"Learning How To Teach" Critical Reflections

I have had the chance to read a rather lengthy report regarding the status of unqualified primary school teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa, entitled "Learning How to Teach: The Uplifting of Unqualified Primary Teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa," by Herman Kruijer, published by Education International, 2010. An extremely insightful analysis and case study of several nations, some crucial issues regarding teacher training and teacher quality were touched upon by the authors. I have critically reflected on some of the major themes, including the use of contract teachers, geographic disparities in educational administration, and the style and quality of training, itself. I have applied these themes to broader aspects of teacher and educational quality in the developing world, drawing personal experience and outside research into the fold. Below are my insights.

"An Educational Decoupling….Advancing Problems"

Geographic Disparities

According to Herman Kruijer and Education International, in a survey of educational progress in Sub Saharan Africa, although there has been progress with the EFA Goals and the MDG Goals, the biggest challenge lies with inequality in educational attainment within nations. 

"Disparities within the countries based on wealth, gender, race, language or ethnic group hinders progress towards (Universal Primary Education. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger, children from the richest 20% are from three to about four times more likely to attend school than children from the poorest quintile."  (19) 

Thus, we see an educational decoupling that mirrors the socio-economic decoupling of these nations. What is not explained in the report is where, geographically, these richest 20% of children are located. More than likely, in my humble estimation, they are in the national capital, commercial capital, or at the very least regional capitals of these nations. Thus, we witness the "dual-track" development of the poorest nations; tiny geographic slices of these countries witnessing a boom, advancements in living conditions, access to material wealth and goods, while the vast majority of citizens outside of the major economic and political hubs are living lives of complete material stagnation, regardless of the economic policies dreamed up in the bubble capital zones. 

The general growth in educational enrollment has also resulted in large class sizes becoming the norm in most areas of these nations, urban and rural. Inclusivity has brought with it increased downward pressures on educational quality, already severely deficient beforehand. 

The Learning Curve, Comments and Critiques

An important contribution to the debate on international educational development was recently published by publisher Pearson, entitled, "The Learning Curve" (http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/). I had some time to digest and comment on some of the main themes of this report. The results are published below. Enjoy.

"Moreover, education remains an art, and much of what engenders quality is difficult to quantify." 

The art of education and the ambiguity of solid connections between inputs and outputs in the world's schooling systems leads us towards the necessity of focusing on the cultural factors that have been so discredited by the world's developmental economists in explaining success and failure amongst nations. As we look  to improve the schooling systems of the developing world, cultural sensitivity is more than needed; cultural sensitivity must be a core element of the changes themselves. Not an excuse, but a foundation for instructional activities, incentive programs, and management strengthening. None of these crucial factors can be imposed by proxy; they must be continually woven from the fabric of local cultures and societies. 

"The Underlying Moral Cause" of successful schooling systems (South Korea and Finland's Parallels)-Korea's ethic of education was shaped in response to the war, and this has continued; however, in many African nations, schooling systems are seen as foreign inventions/interventions, especially in rural areas, and thus are prone to community disconnect; if these values propelling the worth of education are not ingrained into societies, the pressure on both teachers and students will not result in improvements in learning outcomes

In Finland, the moral purpose of education is an "act of social justice" that the society deeply cares about-equality and access are deep societal norms; in the developing world, we have a completely different outlook that has been shaped by both capitalist intervention and the carving out of elite urban enclaves-the movement away from equality and towards inequality. 

Lant Pritchett on Education Innovations

Lant Pritchett in an interesting talk on the failures of the educational systems in both the developed and developing worlds. Ending his talk, Pritchett notes, "How to make a disfunctional system into a functional one is an enormous challenge," thus framing the central challenge of human development in the 21st century.
Pritchett frames his argument around an interesting analogy of "Starfish" and "Spiders," centralized and decentralized educational systems that have historically grown and been transplanted from the developed to the developing world. The big issue, according to Pritchett, is that "Spiders," which rely on strong state capacity, centralization, and strong social cohesion, have only been successful in developing nations with these elusive social and structural characteristics. For the majority of developing world states, the result of this transplantation has been "Dead Spiders," characterized by "...no thinking at the center." Thus, without centralized thinking, without the "Functional, driving force at the center driving towards legitimate goals for students' learning," and in lacking periphery capacities for development, the schooling systems of the developing world have been an unequivocal failure.
Pritchett notes quite saliently and accurately that the educational systems in many nations are driving themselves, instead, on "mimicry." They look like vibrant, living spiders, but, in fact, they are almost completely innocuous and often times functionally dead.
"No amount of "expansion" with these "dysfunctional spiders will lead children to be ready for the 21st century." 

"An Educational Decoupling….Advancing Problems"

"An Educational Decoupling….Advancing Problems"

Geographic Disparities

According to Herman Kruijer and Education International, in a survey of educational progress in Sub Saharan Africa (2010), although there has been progress with the EFA Goals and the MDG Goals, the biggest challenge lies with inequality in educational attainment within nations. 

"Disparities within the countries based on wealth, gender, race, language or ethnic group hinders progress towards (Universal Primary Education. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger, children from the richest 20% are from three to about four times more likely to attend school than children from the poorest quintile."  (19) 

Thus, we see an educational decoupling that mirrors the socio-economic decoupling of these nations. What is not explained in the report is where, geographically, these richest 20% of children are located. More than likely, in my humble estimation, they are in the national capital, commercial capital, or at the very least regional capitals of these nations. Subsequently, we witness the "dual-track" development of the poorest nations; tiny geographic slices of these countries witnessing a boom, advancements in living conditions, access to material wealth and goods, while the vast majority of citizens outside of the major economic and political hubs are living lives of complete material stagnation, regardless of the economic policies dreamed up in the bubble capital zones. 

The general growth in educational enrollment has also resulted in large class sizes becoming the norm in most areas of these nations, urban and rural. Inclusivity has brought with it increased downward pressures on educational quality, already severely deficient beforehand. 

Incentives Matter, But How They Are Measured Matters More

Having recently completed a dissertation on the subject area of teacher incentives and localization of schooling curricula, I have been a dedicated proponent for the area of incentives for some time. A succinct new report from one of the preeminent scholars in the field, Karthik Muralidharan for JPAL/USAID India very clearly restates the relevant literature (most of it being his own) and makes the continued case for a focus on incentives in improving primary schooling outcomes in the developing world. However, as I will detail, the discussion must be furthered, and innovation must be included in the assessment stage of incentives, to truly bind together these advances in educational quality. http://www.povertyactionlab.org/doc/early-grade-reading-workshop-session-3): 

Popular Education and Its Practical Applications: Thoughts and Openings

The work of Brazilian educationalist Paolo Freire has resounded for decades; his "popular education" approach seeks to liberate the oppressed, to open dialogue between the teacher (or facilitator) and students, to create a space for questioning and empowerment, and to eradicate formalized structures which seek to "bank" knowledge from the teacher to the students. Freire saw formalized education as further regimenting the oppressor-oppressed structures of society, as disparaging creativity and critical thinking. Freire talked of "education as the practice of freedom."

A "Simple Solution" to Refugee Education
Thus, there are many practical ramifications and implications for popular education, for educationalists in the formalized arena, as well as NGO's seeking community dialogue and a participative approach. One interesting area of application is in the immediate response to refugee crises (a topic that I have recently written about for coursework here at The LSE), as popular education can, in my theoretical argument, most effectively fill the gap between crisis and formalization of educational services in these complex emergency situations, playing a vital role in psychological protection and empowerment, simplification of teacher training, and in providing educational services that are not highly administratively and financially dependent.

However, practical deployment in mainstream pedagogy is neither widespread nor appreciated by many educators, especially in the developing world, in which formalized educational structures are one of the lasting colonial legacies. Popular education requires training and empowerment of teachers, which, in many cases, is beyond the writ of limited administrative structures.

A "Simple Solution" To Progressive Teacher Training:
Despite these limitations, I will argue that the popular education approach has been mimicked by progressive educationalists throughout the world (acknowledged or not),  and is a critical component of engaging critical thinking and progressive, project-based evaluations of students. And, the lessons and components are not administratively difficult nor difficult to train teachers to implement. Foremost, the approach aligns with individual teacher incentives. Limited additional training provides teachers with a tool that can take the burden off of their "chalk and talk" burden for class periods, provide autonomy and self-learning for students, and not be resource-dependent (the key failing of educational technology initiatives that mimic the popular education approach, though with technology as the medium/go between).

Thus, popular education approaches need to be integrated into school curriculum in LDC's, as a compliment to the formalized structure that has burdened these systems, overwhelmed teachers, and led to extremely limited educational outcomes for many primary and secondary school students. New strategies do not need to be complicated; complication breeds failure in resource starved environments where individual incentives of teachers and administrators are not aligned with educational outputs. Tools need to be simple, effective, non-threatening to authority, and ease the  burden on teachers.

Literacy Innovations

In the developing world's largely-successful push to meet Millennium Development Goal #2 (By 2015, all children will be able to complete a full course of free primary schooling), there has been a critical failure; the failure of quality. Massive increases in enrollment, seen across the globe, has strained already deficient state resources and stretched carrying capacities to the limit. Schools in some countries have 175 children to a classroom; others continue to be beset with more "traditional" issues such as teacher attendance problems. (See, Duflo, 2007: Monitoring Works). However, what the researchers are not connecting is the fact that teacher attendance is inherently tied to educational empowerment, to understanding, to capacities both of the teacher, the administration, and the students; disillusionment can occur quickly even in the best-equipped, most ideal teaching situations, let alone, one with an enormous child-load, few educational resources, and low incentive rates. Thus, none of these factors can be seen in isolation; they must be approached as pieces of a larger puzzle, and the puzzle must first be approached from the most foundational level, which is empowering the children to learn, and giving the teachers the tools to do their jobs. I have highlighted the efforts of Save The Children's Literacy Boost program, which I have been researching for a consulting project here in London; their program evaluations and data streams look very strong in the first 6 countries where the program has been implemented; the program looks to be a replicable and scalable model. However, the critical issue of funding comes into play when looking at this scalability. Another such success story that I was able to highlight last year was Pratham India, which has launched its Read India program a few years back which is now reaching 30million children in the nation. Independent evaluations from the Poverty Action Lab have testified to the effectiveness of this program in boosting literacy rates and numeracy rates, especially amongst marginalized students.
Pratham has mobilized a vast number of volunteers to work with communities and teachers to train and empower teachers in new methodologies, isolate learning variables, understand and implement more proper groupings of students,  and has also worked with parents and local and state governments in both seeking support and partnership. The outputs have been extremely successful, and, like Literacy Boost, shows great capacity for scaling up, with a larger tendency for cost effectiveness due to the voluntary nature of many of the Pratham workers.
The huge challenges brought by the successes of the MDG Goal 2 need innovative solutions: I will continue to highlight and connect to these sources of innovation in the weeks and months to come.

A Question of Quality: THE BIG ISSUE/Literacy Boost

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).

An Issue of Quality

“What does it say about the quality of your product that you can’t even give it away for free?"
- Karthik Muralidharan, University of California, San Diego, on the woeful state of India's public education system, and the subsequent proliferation of low-cost private schools in the nation

A fascinating investigation into the proliferation of low-cost private schools, brought about by an insufficient public system in the nation of India was published in The New York Times on December 30th, 2011. These low-cost schools have tuition rates of about $1-2/month, and are able to compete with the public system on one key factor: their teachers actually attend class. I have reported repeatedly on the epidemic of teacher absence that plagues the developing world; and when teachers, are, in fact present, there is often very little teaching occurring due to the lack of properly implemented incentive structures and oversight. Aspirations of millions of Indians, witnessing the transformation of their country's economy, lies with education, which has shown a magnifying glass on the deficiencies of the state-run system. In fact, when you "cant give it away for free," there is a serious need for reform; however, these issues that plague India are issues that plague most of the world; they are certainly not unique in this situation. What is unique, however, is the dynamic response of the private sector in meeting this need. But there are deeper lessons that need to be learned; the fact that in most cases around the world, a $1-2 monthly tuition is out of the reach of many; and that a state needs to develop efficiencies in its public provisions if it is truly going to build a healthy society; simple privatization of services is not the answer either at forming social cohesion, societal equality, or in promoting a larger sense faith in the state and an idea of nationhood.