The Rebirth of Education (part 2): best bits

In part 1 I gave a quick run-down of Lant Pritchett's 'The Rebirth of Education'. In six words, learning not schooling, starfish not spider. Now I thought I'd highlight some important and/or interesting take-home messages. They mostly buzz around the same theme but hopefully will crystallise things a little.

On the problem:

1) You can't solve the education problem if you don't understand it.

We need to grasp that schooling systems adopted in developing countries were not designed to enable children to meet learning goals, so more of the same (more inputs alone) doesn't cut it. As with an addiction to Twitter, so with education policy, the first step is admitting you have a problem. "You cannot search [for solutions] if you are convinced you have already found what you need" says Lant. This also means that arguments on the public-private axis (as fun as they are) are also tangential to the debate in the developing country context.

2) 'More inputs help a bit so we might as well carry on doing that for now' = not advisable 

 “Taking a placebo can be dangerous if it prevents you from seeking out the right diagnosis”. Probably enough said there.


3) Western education experts need to eat some humble pie

Usefully-named 70s band Humble Pie

"No living Western education expert has led, participated in, or lived through a truly major national improvement in measured student achievement". All currently high scoring educational systems in OECD countries already had high-scoring systems 40 years ago, so we 'over here' don't seem to know how to transform an education system either. More generally the problems for education in developing countries are (unsurprisingly) different to those in developed countries, so even with a system proven to be successful in the Netherlands, for example, we may not be any closer to our goal.





4) This isn't technical, it's incentives, it's political

The problem is in the dynamic of the system and the incentives it produces, not just a lack of a certain missing X. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague when working in a school in Uganda last summer, when it dawned on us that everyone was 'playing their role' more or less effectively (teachers mostly present, pupils sat behind desks, adequate classrooms, timetable, register etc) but a lot of the time, nothing was actually happening. There was no learning. Pritchett's cover shows a child walking through a doorway of a façade of a school with nothing behind and this captures the point perfectly. Translating this into practical advice for someone who works for a charity trying to improve schools in developing countries (like me), when you think you've found the perfect initiative for the school, you need to ask yourself two questions: why isn’t this being done already? And why will it be done that way in the future? Incentives. And panning back out to the level of the whole system, this means politics: switching to a starfish system means ceding power and giving up central control to some measure, and there lies the difficulty.

Towards a solution...

5) There is no blueprint and there is no silver bullet

If what we are trying to do is learn the principles of design rather than how to design a particular house (Lant's metaphor), and we take into account architecture degrees are like six years (me stretching Lant's metaphor), it's clear there is no quick blueprint for success. Even within his six key characteristics for a successful system, you need these all functioning together. If you look at point 2, 'locally-operated' and think that the panacea for poor education systems is decentralisation, then you are likely to end up with a decentralised poor education system. You need all of these characteristics together, with the details right. Then adding in the inevitable caveat that political, social and educational context will determine the precise formula, and the surreal, incomprehensible bit of Zen teaching Pritchett adds in "If you should meet Buddha on the road, kill him"(?!), it's clear that there is no one formula for success.

*searching for something positive...*

6) There's loads of innovation at the micro-level, so change is possible

Particularly for those working on individual schools rather than an entire education system, take inspiration from the fact that there are plenty of actors doing great, innovative work in difficult contexts. We know that some interventions (remedial classes, curriculum reform, and others) are really effective at improving learning. The problem is more that the spider system often prevents these innovations from scaling-up.

And the irritating, super-keen development student's choice...

7) Systems-thinking is the way forward

Complex adaptive systems did this

Trying to take heed of the development ideas hype cycle and not explode with wonk-y excitement, but systems-thinking, and particularly complex adaptive systems theory, is the future. Lant has a great passage on why we're crap at thinking in terms of systems rather than agents (which is also an example of his excellent prose style) but all the cool kids in policy are talking about systems-thinking and I'll soon be blogging about it (once I've read this and this and this and this and this). Getting back to the concrete example of education, thinking in terms of systems explains why absent teachers and obstructive teachers' unions don't mean that teachers are the baddies and all we need to do is make teachers be less rubbish. If the system is set up to treat teachers like workers not professionals, and fails to provide the right incentives, then the outcomes will be inevitably be disappointing.

In conclusion, read the book because it's great and will change the way you think.