The Rebirth of Education (part 1): Spider vs. Starfish

As the call comes in for more money for education in developing countries, so too, does the news that current performance on education is appalling . Shockingly appalling.  If you need any more convincing, an Educational Initiatives survey covering 74% of the Indian population found that schoolchildren’s performance on conceptual questions is often worse than random guessing. Meanwhile at the current rate of improvement, Indonesian schools will take more than 1000 years to reach current OECD-country levels of quality. Other countries, at the current rate, would never get there.

Lant Pritchett’s book ‘The Rebirth of Education’ (in which a whole chapter is dedicated to crushing our spirits about education in developing countries with statistics like the last two above) attempts to explain this dire situation and what to do about it, and in doing so he kind of blew my mind. I started reading the book in part to supplement the lit. review I am currently doing for Education Partnerships Africa in which we initially aimed to find a set of basic inputs (in terms of infrastructure and resources) which would add up to a ‘good school’, and thus produce a schematic ‘blueprint’ for our partner schools. It turns out it doesn’t work that way.

Governments across the world are great at getting children physically into school. The population of labour force age in the developing world has now completed three times more years of schooling than in 1950 when 60% had no schooling at all. And in Ghana, for example, the average 7.8 years of schooling in 2010 for each child was not attained by the UK until 1970. The problem is, that the type of system which is great at sorting the logistics of schooling isn’t good at ensuring children learn. The problem is the system, meaning that 'more of the same' (= more schools, more books, more desks, more computers) won't solve the problem. 

These centralised, top-down, bureaucratic, inflexible, unresponsive, closed, ‘spider’ systems which exist across the world arose out of a mixture of demand, driven by a modernising economy (education has good returns in terms of income), but more from a drive for the ideological control of socialisation (indoctrinate those kids) and isomorphic mimicry (if we acquire the outer trappings of a responsible, well-functioning state then we seem more legitimate).  So the whole dynamic of the system has nothing to do with effective learning, and more to do with political patronage and rent-seeking in many cases; even if you assume that intentions are benevolent (strong assumption) then the spider systems just aren’t set up to deliver good education*. Pritchett even finds that ‘spider’ education systems in developing countries are value-subtracting. That is to say, as well as being more expensive than alternatives, spider systems deliver absolutely worse education than if the same teachers were teaching the same kids outside the system.

Kill that spider!

So what beats a spider in rock-paper-scissors? A starfish, you got it. Whereas in a spider system, all information across the web filters up to the brain at the centre of the web, in a starfish there is no centralised nervous system; each part is constantly taking in and processing information, and the overall movement of the starfish comes about as an aggregate of tiny little movements of each part. Translated back into education, this means a system which is

• Open:  many different types of school and approaches allowed
• Locally-operated: local actors have the autonomy to operate, explore and discover innovative approaches
• Performance pressured: schools are accountable on the basis of actual, measurable learning outcomes not just schooling input
• Professionally networked: a professional ethos among educators and organisational learning across the system facilitated and promoted
• Technically supported: schools are equipped with the capabilities to succeed
• Flexibly financed: finance follows students and performance with local control

Happy cause he's learning

So there we have it: Pritchett comes up with the solution? Erm, kind of. He does give a few examples of starfish systems (the US/UK higher education system; the International Baccalaureate system; Brazil’s basic education system) but this is no concrete blueprint like I was hoping for. In one of his many analogies (Pritchett’s way of explaining things, both in the book and in podcasts I’ve heard, is brilliantly lucid and witty) he likens what he is doing as not showing how to build a specific house, but giving the principles of design. Having said this, he could definitely have expanded more on the positive, starfish-side of things (five of six chapters are dedicated to taking down the current spider system), and I’m sure research/policy discussions will push on in a more practical direction, particularly as we reach 2015 and the post-MDG apocalypse.

I was going to follow that up with my impressions/key take-home messages, but this has got really long. Still haven’t got the succinctness of a pro-blogger. So I’m going to call this ‘part 1’ and write an accompanying ‘part 2’ on the ambitious assumption that people would actually read two consecutive posts of mine. In the meantime, to consolidate, gorge yourself on review/blog/blurb/podcast about the book from people more intelligent than I.

*if you’re wondering why spider systems in developed countries do a good job, Pritchett’s explanation is that they took over pre-existing local starfish systems