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.

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

Some MOOCs to be getting on with

It's at this time of year that many people seek to overburden their lives with unnecessary and unrealistic aims and projects. I am like any other in this respect, and have signed up to two of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) listed below - Banerjee and Duflo, of Poor Economics fame were far too much for me to resist, and 'The European Union in Global Governance' is far enough away for me not to care about what I might be doing then. Not sure what I make of MOOCs as a concept yet (see here and here and here for some opinions on them) but it'll be interesting to see what they're like whilst brushing up on my global poverty and global governance knowledge at the same time.

Anyway here are five MOOCs on development-related subjects starting in the near future, along with brief information about their content, duration, conveners, etc. Oh and thanks to Anna Spinks for the inspiration for this. Enjoy!

1. Introduction to Sustainability

By: University of Illinois
Start date: 20 Jan 2014
Course length: 10 weeks
Effort: 8-10 hours per week
Superstar instructor: Jonathan Tomkin

A sneak preview...

"[The study of sustainability seeks to] uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet". One for the inter-disciplinarians; as the description says: "understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management)"

2. The Age of Sustainable Development

By: Columbia University
Start date: 21 Jan 2014
Course length: 14 weeks
Effort: 5-7 hours per week
Superstar instructor: Jeffrey Sachs

A sneak preview...

"The fundamental question is how the world economy can continue to develop in a way that is socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. The course describes the complex interactions between the world economy and the Earth's physical environment. Ecological processes and constraints (climate, disease ecology, physical resources such as soils and energy sources, topography and transport conditions) significantly shape the patterns of economic development, demography, and wealth and poverty. At the same time, human activities (farming, land use, urbanization, demographic change, and energy use) change the physical environments, increasingly in dangerous ways"

3. The Challenges of Global Poverty

By: MITx
Start date: 5 Feb 2014
Course length: 15 weeks
Effort: at least 6 hours per week
Superstar instructors: Banerjee and Duflo

A sneak preview...

"[I]s extreme poverty a thing of the past? What is economic life like when living under a dollar per day? Are the poor always hungry? How do we make schools work for poor citizens? How do we deal with the disease burden? Is microfinance invaluable or overrated? Without property rights, is life destined to be "nasty, brutish and short"? Should we leave economic development to the market? Should we leave economic development to non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Does foreign aid help or hinder? Where is the best place to intervene? At the end of this course, you should have a good sense of the key questions asked by scholars interested in poverty today, and hopefully a few answers as well."

4. International Human Rights

By: LouvainX
Start date: 17 Feb 2014
Course length: 10 weeks
Effort: 6-8 hours per week
Superstar instructor: Olivier De Schutter

A sneak preview...

A course dealing with, among other issues, "the sources of human rights, the rights of individuals and the duties of States, and the mechanisms of protection...religious freedom in multicultural societies, human rights in employment relationships, economic and social rights in development, [and] human rights in the context of the fight against terrorism."

5. The European Union in Global Governance

By: KU Leuven
Start date: April 2014
Course length: 6 weeks
Effort: n/a
Superstar instructor: Prof. Dr. Jan Wouters (among others)

A sneak preview...

"The study of the EU as an international actor has become a key element in European and International Law, European Studies and International Relations. The EU represents the world’s largest trade power and aid donor, has a diplomatic service larger than that of most states, and has launched more than 20 civil-military operations. It has presented itself as a normative, global actor, and its emergence as a legal entity that is neither a state nor a classic international organization has both puzzled and fascinated legal scholars and political scientists alike. We invite students to delve into and help solve the most intriguing of these puzzles."