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It's not that I didn't believe James Tooley's books and articles asserting that an astonishing number of poor children in developing countries are being decently (and sometimes superbly) educated by a little-noticed army of low-budget private schools that receive no government support and, indeed, are paid for by those kids' own parents.

But it hadn't really sunk into my consciousness, perhaps because others scoffed at these claims. Big "foreign aid" and education funders generally ignored this entire education sector, journalists and analysts paid it scant heed and governments, perhaps embarrassed by their own failure to do right by these youngsters, acted as if it weren't really happening.

Now, however, I've seen examples of this phenomenon with my own eyes in the slums of Hyderabad, India, where Tooley (a British education scholar on leave from the University of Newcastle) is both learning even more about it and trying to strengthen it via the "Aristotle" project he leads with backing from a New Zealand-born, Singapore-based tycoon.

I confess: I was impressed--and slightly sheepish, too, considering I've lived and traveled in India and other "third world" countries over many years and worked in the education field forever. Yet, until now I had allowed my gaze to pass over signs of the presence of hundreds of these schools without really noticing them, much less seeking to understand how they work.

In America my efforts to widen education options and promote school choice for poor kids, like the efforts of most U.S. reformers, have always assumed that, at day's end, the government must pay for this. Perhaps that's true in the Western world, perhaps it's not. But elsewhere on the planet, I can now attest, poor families are paying for it themselves and education entrepreneurs are responding to their demand (and their governments' failure) by starting, managing and growing such schools.

Most of them occupy sketchy facilities, sans playgrounds, labs, libraries and fancy technology. Many teachers are themselves just high-school graduates. The kids bring their own lunches. Parents provide transportation and go to the bazaar for textbooks and uniforms. Sports and extracurricular activities are scarce to nonexistent. Neither schools nor families have any money to spare.

But teaching and learning are occurring in those cramped and sometimes ill-lit classrooms. Eager youngsters, prodded by determined parents, are drinking in whatever knowledge and skills their books and teachers can provide. And while besting nearby government schools on state tests is no high accolade in places like Andhra Pradesh, most of these private schools are doing that at astonishingly low costs.