school becomes more accountable to them. Tooley drowns readers in local color, detailing every ‘bright-eyed' school child and every ‘thin drifting smog' above a shantytown. Tooley's passion comes off as genuine."
-Carlos Lozada, Washington Post

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