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

Reflections from a student volunteer in Uganda

In summer 2013 I was fortunate enough to work as a volunteer investing money and trying to generally make improvements at a secondary school in rural Uganda. I recently entered the following essay in a competition (give it a go here!) on a title along the lines of 'what did you learn/how did your view of development change?'

Basically my key idea (not that original: similar sort of idea from Angus Deaton here) is we zealous international development-minded students should either:

 a) accept that the projects we get involved with (and I'm not talking about hopeless gap yah projects which no one would claim are very beneficial) may very well not have great long-term impacts but keep doing them anyway because of an intuitive feeling that we can't be wrong about micro, short term impacts (building a school is surely never bad right?) or some ideal of solidarity whereby us being there is a good thing in itself.

OR

b) don't go on summer projects but concentrate on campaigning at home on issues like illicit financial flows, transparency, indigenous rights/environmental destruction, take your pick (there is no shortage), where governments in the global North could often be doing a whole lot more.

If you fancy reading the whole thing, here it is below for your enjoyment...

"I spent summer 2013 working with two other volunteers for an NGO[1] in a secondary school in rural south-west Uganda, planning and implementing initiatives to improve the quality of education for the students using money we fundraised previously. We worked alongside school management, students and teachers, ultimately introducing measures improving the library, sanitation and counselling provision, among others. We were fortunate enough to receive constant and engaged support from the school, as well as a brilliantly warm reception from both school and community. Yet despite this overwhelmingly positive experience, in which we witnessed tangible outputs in infrastructure and school resources, the question of whether we have a long-term, sustainable impact remains doubtful. Having subsequently joined the central charity administration in a monitoring and evaluation capacity, I was struck by a double realisation: first, that we currently lack a means of knowing that our work is effective; and second, with the further discovery that our water purification scheme had failed, that it is possible that our work is not effective in many areas, and even that our whole model may be partly misguided(see Crawfurd 2013). Fundamentally, the idea of international volunteering and indeed international development, in the broadest sense, is to help promote positive changes in the lives of others. Therefore, short of rigorous evidence of impact, we are left with a challenge.

One immediate lesson to be learnt is that we need to focus our attention to the evaluation of programmes, in order to find out empirically what works. And indeed, impact evaluation and RCTs are undoubtedly ‘in fashion’ in the development world, as demonstrated by the popularity of Banerjee and Duflo’s Poor Economics(2012) and the establishment of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation in 2009. My own charity is itself doing some excellent work to put in place a more robust M&E programme. But leaving aside the empirics and entering speculatively into the theory of how development happens, my volunteering experience suggests some potentially sobering lessons for any young international volunteer.

Our school did not perform well academically, achieving generally poor exam results and failing to get many students into university. In a wider sense, it is a school with many talented teachers and fantastic students, but which could be much better. We observed unmotivated and often undisciplined students and teachers, unfocused lessons starting late, and a chronic lack of effective communication between staff and administration, among other problems. To address these, we attempted to plug some gaps: we facilitated better access to the many books the school possessed by expanding the library; we introduced a system to improve students’ wellbeing through a peer-to-peer counselling system; and we improved sanitation to get more happy, healthy students in class more often. Nevertheless, comparing the problems we perceived with what we supplied as ‘solutions,’ it is clear that they do not match up. Part of this, admittedly, is due to the size of our investment, which was insufficient to even attempt to cover the financial shortfall faced by the school. Yet we also failed to prompt change in areas not directly determined by money: the basic operating pattern of the school; the motivation to teach well or learn; the power structures which deny voice to innovative and motivated teachers, for instance. In this way, what we supplied was investment, creativity and time to plan projects to facilitate better delivery of education and better learning at the school. But unfortunately, what I have come to realise is that this sort of facilitation cannot drive dynamic change or permanently improved outcomes.

Acemoglu and Robinson(2012) offer a broad theory of why some countries prosper and others do not, and I suggest that their analysis holds some relevance for us. They locate the drivers of prosperity in ‘inclusive economic and political institutions,’ implying that improvements come from gradual alterations in the institutional makeup of a country rather than an imposition of the ‘right’ policies. The latter idea they denounce as a manifestation of the ‘ignorance hypothesis’ which “asserts that world inequality exists because we or our rulers do not know how to make poor countries rich”(2012:57), therefore “enlightening and informing rulers and policymakers can get us out” of poverty (2012:440). This manifests itself, for example, in the ‘Washington Consensus,’ generally accepted to have been largely unsuccessful, which advocates “seemingly attractive macroeconomic goals such as a reduction in the size of the government sector, flexible exchange rates, and capital account liberalization”(2012:440). Applying these ideas to my experience, this logic seems evident at least partly in what we did; we came with ideas about how to better run a school (and the money to make change happen), on the assumption that the school management may not be aware of such ideas. Extending this thought further, we too advocated ‘seemingly attractive goals’ such as enlarging the library and improving sanitation. However, like Acemoglu and Robinson who find that it is “institutional patterns” which are “condemning them[poor countries] to poverty” (2012:61), it strikes me that the institutional pattern and environment of the school is what condemns it to underperforming. It is thus the interplay of fundamental factors, often political, including why students comes to school, what opportunities(or lack thereof) are available post-school, the private situation of students and teachers, the distribution of power and authority amongst the staff, the decision-making process at school, the demands made on and interests of the management, the relationships with boards of governors and with local authorities, extending all the way up to the ministry of education. And these areas are generally beyond the scope of student volunteers’ capabilities.

So where does this leave us? We have seen that many development NGOs lack empirical evidence of positive impact for ‘beneficiaries’, and are faced with a theoretical argument which locates the long-term solution to beneficiaries’ problems outside the remit of what we can achieve. There are therefore perhaps two options for young people in the global North. First, to continue participating in international volunteering programmes in their current form whilst striving to improve monitoring and evaluation to improve our offering, meanwhile recognising that the benefits will often be limited to (i) short-term gains,(ii) promoting ‘solidarity’ whereby our being there and interacting with people is recognised as an intrinsic good,(iii) encouraging volunteers’ interest in development in anticipation of further, more productive involvement, or even (iv)(more controversially) boosting the reputation of the school or organisation through our prestigious status as ‘outsiders’, often connected to racial factors. This option would reflect Chouliaraki’s (2013)idea of an ‘ironic’ attitude to development, whereby the desire to help others exists alongside a fundamental scepticism towards the benefits of the project of development itself. Second, we might avoid international volunteering, and instead concentrate either on fundraising on behalf of charities with demonstrated impact, or lobbying governments to change policies detrimental to the prospects of the global South. Indeed the recent revelation that for each dollar that reaches the global South in aid, seven escape through illicit financial flows(Green 2013) provides an arresting starting point. Whichever option is chosen, what is essential is that young people with an interest in development actively examine the value of what they are doing, and ensure that their actions are dictated by concrete outcomes not good intentions.

Bibliography

Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. A. (2012) Why Nations Fail (London: Profile)

Banerjee, A. V. and Duflo, E. (2012) Poor Economics (London: Penguin)

Crawfurd, L. (2013) ‘We don’t need no education’ Roving Bandit accessed 22/12/2013 available at <http://www.rovingbandit.com/2013/12/we-dont-need-no-education.html>

Chouliaraki, L. (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity)

Green, D. (2013) ‘Poor countries are losing $1 trillion a year to illicit capital flows – 7 times the volume of aid’ From Poverty to Power accessed 22/12/2013 available at <http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=16967>

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[1] Which has asked to remain anonymous"