The biggest issue in education development is in learning outcomes, plain and simple. Millennium Development Goals and enrollment rates have been increasingly globally, but quality has not kept up. I have written about the subject extensively on this website-education without learning; the shell of an educational system, fraught with dangerous trade-offs and opportunity costs for individuals, households, and communities, local and national.
It is reported (UNESCO 2008) that up to 40% of teachers have no textbooks and manuals from which to teach in Sub-Saharan Africa. UNESCO highlights the fact that most international assistance is one-off and not sustainable, and in my own experience, I have seen and highlighted the need for both local production and local language/ownership of the book publishing process to truly make progress in this segment. Taking into account the poor levels of training for most teachers and increasingly overcrowded classrooms, this is a simple recipe for educational ineffectiveness. It has also been shown by multiple reports that socio-economic status is the key determinant of educational outcomes both in the developed and developing worlds; the cycles of poverty are incredibly cyclical and perpetuating. Thus, what is to be done to break this educational poverty trap?We need to remember that there is no silver bullet for increasing educational outcomes; the process will involve many components intersecting at the local level, and slow, incremental change. However, highlighting how this change is possible has been one of my key missions, and here is another great possibility:
An interesting approach highlighted in the New York Times recently by Tina Rosenberg ("A Boost for the World's Poorest Schools" comes from a private NGO, Save The Children. They have implemented a program called "Literacy Boost," focusing on this critical issue of educational quality. The program,
"...holds monthly workshops with teachers to train them in effective teaching methods, works with villagers to create out-of-the-classroom support for reading in families and communities, and carries out rigorous assessments."
"In a few places, Save the Children has worked with local publishers or nongovernmental groups, or even government ministries, to print books. But more commonly, the program depends on an ingenious solution — the books are homemade. Sometimes adults write down favorite stories, but often the authors are children. In Chingoe, for example, children are asked to draw pictures about their lives — their mothers’ cooking and cleaning chores, for example. Then they write phrases illustrating those pictures. Sew a few of these together and you have a book. The books can have themes — Damiao Mungoi, who works on education for Save the Children in Mozambique, said that a lot of themes are environmental. He said that one fifth-grade student in Chingoe wrote phrases such as “Stop Bush-Burning,” about the cutting down of bushes for firewood. Children take the books home and read with parents or older children. Community volunteers lead reading camps — in Chingoe, two school parents hold these regular workshops, playing letter and word games with children, often using homemade vocabulary cards. The village also had a reading fair, with reading contests, storytelling and exhibitions of student drawings with text."
This approach highlights and implements a creative solution in the need for locally produced instructional materials, local language instruction, and, as I have seen in my work in library development, educational games, a hugely important part of the literacy puzzle in both the developed and developing world-these are often glossed over, but have a POWERFUL impact on learning outcomes, especially at the primary level. While the verdict is still out on this particular program (it has been implementing rigorous controlled trials which have shown effectiveness, but the durability of these results, something not highlighted by the reporting, will take years to analyze).
