Since positive messages do not often make headlines, we should welcome a few indications of progress towards education for all. There are more children going to school than ever before, even though the current pace of progress is too slow to reach universal enrolment by 2015.
Education is capturing heightened global attention. At the World Economic Forum in January 2005 in Davos, Switzerland, business and political leaders ranked education as a leading global concern, recognizing it as a key to beating poverty. As the year-long “Make Poverty History” campaign kicked off, the G-7 finance ministers pledged more aid and debt relief for developing countries, paving the way for the G-8 summit in July in Scotland, which will focus on Africa. In September, the spotlight will be on the heads of State meeting, an occasion to review progress towards the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to urge nations to follow through on their commitments.
The current year is a first summoning. By signing up to the MDGs and the Education for All (EFA) goals in 2000, countries pledged to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005. But the mark is likely to be missed in some seventy countries. Progress in narrowing the gender gap has been substantial but too slow to meet the 2005 target. Africa and South and West Asia remain the epicentres of educational deprivation. Three quarters of the world’s 103 million out-of-school children live in these regions, a majority of them girls. Household poverty, social norms and traditions, and the cost of sending children to school infringe upon the right to education, according to the EFA Global Monitoring Report (GMR) 2003/4, Gender and Education for All: The Leap to Equality. But as many low-income countries take bold measures to broaden access to schooling—abolishing tuition fees, introducing measures to help the most underprivileged—the poor quality of education is emerging as a foremost obstacle to progress.
In one third of countries with data, less than 75 per cent of students reach Grade 5, reflecting issues of household poverty and poor quality of education. Overcrowded classrooms, poorly-trained teachers and a lack of textbooks and sanitation facilities are the daily reality in many schools.
National and international assessments provide one yardstick for measuring educational achievement. These tests also provide a valuable measure of how well the curriculum is being learned. Results show that in many low-income countries, more than one third of children have limited reading skills after several years of schooling. The Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) study involving fifteen countries in the region reveals that education quality has declined in recent years. Comparisons between studies five years apart show a 4-per-cent decline in Grade 6 literacy achievement scores. In Latin America, national assessments showed that in Nicaragua, for example, 70 per cent of students reached only the “basic” level in language in 2002.
These results suggest that a sole focus on access to education will not deliver education for all. Since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed that elementary education was to be made free and compulsory for all children, several international treaties and UN declarations have restated this objective. Most, however, are silent about the quality of education to be provided, one exception being the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), which expresses strong, detailed commitments about the aims of education. Another is the Dakar Framework for Action (2000), in which improving education quality is spelt out as a specific goal. But the 2000 Millennium Declaration made no explicit reference to quality, although the target to complete primary schooling implies that the quality of education is decent enough to permit this.
How then, can quality be improved? The 2005 edition of the Global Monitoring Report, Education for All: The Quality Imperative, published by an independent team at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), reviews research evidence on what determines quality and maps out key strategies for improving teaching and learning, especially in low-income contexts. Achievement tests are just one indicator of quality. Government spending (below the recommended 6 per cent of gross national product in most regions), pupil/teacher ratio (too high in countries where the EFA challenge is greatest), how long students stay in school, and teacher qualifications, all provide measures of quality.
Because the learning process is complex, there are no straight answers to the quality equation. For a start, there is far from universal agreement on what the concept means in practice. Two principles generally characterize most attempts to define quality: the first identifies learners’ cognitive development as a major explicit objective of education systems, and the second emphasizes the role of education in promoting shared values, responsible citizenship, and creative and emotional development–objectives that are much more difficult to measure.
To make matters more complex, no general theory on what determines the quality of education has been validated by empirical research. Many approaches in the economic tradition have assumed that there is a workable analogy between schools and factories, in the sense that a set of inputs to schooling is transformed into a set of outcomes in a fairly uniform way. But attempts to assess which inputs–teacher education, experience, pupil/teacher ratio–have the largest impact on outcomes have been inconclusive, especially in developed economies where large increases in per-pupil spending have not had a significant impact on increasing test scores. The evidence is more clear-cut in developing countries: higher per-pupil spending translates into higher scores on literacy tests; but this model has come under sharp criticism. A new school of interdisciplinary research puts the spotlight on what happens in the classroom. How well do teachers master the curriculum? How do they organize their time, and interact with students and assess them? What are their expectations of students? The importance of a safe and healthy learning environment is also emphasized. Studies in developing countries show that all these dimensions are influential in achieving higher student performance. Clearly, Governments are faced with hard choices, precisely because improving learning means focusing on a wide array of issues, starting with the learner’s background. Several dimensions are considered essential in all contexts:
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| Net enrolment ratios in primary education rose from 81.7 per cent in 1990 to 84 per cent in 2001, and are projected to go up to 87 per cent in 2015. However, this is too slow to reach universal primary education. These global figures conceal stark disparities between regions, as per above graph showing the number (in millions) of out-of-school children by region in 2001. Source: EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005. |
First, investment in teachers is critical. High pupil/teacher ratios, with classes averaging 70 students, prevail in countries with the greatest education needs. The HIV/AIDS pandemic is aggravating the crisis, contributing to teacher absenteeism and attrition. Too many teachers come to class with minimal or poor training. The proportion of new primary school teachers meeting national standards has been falling in several sub-Saharan African countries. Balancing time and money spent on initial training and on-the-job support for newly qualified teachers are a critical policy question. In many countries, there is room to shift the balance away from lengthy institutional pre-service training towards more school-based models. Earnings are also a contentious issue: they were lower in real terms in 2000 than in 1970, and often too low to provide an acceptable standard of living. In Sierra Leone, most teachers have to maintain a household of four to five persons on less than $2 a day. Principals also deserve separate leadership training programmes—their engagement can have a strong influence on the quality of schools.
Second, “chalk-and-talk” teaching styles tend to dominate in classrooms, placing students in a passive role. Although flagship programmes built on more interactive “child-centred” methods exist in all regions, they are often difficult and costly to scale up, which has led many educators to advocate structured teaching–a middle way combining direct instruction, guided practice and independent learning.
Third, students are not spending enough time learning. Test scores show that the amount of class time spent on mathematics, science and language strongly affects performance. The broadly agreed benchmark of 850 to 1,000 hours of instruction per year is not reached in many countries. In some cases, the average annual number of schooling hours has decreased sharply over two decades, reflecting pressure to meet higher demand for schooling under tight resource constraints.
Fourth, reading must be considered a priority area in efforts to improve the quality of basic education, particularly for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. Literacy is a critical tool for the mastery of all other subjects and one of the best predictors of longer-term learning achievement.
Fifth, the choice of language of instruction is of utmost importance. About 20 per cent of the world’s population has a “local language” as their mother tongue. Initial instruction in the first language improves learning outcomes and reduces subsequent grade repetition and dropout rates. For example, Papua New Guinea, a linguistic mosaic of over 800 dialects/languages, uses more than 400 for initial instruction in schools.
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| Source: EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005. |
Sixth, the quality of learning materials strongly affects what teachers can do. National book policies can provide a framework for local publishing to develop and enable schools to choose which books they use. And central governments must be ready to grant schools greater freedom, provided that adequate resources are available.
Improving education quality does not happen in isolation. Early childhood care and education programmes help with subsequent achievement in school. Literacy improves adults’ commitment to their children’s education. Gender-sensitive policies and more broadly-based gender reforms in society directly improve the quality of education and its outcome.
The GMR 2005 describes as ambitious seven developing countries–Brazil, Bangladesh, Chile, Egypt, Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka—because of their efforts to both expand basic education and improve its quality. South Africa, for example, has taken measures to make education compulsory for nine years, move better teachers to poorer schools, introduce school governing bodies and equalize expenditure on schooling for all racial groups. Bangladesh has a vibrant non-governmental sector that has spearheaded educational innovations targeting the rural poor. Brazil has introduced large projects to reduce regional and social inequalities, including a scholarship programme for poor families, and initiatives to provide books and train unlicensed teachers through distance learning. The case of several high-performing countries, such as Canada, Cuba, Finland and the Republic of Korea, also suggests broad common traits. All hold the teaching profession in high esteem, show policy continuity over time and share a high level of public commitment to education.
The fact that a child in sub-Saharan Africa can expect to receive, on average, five to six fewer years of schooling than a child in Western Europe and the Americas is a clarion call for rich and poor countries alike. Bilateral aid currently stands at $1.5 billion per year. Although recent pledges suggest that this figure could reach $3.5 billion in the next five years, it is short of the estimated additional $5.6 billion required to reach the objectives of universal primary education and gender parity alone by 2015. Literacy—the theme of the GMR 2006—all too often remains a forgotten goal. A staggering 800 million adults possess no reading and writing skills, leaving them on the margins of all development opportunities.
Study after study demonstrates the powerful links between education and poverty reduction. Recent research suggests that the cognitive skills required to make informed choices about the HIV/AIDS risk are substantively based on levels of education and literacy. This is why achieving all the MDGs, among them reducing poverty, empowering women, improving health, sanitation and environmental management, depends to a large extent on ensuring that children, youth and adults benefit from good quality learning opportunities, enabling them to better the future. |
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