James Tooley’s recent book The Beautiful Tree is the best single book on public policy to be published since Charles Murray’s Losing Ground  twenty-five years ago. It richly deserves to win the 2010 Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Award

Tooley (Reclaiming Education) documents his surprising finding that private schools are providing quality education to millions of poor children in the developing world. Whereas development experts insist that the path out of poverty lies in investment in public schools, the author draws on his fieldwork in India, China and Africa to argue that small entrepreneurs are educating the poor.