"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): 

Simple Yet Effective: Yet One More

I have written previously on this website about the power of simple educational inputs in increasing schooling outputs. Thus, previous reports have been consolidated into a full primary school intervention targeting providing reading glasses to the 10 percent of primary school children who cannot see correctly. Such a simple idea, requiring the simplest of solutions; if children cannot see, they cannot learn; and if 10% of children cannot see, we are automatically forfeiting 10% of our young populations' futures.
However, as is the case with all aspects of educational quality which have been examined on this website, incentives and and their proper understanding and integration into policy design is absolutely critical. Though the intervention was shown to be incredibly efficient in raising educational outcomes for the targeted children, equivalent in some cases to an additional one half year of school, adoption of the glasses by communities, parents, and children was hindered because proper insight was not given into the role of incentives and internalization of change theory.

According to the intervention, "Visualizing Development: Eyeglasses and Academic Performance in China," (Glewwe, Park, and Zhao, 2012), eyeglasses as an educational intervention are easy and efficient, as has "...immediate gains," and are, perhaps most crucially, have the ability to create positive change even in larger, failing macro-climates which commonly impede other interventions. However, community norms, expectations of the necessity of future eyeglass purchases, and parents' simple perceptions of eyeglasses means that even when provided for free, 30% of needy children did not accept the lenses.
However, what about the role of incentives and change theory in the adoption of new technology? The authors have not analyzed the basic human fundamentals behind change itself; the status quo, even when detrimental to youth, is much easier to maintain than to change. Thus, incentives for change must be examined; these incentives can be either monetary or non-monetary in nature. Parents, the obvious gatekeepers in such interventions, must be educated and incentivized to induce needed change for such beneficial and simple interventions as the Gansu Eyeglass Project.
http://www.povertyactionlab.org/publication/better-vision-education

Current Areas of Educational Research Interest

Current Areas of Research Interest: my current international educational development research interests and writing are primarily focused around one core question: how can rural, traditionally marginalized student populations actually benefit from increased enrollment rates in the developing world? What are the most effective policies which address both teacher training and motivation, materials development, curriculum development, and community monitoring/information flows in these rural areas? In addressing this broader topic, I have several specific research questions that I am working on at the moment:


-Feasibility of implementing private schooling in rural areas of LDC's: What is the "tipping point" for population density requirements before low cost private schooling can be introduced as a competitive mechanism in rural educational systems?

-Schooling Materials: What are the implications for the nationalization and standardization of schooling materials on historically marginalized student populations? How can localized development of schooling materials be nationally recognized and nationally implemented?

-Systemic Distortions in Nationalized School Curriculum:  What are the historical and social conditions that create the systematically distorting nationalized pushes for school curriculum? What is the "tipping point" in which localization of learning objectives, localization of language instruction, and localization of schooling materials to compliment curriculum redesign is both practical and implementable?

-Training and Motivation: What are the most effective delivery mechanisms for the training of teachers in progressive pedagogical theory and techniques, including ICT, critical thinking, and child-centered instruction? Are the best training techniques centralized, or decentralized, and traditional or technology/ICT based? What are the historical and social conditions which create value and prestige in the teaching field? How can these historical and social conditions be manipulated in enhancing the social position of teachers, in increasing teacher motivation and subsequent educational outputs?



"We have schools, but we lack education." -Unknown

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).

Poor Economics on Education Development

Excerpts, Reflections, and Opinions on Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee's "Poor Economics"

I think the most important subject illuminated in the section of Poor Economics dealing with Education Development is the one that is central to the big debate in development, and, in fact, all the economic debate raging in both the developed and developing world; that of the "Easterly vs. Sachs" arguement, of more aid vs. less aid, of more government intervention vs. less government intervention. In the case of education in the global south, the market functions do not create the conditions for all children to have a basic chance at progress, this is the stark fact. Pure market conditions, instances in which those who are rich will continue to have opportunity in countries where governments cannot provide for public goods, will continue to doom the disadvantaged to poorly educated lives, without the simple human right of personal enrichment and progress through the freedom to improve.

“…leaving it purely to the market will not allow every child, wherever she comes from, to be educated according to her ability.” (81)

“…according to UNICEF, between 1999 and 2006, enrollment rates in primary school in Sub-Saharan Africa increased from 54% to 70%. In East and South Asia, they increased from 75% to 88% over the same period…even among the extremely poor, enrollment rates are now above 80% in at least half the countries for which we have data.” (75)

Again, we need to look at these figures through a critical lens. Numbers do not directly translate, as I have stated time and time again when looking into matters of teacher quality and school enrollment in the Global South, to actual learning. And a bad school environment, which is, in fact, the default setting in most of the development world, is often worse than no school at all, when we look at the opportunity cost for the student and the student’s family in using scarce resources to send them to school.

“Getting children into school is a very important first step: that’s where the learning starts. But it isn’t very useful if they learn little or nothing once they’re there. Somewhat bizarrely, the issue of learning is not very predominantly mentioned in international declarations: the MDG’s do not specify that children should learn anything in school, just that they should complete a basic cycle of education.” (75)

“Overall, 50% of teachers in Indian public schools are not in front of a class at a time they should be. How are the children supposed to learn?” (75)

In the rich world, education is mandated by the state, and is a provision of public good. “But this clearly does not work where state capacity is more limited and compulsory education cannot be enforced. In such cases, the government must make it financially worthwhile for parents to send their children to school. This is the idea behind the new tool of choice in education policy: The Conditional Cash Transfer.” (79)

Income matters highly in education decisions by households. Spending increases faster than a household’s total consumption, showing that education is an investment unlike others.

“If parental income plays such a vital role in determining educational investment, rich children will get more education even if they are not particularly talented, and talented poor children may be deprived of an education. So, leaving it purely to the market will not allow every child, wherever she comes from, to be educated according to her ability.” (81)

Evidence and trials have shown that, worldwide,  “…despite the poor quality of education, schools are still useful.” Every year of primary school enrollment does lead to an overall increase in wages.

Parents will focus their resources on one child (a lottery approach) when these resources are limited; however, “Education is valuable at every level,” and parent, thus, create an education-based poverty trap; in addition, teachers will have low expectations for lower-class children, and will often not even try to educate them, behavior that actually also creates a poverty trap. Children will also do this to themselves in assessing their own abilities, and can negatively reinforce their own futures.  (89)

Pratham, of India, has worked in remedial education programs by training teachers to work with their materials, and by training volunteers to work as Teacher Assistants in these classes; this has led to very positive results.

“…most school systems are both unfair and wasteful. The children of the rich go to schools that not only teach more and teach better, but where they are treated with compassion and helped to reach their true potential. The poor end up in schools that make it very clear quite early that they are not wanted unless they show some exceptional gifts, and they are in effect expected to suffer in silence until they drop out. This creates a huge waste of talent.” (95)

“A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.” (96)

“…all the evidence we have strongly suggests that making sure that every child learns the basics well in school is not only possible, it is in fact fairly easy, as long as one focuses on doing exactly that, and nothing else.”

The focus needs to be on basic skills, and on the idea that. “every child can master them, as long as she and her teacher expend enough effort on it.” Children need to be given the chance to catch up, quite simply put.

“It takes relatively little training to be an effective remedial teacher, at least in the lower grades…” While comforting, this also implies that many primary school teachers in the developing world simply do not exert the energy in their jobs that is so sorely needed. This could be a harder problem to fix than the problem of basic teacher training; the problem of basic teacher motivation. Curriculums need to be improved so they are not daunting to teachers with only basic skills; this is a strong factor that turns many off to even attempting to work hard. These curriculum also need to allow children to learn at their own pace, so they are not left behind. “…and in particular to make sure the children who are lagging behind can focus on the basics. Tracking children is a way to do that.” Students should be assigned to classes based on ability, not on age; but in this, lower-level students and their teachers will need added incentives. (98)

 

"The Value of Teachers"

From Flipping the Classroom,The Economist, September 22:

"The arrival of a powerful new tool thus does not replace the other necessary element in education reform, the raising of teacher quality. Good teaching is the single biggest variable in educating pupils, bigger than class size, family background, or school funding, says Eric Hanushek, an education expert at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. And crucial to having better teachers is evaluating them property, hiring, firing and promoting on merit."

Increasing the Funding to Schools in Uganda through the Media...

Collier, the Bottom Billion, and a Novel Approach to Corruption

A Novel Approach to Corruption in the Public Sector-The Bottom Billion-Laws and Charters

On the utilization of the press in combatting corruption in the public sector, obviously reliant on a free local press and an open environment free of politically-based intimidation, obviously not the case in many of the bottom billion societies. But nonetheless, certainly noteworthy.

“...only around 20% of the money that the Ministry of Finance released for primary schools, other than for teacher's salaries, actually reached the schools. In some societies the government would have tried to suppress information like this, but in Uganda, far from suppressing it, Tumusiime-Mutebile used it as a springboard for action. Obviously, one way would have been to tighten the top-down system of audit and scrutiny, but they have already been trying that and it evidently wasn't working too well. So Tumusiime-Mutebile decided to try a completely different approach: scrutiny from the bottom up. Each time the Ministry of Finance released money it informed the local media, and it also sent a poster to each school setting out what it should be getting...Now, instead of only 20% getting through to the schools, 90% was getting through....the media had been decisive-in this case reports in the newspaper. So scrutiny turned 20 percent into 90 percent-more effective than doubling aid and doubling it again.”

(150).

How to Control Absenteeism in the Classroom-MIT

In furthering my research into MIT's work in educational randomized trials, in the summer of 2009, a report entitled, "Showing Up is the First Step," was published. The results of this report point towards impersonal, direct incentives for teachers to improve attendance. As already reported, during my school visitations amongst the developing world nations in Africa and South Asia, simple abscenteeism can be seen as the biggest impediment to educational advancement, as is a key factor in some students sitting in classes for 7 years and not being able to read or write. Teacher effectiveness surely plays a role, but without their attendance (the report cites that on any given day, 27% of teachers in Uganda do not show up, and the figure is 23% in India;  further, in India, only 2/3 of teachers who showed up were actually teaching!), there is simply nothing being learned, and this contributes to a further breakdown of the entire process, as absent teachers also lead to demoralization and behavior problems that do not end when the teacher shows up for work, eventually. The details from the report, on what works best:

"Seva Mandir, an NGO in Rajastan, India, introduced a simple mechanism that recorded teacher attendance and directly determined teacher pay. This combination of external monitoring with credible rewards (and punishments) cut absence rates in half. Moreover, providing incentives for service provider attendance improves outcomes for poor people without undermining providers’ intrinsic motivation." 

MIT-The Incentivation of Student Test Scores in Kenya

The push for standardized testing around the world as one of the key metrics evaluating student progress, and thus, teacher effectiveness has been in full swing for some time now. In the NYC public schools where I taught for two years, as well as the Pohnpei State School system where I taught in the Peace Corps for two years, teachers were constantly faced with state and national testing for students to determine a wide range of "competencies," with testing becoming so proliferate in NYC that it seemed every other week we had at least one day dedicated to evaluation programs, significantly eroding actual, valuable class time. Although as a teacher I strive to measure progress through alternative means, such as portfolio/project and group/peer assessments, the standardized test always looms large on the periphery. While there are often perils in using standardized testing as a means of incentivising teacher motivations (the largest being that teachers will "teach to the test" and relegate actual learning to the back burner), in some instances, there are few alternatives, and providing incentives for improvements in testing can be a viable way of increasing teacher effectiveness. Thus, the folks at MIT have been looking at, and conducting randomized trials in this focal area in Western Kenya (actually in the same areas where their other work as been held in dealing with increasing teacher effectiveness through community teachers, which raises a bit of a red flag in my mind).
In Kenya, as in most of the developing world, the teacher absenteeism rate is alarmingly high (over 20%) and although universal primary education has been implemented, the largest hurdle faced is the actual quality of the education that is being offered. In most instances, it is alarmingly poor, and is often a net loss for many students who trade off helping their families with agriculture or in the household for a completely inadequate education. The biggest issue in Kenya is, as stated, "Teachers’ salaries depend on their education and experience, with no opportunity for performance-based promotion, which appears to result in a system with no incentives to teach well." 
Merit pay was offered to teachers in the test groups for improvements in their schools as a whole for the national testings. The program ran for two years, and penalized teachers for student dropouts, which is a serious issue in the region, as well.

The result was less than encouraging. Test scores did improve, but not through the means that one would have hoped (such as increased teacher attendance or decreased student dropout rates, the real core issues that were being addressed in the study). What occurred is that schools offered test-prep classes outside of the normal school day to improve the testing scores; additionally, there was no spillover when the project was ended, and thus, the sustainability factor was negligible. 

Thus, there are many issues to analyze with this trial in Kenya and the greater implications of what can be done to improve teacher absentee rates and student performance minus the critical elements of strong supervision, parental involvement, and social drive for educational advancement. Without actual, tangible societal shifts and community focused shifts, any approach will be non-sustainable. Without the larger scope of societal progress being a critical input into the process, incentives will be hollowed out and meaningless for the intended beneficiaries, ie: the students. And so, we are faced with the hard questions yet again. What is to be done? The shift needs to occur at the personnel level of the school bureaucracies; without strong incentives to work, people will not work, it is simple, whether these be intrinsic/societal/cultural or extrinsic/pay factors. Either will do; both are especially advantageous. But the lack of either is crippling, and non-permanent, non-indigenous approaches, as seen in this test case, will only offer temporary solutions, at best, and encourage deviance, at worst.

The full report can be seen here, courtesy of the MIT Poverty Action Lab Website:

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/teacher-incentives-based-students-test-scores-kenya

Teacher Attendance: What Works Most?

 "One can build schools and clinics and stock them with books, drugs, and equipment, but if the teachers, nurses, and other providers are chronically absent, these investments will be wasted."

In looking at the core issues facing educational development and the reformation/enhancement of educational systems in the developing world, the key issues of teacher quality and teacher attendance are the most critical variables in this complex puzzle. Teachers are the human elements that have the most direct impact on the educational process and the ability to make or break an educational system, bar none. One bad student and a good teacher, no problem. Five bad students and a good teacher, no problem. Thirty great students and a bad teacher, problem. This is an issue that transcends national and demographic barriers; in the richest nations, bestowed with the most efficient educational systems, the heaviest weight and concern goes into ensuring teacher training and quality. Thus, how can quality be ensured in nations where training often doesnt exceed 6 months, and teachers are thrown into foreign communities with little support and little incentive? I have seen these trends over and over again, from the US, where I taught in the inner city of New York for two years, to Africa and Asia, where I have conduced numerous school visitations and evaluations for this project. In addressing teacher quality as the key aspect of educational reform, teacher attendance is a core, vital pillar. When visiting Mozambique this summer, I was told repeatedly by both teachers, community members, and NGO personell in the field that teachers could be, and thus often were, absent for extended periods of time with no penalization and oversight. In one case, the school principal was absent for the better part of a year, leaving the school to wither in her absence, as any hierarchical organization would most likely do, especially in a lax cultural environment. The Poverty Action Lab at MIT has been looking into the issue of teacher attendance, and have come up with some very interesting results after their randomized trials have been conducted and assessed. I am going to be digging into the results of this overall study, first looking at the most effective cost-ratio solutions to teacher attendance and quality http://www.povertyactionlab.org/policy-lessons/education/teacher-attendance                                    MIT Poverty Action Lab Site:

Innovations for Poverty Action conducted a successful trial in which supplementary community-based teachers, who make much less than full-sector teachers, were brought into the schools, to be monitored by the local community-boards. The results were positive; these contract teachers had the initial impact of lowering class sizes, which is a huge problem in developing-world nations with large scale literacy and primary education drives, which are often pushed by multi-lateral organizations (and is another subject for discussion in itself...) as well as improving overall test scores.The biggest gains are seen when the local school committees are empowered to monitor the supplementary teachers

The issue of supplementary teachers, as used in this study, brings up some red flags. The first is that the approach seems to be a band-aid; it is not dealing with the actual problem of teacher quality and teacher training, it is, rather, providing an additional fix without curing the root problem. While not negative in itself, if the educational process can be improved in such nations as Kenya where there has been free-universal primary education drives, the fix needs to come from the national level, which needs to be more focused on producing quality teacher training academies and a culture of competition and incentivization. This could be seen as a great model moving forward, a model to be built upon, and works to address two of the most critical areas, in terms of class size and teacher motivation/quality.

In the area of incentives for increasing the educational effectiveness, the randomized trials that were seen in the most positive light by the folks at MIT came in a merit-based girls scholarship program in Kenya: http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/incentives-learn-merit-based-girls-scholarship-program-kenya               Kenya Girls Scholarship Trials:
The researchers in this case looked at student motivations and progress in the classrooms of Western Kenya. In these trials, the researchers were looking to address the key issues of high primary school dropout rates (a result of the push for universal primary education and the lack of local resources to actually implement this) and scholarships to cover the small primary school fees that students must pay to cover educational and classroom expenses, which is often a cause of the high dropout rate as well. The scholarships were merit-based, and given to sixth-grade girls who scored in the top 15% of national tests. The results were skewed, and show the importance of local customs and norms in the implementation of any aid project.  In one community where there was a large pool of disadvantaged students and high public skepticism, the program did not show any effectiveness; however, in another community where there was higher rates of receptivity from the onset, the program was shown to both improve teacher effectiveness and attendance, as well as increasing test scores and parental involvement. 
What is the takeaway from this set of trials? Community involvement, that old cliche of aid and development, is absolutely essential to effectiveness of any community/school project. However, how to gain this involvement is the great puzzle; motivation must be seen in the structure of the local community, elders and chiefs must be on-board and motivated, and the leadership as a whole must have ownership, as I have seen and stated time and time again. Funding and supervision can easily come from the outside, but if there is no buy-in to the programs, there will be no net impact, which can also further the risk of an increase in future failure rates. 

MIT Poverty Action Lab/Education Technology

A great bit of research courtesy of the MIT Poverty Action lab on the effectiveness of technology training on primary school students in India. Students were tested with both after school, additional computing classes, a pull-out model of during-school classes, and no extra computer classes at all; the results were quite interesting....Niranjan Rajadhyaksha reported on the findings in the Wall Street Journal: 


Computers or classrooms?
The role of the teacher is restricted to switching on the computers and allocating them to different batches of children
Cafe Economics | Niranjan Rajadhyaksha

Ever since fears erupted about a decade ago that the world could be divided into digital haves and have-nots, policymakers and do-gooders have assumed quite correctly that this digital divide needs to be bridged. The most obvious first step was to give children from poor families access to computers, in school and at home. From that followed ambitious programmes as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which is funded by some of the world’s best firms such as Google. Some visionaries even dream of an education system where the teacher is replaced by a computer programme.

Does this plug-and-study idea really work in poor neighbourhoods? Not necessarily, it seems.

True, the initial findings were encouraging. Many studies showed that poor kids improved their exam scores when they had access to computers. But more recent studies cast some doubts on the assumption that the academic performance of children from poor families improves with access to computers. In other words, plonking a computer in front of a kid does not necessarily do the trick.

In one recent study in Gujarat, Leigh Linden, an economist with Columbia University, and the MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab evaluated how academic performance changed when computers were introduced in classrooms. The data was collected from schools in the slums of Ahmedabad and some other towns and villages in Gujarat that are run by Gyan Shala, an NGO. Children in these schools get one hour of computer time each day. The role of the teacher is restricted to switching on the computers and allocating them to different batches of children.

Linden found that a lot depends on how the computers are used — as complements or substitutes for the teacher and the regular curriculum. The programme of computerized learning does not work too well when it is used to substitute the teacher in the normal school day. Math scores actually dropped in schools that took this path. The “out-of-school” alternative — when students sat at the computers either before or after school — showed better, though modest, improvements in academic performance. Here, the learning software is a complement rather than a substitute for the usual curriculum. Further, Linden says the worst students benefited the most in this case.

The Gujarat study shows that merely providing computers in schools is not much of an answer. A lot depends on how they are used, when they are used, and who uses them.

Another study from across the world has an even more sobering lesson. Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches turned their eyes on what happens when poor children in Romania get computers at home. As part of a programme, called Euro 200, some poor Romanian families were given euro 200 to buy computers for their children. Other families with similar income levels did not get this subsidy because of budget constraints. The two economists compared what happened in the two groups of families which were alike in almost every other respect.

There is much to be learnt: Kids with computers saw less television, but they also had less time for their homework. Grades dropped. “The lesson from Romania’s voucher experiment is not that computers aren’t useful learning tools, but that their usefulness relies on parents being around to assure they don’t simply become a very tempting distraction from the unpleasantness of trigonometry homework. But this is a crucial insight for those tasked with designing policies to bridge the digital divide,” writes Ray Fisman, in a June article for online magazine Slate, where Malamud and Pop-Eleches’ research was cited.

Does this mean that computers have no role in classrooms? Does this mean that the age-old talk and chalk teaching routine is irreplaceable? There is no need to draw such dark conclusions. (And these are dark conclusions, since schools do need reform. Peter Drucker​ once pointed out that our schools are the only social institutions around us that have not changed at all since the Industrial Revolution​. Everything else — from governments to workplaces to families — has been radically transformed.)

The more limited point is that it’s not just an issue of lavish funding and putting computers in classrooms. The OLPC mission statement reflects this belief: “To eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education to the poorest and most remote children on the planet by making them more active in their own learning, through collaborative and creative activities, connected to the Internet, with their own laptop, as a human right and cost free to them.”

In the Gujarat study, Linden draws attention to several more cost-effective ways to improve the academic performance of children from poor families — cash incentives for teachers, scholarships for girls and access to textbooks. And good libraries, too. Computers are part of the answer — but perhaps not the most important part.

MIT Poverty Action Lab-Madagascar Education Development Trials

I have been reading into the MIT Poverty Action Lab's work since seeing their test results published in the book Economic Gangsters. In looking specifically at their randomized trials in the educational setting, I was drawn to recent work done in Madagascar, which looked at the effects of both a "top down" and a "bottom up" approach to school interventions. Madagascar is filled with the same issues as most of the developing world in terms of lack of truly progressive educational policy and a stagnant public education system riddled with huge systemic problems. The details are as followed for the "intervention:"

Researchers, in collaboration with The Ministry of Education in Madagascar, ran a randomized experiment in 3,774 primary schools in 30 public school districts. These districts represented all geographic areas in the country, but were focused on schools with the higher rates of grade repetition.

All district administrators in treatment districts received operational tools and training that included forms for supervision visits to schools, and procurement sheets for school supplies and grants (district-level intervention). In some of these schools, the subdistrict head was also trained and provided with tools to supervise school visits, as well as information on the performance and resource level at each school (subdistrict-level intervention).

Lastly, several districts also introduced a school level intervention which involved parental monitoring through school meetings. Field workers distributed a ‘report card’ to schools, which included the previous year’s dropout rate, exam pass rate, and repetition rate. Two community meetings were then held, and the first meeting resulted in an action plan based on the report card. One example of the goals specified in the action plans was to increase the school exam pass rate by 5 percentage points by the end of the academic year. Common tasks specified for teachers included lesson planning and student evaluation every few weeks. The parent’s association was expected to monitor the student evaluation reports which the teachers were supposed to communicate to them. These tools allowed parents to coordinate on taking actions to monitor service quality and exercise social pressure on the teachers.

What is so interesting about the results is that the top-down approach, which is the traditional development approach of dealing with school reform, did practically nothing to actually improve the conditions on the ground. What showed large results were the "bottom up" trials, in which parental monitoring, field workers, and community meetings following specific action plans. Here are the details from the MIT site: 



Impact from Bottom-Up Approach: The interventions at the school level led to significantly improved teacher behavior. Teachers were on average 0.26 standard deviations more likely to create daily and weekly lesson plans and to have discussed them with their director. Test scores were 0.1 standard deviations higher than those in the comparison group two years after the implementation of the program. Additionally, student attendance increased by 4.3 percentage points compared to the comparison group average of 87%, though teacher attendance and communication with parents did not improve.