This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 16, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

So many of the world's poor are educating their children in low-cost private schools. And though many governments in development groups are blissfully unaware of it,

James Tooley has witnessed it firsthand.

He writes about it in his new book, The Beautiful Tree.

We spoke before a Cato Institute forum for the book held yesterday.

I guess the hardest thing for people here in America or in Britain is to realize that poor people tend not to use what you call

public education, government education.

There's this huge mushrooming burgeoning of low-cost private schools in slums and shantytowns and some of the poorest parts of this earth and poor parents are using private schools.

They're abandoning government schools because government schools by and large are seen

as abandoning the children who are in those schools.

So it's very hard when you talk to someone here on the street,

what's happening in India or in Ghana or Sierra Leone,

actually you'll find in the poorest places children in low-cost private schools,

it's not government schools that are helping the poor.

How does it function in these very poor areas?

Oh, somewhat similar.

I mean there are formal schools that are working a normal school day,

maybe from 9 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon.

Some children, in some parts of the world there

are schools that operate in shifts in Bangladesh for example in the slums of

Dhaka you'll get schools operating in two shifts from 9 until 12, from 12 until three, and then maybe some of these

...