deteriorating quality of education essay

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1 The Problem of Education Quality in Developing Countries

• Published: March 2019
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The universalization of basic education was set to be one of the great policy successes of the twentieth century, yet millions are still unenrolled, and many of those who attended school learned little. The ‘learning crisis’ now dominates the global education policy agenda, yet little is understood of why education quality reforms have had so little success compared to earlier expansionary reforms. This chapter sets out the rationale for this book, which is to explore how the nature of the political settlement or distribution of power between contending social groups in a given country shapes efforts to get learning reforms on the policy agenda, how they are implemented, and what difference they make to what children learn. It discusses debates about the sources and determinants of the learning crisis, examining its extent and nature and providing a rationale for the key themes the book takes up in subsequent theoretical, empirical, and comparative chapters.

Introduction

Universal basic education was set to be one of the great development successes of the twentieth century, as countries all around the world enthusiastically expanded provision, enrolling ever more of their young in primary and secondary schools. Yet by the early 2000s, it was already evident that not only were millions still out of school, but that a majority dropped out early, attended sporadically, or learned little while there (UNESCO 2014 ). As one observer summarized it, ‘schooling ain’t learning’ (Pritchett 2013 ): there is more to learning than placing children in schools. The ‘learning crisis’ is acknowledged in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 to ‘ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning’, 1 an emphasis on quality and equality in contrast to the focus on access in Millennium Development Goal 2. This learning crisis is widely yet unevenly spread, varying between countries, classes, genders, and social groups (World Bank 2017 ). But whereas expanding primary schooling was a comparatively popular and measurably successful policy goal, addressing poor quality teaching and low levels of learning has so far proven less so (Bruns and Schneider 2016 ). A few countries have managed to expand their education systems while enhancing learning. But it is easier to build schools, abolish fees, recruit more teachers, and instruct parents to send their children, than it is to ensure that schools, teachers, and students are equipped and motivated for teaching and learning once there.

This book contributes to making sense of this global learning crisis, by exploring the conditions under which reforms likely to shift education provisioning onto a higher-quality pathway are undertaken and enacted. It takes as its starting point the view that politics is likely to matter in explaining why this is the case. As a recent review put it, education reform is:

a highly charged and politicized process; what gets implemented—and its impact—depends as much or more on the politics of the reform process as the technical design of the reform. (Bruns and Schneider 2016 , 5)

There are good reasons to believe that variations in how countries adopt and implement reforms necessary to promote learning relate to differences in their political economies. These differences may play out in the design of reforms that are attempted and adopted, and in what gets implemented—including that it is more politically popular and less taxing of often weak state capacities to expand school provision than to improve learning outcomes. Yet, barring some notable exceptions (e.g. Grindle 2004 ), there has been little political analysis of education in general (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011 ; Gift and Wibbels 2014 ), and still less on the political economy of education quality in developing countries—a gap that has been noted and bemoaned in several recent reviews (Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Nicolai et al. 2014 ; Wales, Magee, and Nicolai 2016 ; Bruns and Schneider 2016 ). As a contribution to filling this critical gap, this book sets out and tests hypotheses about how different types of political context interact with the education policy domain in ways that shape the uptake and implementation of reforms designed to improve learning outcomes.

The book features comparative analysis of the politics of education quality reforms across six low- to middle-income countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda—all of which were relatively successful at rapidly expanding access to primary schooling, but which have all found it much harder to improve learning outcomes, in part (we suggest) because of the variable levels of political commitment that exist in each context for reforms aimed at improving the quality of education. In this volume, we understand political commitment to reflect the incentives and ideas that predominate amongst political elites, and which are shaped by the underlying character of politics and power in specific contexts. The concept we use to describe ‘the balance or distribution of power between contending social groups and social classes, on which any state is based’ (di John and Putzel 2009, 4) is a ‘political settlement’, and we have chosen our cases to represent different types of these settlements.

The comparison explores how different distributions of power shaped incentives and ideas around education quality reforms and the institutions and processes of implementation, tracing the politics of reform from the political centre down through different levels of governance to the school, taking into account the impact of the external environment (for example, aid) and the policy legacies and challenges in each context. What we want to examine here is less the broad question of ‘how politics shapes educational outcomes’ per se, than the ways in which politics shapes the commitment and capacity of elites and governments in developing countries to promote reforms that are aimed at improving learning outcomes. In particular, and following several systematic reviews of what works to improve learning outcomes in developing countries (e.g. Glewwe et al. 2011 ; Tikly and Barrett 2013 ), we focus on efforts to improve the level and management of resourcing accorded to schools, and the quality and presence of teachers through training, incentives, and oversight mechanisms.

What we know about quality reforms is that they are inherently more difficult to design and to ‘sell’ to the public: there is less certainty about ‘what works’ and results are harder to measure (Nelson 2007 ). It is easier to design and implement top-down command-and-control responses to build more schools and recruit more teachers and children than to devise workable solutions to the ‘craft’ challenge of the interpersonal, transactional nature of effective teaching and learning (Pritchett 2013 ). Strengthening local accountability is difficult. Teachers, the group whose interests are most likely to suffer from reforms to enhance their performance accountability, tend to be well-organized, influential, and equipped to resist them (Corrales 1999 , 2006 ; Moe and Wiborg 2017 ; Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Béteille, Kingdon, and Muzammil 2016 ). Parents and communities, particularly in developing countries, are often less well-equipped and informed to articulate demand for quality improvements from their political leaders or frontline providers (Dunne et al. 2007 ; Mani and Mukand 2007 ). This means that for parents and communities, both the ‘long route’ (via the process of political representation) and the ‘short route’ (via relationships with frontline providers, teachers, and schools) to accountability for the delivery of high quality education, may be obstructed or subverted (World Bank 2003 ). A recent review concluded that three features of the politics of education are particularly relevant in analysing the prospects for reform: (i) the strength of teacher unions compared with other education stakeholders or labour unions; (ii) the ‘opacity of the classroom’—the need for reforms to shape teacher behaviour in the classroom, over which direct control is impossible; and (iii) the slow or lagged nature of the results of quality reforms (compared, for example, with the abolition of fees, learning reforms will yield no instant or obvious political return) (Bruns and Schneider 2016 ).

The World Bank identifies children’s unreadiness to learn, along with teacher and school management skills, and inadequate school inputs, as the proximate determinants of the learning crisis (World Bank 2017 ). It argues that the intractability of education quality reforms is not inherently a matter of inadequate resources, although many failing systems are also under-resourced (UNESCO 2014 ; World Bank 2017 ). Instead, it is a problem of ‘misalignment’ between learning goals, policies, and practices, in which the dominant role of teacher unions and other forms of ‘unhealthy politics’ plays an important and persistent role (World Bank 2017 ). It concludes that ‘healthier’ forms of politics—in particular the use of information to increase ‘the political incentives for learning’ and broad-based pro-reform coalitions—are critical to align goals, policies, and practices around improved learning. While highlighting the significance of the politics of teacher and school management on the frontline of the learning crisis, the emphasis on ‘alignment’ sidelines the significance of contention in education reform, and fails to address the questions to which it gives rise: under what conditions do broad-based, pro-reform coalitions come about? In which political contexts does information about education performance become embedded in functioning mechanisms of accountability? Why do some states visibly devote more capacity to learning and more political resources to quality reforms than others?

This book seeks to pick up the analysis at the point where the World Development Report (WDR) 2018 leaves off, pursuing a political explanation of the misalignments and contentions that shape the uptake of learning reforms. The analysis seeks to test assumptions that political settlements where elites have shorter time-horizons (competitive and clientelistic settlements, such as those in Ghana and Bangladesh) are less likely to take up the politically intractable task of redistributing power in the education system than those (the dominant settlements of Cambodia and Rwanda) where elites are better insulated, can adopt longer-term horizons and might be more likely to take up developmentally important projects. It also seeks to explore how different political settlements interact with systems of governance within the domain of education, ranged from traditional hierarchically organized bureaucracies to multi-stakeholder models, to create a range of different outcomes in ‘the many layers within a specific sector in between the top levels of policymaking and the service provision frontline’ (Levy and Walton 2013 , 4).

Following this introductory chapter, Chapter 2 sets out the intellectual rationale for a political settlement-based approach to the analysis of education quality reforms, and establishes the theoretical framework and methodological approach used to research the politics in the cases presented here. Chapters 3 through 8 comprise the set of six country cases, each of which gives an account of the quality of basic education and its development in that country; of the political settlement and its influences on education policy and the reform agenda; and of the implementation of policies aimed at improving learning from the national level downwards through sub-national levels of governance and, in most cases, through to schools themselves. Chapter 9 draws together the theoretical, methodological, and empirical findings from the comparative analysis, and points towards areas for further conceptual development and empirical research. The book concludes with two commentaries from leading authorities in the field on the arguments and cases presented in the book.

The Global Learning Crisis

From an access point of view, progress towards universal primary education in low-income countries accelerated markedly in the past two decades (see Figure 1.1 ). Globally, 93 per cent of children now attend primary school at the appropriate age, up from 84 per cent in 1999. By 2015, 20 million more developing country children had completed primary school than would have done so had the rate of school expansion before 2000 continued. In seventeen countries, age-correct enrolment rates increased by more than 20 per cent between 1999 and 2012, implying a remarkably rapid expansion. And gains were concentrated in the poorest world regions of Sub-Saharan Africa (where the net enrolment ratio [NER] rose from 59 per cent in 1999 to 79 per cent in 2012) and South and West Asia (where it went from 78 to 94 per cent over the same period). Between 2000 and 2010, NER increased from 27 to almost 64 per cent in Niger, from 42 to 76 per cent in Guinea, and in Burundi, from less than 41 to 94 per cent in 2010. The proportion of children who had never attended school dropped in Ethiopia from 67 per cent in 2000 to 28 per cent in 2011, and in Tanzania from 47 per cent in 1999 to 12 per cent in 2010. Globally, gender parity in enrolment was achieved at primary level and almost achieved at secondary level over the period, in part due to the push on girls’ education from MDG3 on gender equality; of countries with data, 69 per cent were set to achieve gender parity at primary level, but only less than half at secondary level by 2015. 2

Primary enrolment rates worldwide, 1970–2015

However, the idea that mass education was ‘one of the successes of the MDGs’ has been tempered by ‘more sobering trends’ (Unterhalter 2014 , 181). Large numbers of children remain excluded from school, with 58 million children aged six to eleven unenrolled in 2012, many in conflict-affected regions. At least one-fifth of all children were likely to drop out before completing primary in 32 countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNESCO 2015 ). And rural–urban location, socio-economic class, and marginalization and social exclusion continued to determine which children enrolled and stayed on in school. Despite gains in gender parity on literacy in many places, progress towards adult literacy has been slow; in fact, almost all gains have been due to the transition of schooled youth into adulthood, rather than programmes of learning for adults. About half a billion women still lacked basic literacy in 2015 (UNESCO 2015 ). And while most children in most countries can now attend school, in a great many, a minority learn as much as their governments expect them to. By their own standards, a large number of developing country school systems are failing to endow their students with even minimum competencies of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Globally, some 125 million children do not attain functional literacy or numeracy even after four years of school, while the majority—in some cases the vast majority—of primary school students in many education systems do not attain even the basic competencies in reading or arithmetic needed to continue their learning (World Bank 2017 ).

The poor quality of the education received by the majority in developing countries is of particular concern because of the potential role of good quality education in reversing—or reinforcing—economic and related inequalities. The quality of education is increasingly understood to be a more powerful driver of economic growth than the size of an education system, and higher-quality basic education is associated with more inclusive and equitable forms of growth (Hanushek 2009 ; Hanushek and Woessmann 2007 ). However, the learning crisis aggravates, and is aggravated by, social and economic inequalities of all kinds. Differences in learning attainments between lower- and higher-income regions and countries are substantial, as a comparison of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores shows: the average student in a low-income country performs worse than 95 per cent of students in OECD countries—that is, would require remedial lessons in any developed country school system. Differences within a region can also be significant: Colombian students attain basic literacy six years earlier than their Bolivian counterparts, while only 19 per cent of young Nigerian primary school completers can read, compared with 80 per cent in Tanzania (World Bank 2017 ). Girls, rural students, and children from minority or other socially marginalized groups generally learn less, compared with boys, city children, and other advantaged groups (World Bank 2017 ). This reflects how gender and class disadvantage, remote geography, and membership of marginalized social groups amplify unequal learning outcomes; these then accumulate as children transition through the education system and on into the labour market (UNESCO 2012 , 2014 ). Nonetheless, some countries outperform others on learning indicators: Vietnam, for instance, performs much better than predicted by its per capita income; students in Latvia and Albania similarly learn more than expected from their other social and economic indicators (World Bank 2017 ). This again reinforces the sense that the drivers of educational quality are not simply related to economic or cultural factors, and that political factors are likely to play a significant role here.

Roots of the Learning Crisis: Lessons from Efforts at Reform

Why is the learning crisis so pervasive and apparently stubborn, when policies of educational expansion were so rapidly and enthusiastically adopted across the developing world? Improving quality is recognized to be more expensive and more difficult than increasing school places, and there is a perceived trade-off between keeping unit costs low and maximizing learning achievement (Nicolai et al. 2014 , 2). Enabling high quality learning is particularly challenging amongst low-income populations because of: institutional or personal biases against children from poor or marginalized groups (UNESCO 2010 ); challenges in the home environment (Smith and Barrett 2011 ); the adverse cognitive effects of early and chronic malnourishment (Crookston et al. 2010 , 2013 ; World Bank 2017 ); and dropout, poor attendance, child labour, and other characteristic features of childhoods lived in extreme poverty (Rose and Dyer 2008 ). School meals tend to raise participation and attendance rates, for instance, but evidence that school meals improve learning outcomes is more mixed (Adelman, Gilligan, and Lehrer 2008 ; Snilstveit et al. 2015 ). Poverty and inequality may be the biggest obstacles to education quality (Tikly and Barrett 2013 ), but while good quality education may be the surest pathway out of poverty and towards more equitable societies, there are few simple solutions to raising education standards in such settings. There is, in any case, limited consensus about what works to improve learning, as a recent ‘review of reviews’ found (Evans and Popova 2016 ).

Under-resourced and poorly managed systems lead to persistently poor quality basic education, but more finance is not necessarily the answer. Low- and middle-income countries typically spend too little on education: only 41 of 150 countries for which data is available spend the recommended 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education, and 25 countries spend less than half that. Globally, the average proportion of public spending on education was only 15 per cent (against a recommended 20 per cent), a proportion that has barely changed since 1999; in some low- and middle-income countries, the share of education in public spending dropped below 5 per cent of GDP during the MDG period (UNESCO 2014 ). Under-resourcing does not explain all of the problems of education quality, but it helps to explain why fewer than 5 per cent of Tanzanian students have their own reading textbook, why 130 Malawian students cram into the average first-year classroom, and why only one in four Chad schools has a toilet (UNESCO 2014 ).

Yet the extent to which resources shape education quality is known to be highly variable, depending on how they are governed and managed at the different levels of education systems. The resources that do reach schools are often poorly deployed, usually because of over-centralized control, so that the meagre resources are inefficiently and ineffectively used, and the evidence on how more resources contribute to better learning via lower pupil–teacher ratios and more qualified teachers is mixed and context-specific (Glewwe et al. 2011 ). In their review of seventy-nine studies in developing countries, Glewwe et al. (2011, 41) concluded that a reasonably functional physical classroom tended to matter, but so did teachers with more subject knowledge, longer school days, and the provision of tuition; by contrast, teacher absence had a ‘clear negative effect’. Many teachers freelance as private tutors or find other ways to supplement their income (Bray 2006 ). Leakage is common, particularly through loss of public sector employee time (Chaudhury et al. 2004 ).

Where teachers do show up, they are often themselves too poorly educated to impart high quality learning: most new teachers in The Gambia, Botswana, Lesotho, Chad, Togo, Guinea-Bissau, and Cameroon did not even meet secondary school minimum qualifications for teachers in the 1990s (UNESCO 2004). And, despite massive investments in teacher training in the 2000s, in one-third of countries less than 75 per cent of teachers are trained even up to (often quite low) national standards (UNESCO 2014 ). Tikly and Barrett ( 2013 , 4) found that while low reading and mathematics attainments were closely linked to poverty and inequality, ‘schools can make a difference’, even more so in lower-income countries than in richer countries, particularly through effective school leadership and teacher management. As the World Bank ( 2017 ) summarized it, the four determinants of the learning crisis are: (i) children do not arrive ready to learn; (ii) teachers often lack the needed skills and motivation; (iii) school management skills are low; and (iv) school inputs have failed to keep pace with expansion. A critical lesson is that learning crises are systemic, not merely errors at the margin: entire education systems generally fail to deliver adequate levels of learning. This reflects the ‘misalignment’ of the goals and practices of the education system with the learning outcomes it needs to generate, notably on matters such as setting learning objectives and responsibilities, monitoring learning, financing, and the motivations and incentives of key actors within the system (World Bank 2017 ).

What causes these misalignments? The World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People , undertook a political analysis of service delivery failures, linking them to weak or dysfunctional relationships of accountability between citizens and service-users (with respect to education, parents, and students) and service providers (teachers, officials, politicians) (World Bank 2003 ). Four dimensions of accountability most needed strengthening in relation to education performance: (i) voice, or how well citizens could hold the state—politicians and policymakers—accountable for performance in discharging its responsibility for education; (ii) compacts, or how well and how clearly the responsibilities and objectives of public engagement were communicated to the public, and to private organizations that provide services (Ministries of Education, school districts); (iii) management, or the actions that created effective frontline providers (teachers, administrators) within organizations; and (iv) client power, or how well citizen-clients could increase the accountability of schools and school systems (World Bank 2003 , 113). Central insights included that accountability for public service provision could be exercised via the ‘long route to accountability’, whereby citizens and civil society mandate political actors to provide education services, politicians then direct state actors to design such services, and the central state then tasks local governments and frontline service to deliver the services (and they are potentially punished electorally for failures at education service delivery); or via the ‘short route’, through which service-users hold frontline providers directly to account, through the use of their powers as consumers or rights-bearing citizens to demand services and sanction failures (World Bank 2003 ).

Recognizing the central importance of accountability, efforts to strengthen the ‘short route’ to accountable education provision took the form of interventions and experiments to promote community participation in school-based management; induce community monitoring of school quality indicators, such as enrolment, attendance, and performance; introduce vouchers and other ‘school choice’ initiatives; and efforts to monitor teacher performance, amongst others. It seems clear that teachers perform best when motivated and monitored to do so (Bruns, Filmer, and Patrinos 2011 ; Bruns and Luque 2014 ), yet efforts to enhance learning by strengthening ‘client power’ have yielded mixed results (Bruns et al. 2011 ; Carr-Hill et al. 2015 ; Snilstveit et al. 2015 ; World Bank 2017 ). Carr-Hill et al. (2015) found that community participation in school management yielded positive and large effects in middle-income countries, but smaller and more uneven results in poorer countries, where, amongst other things, community members lacked the capacities or incentives to engage with school performance (see also Dunne et al. 2007 ).

Some of these interventions, particularly the quasi-experimental efforts at information and monitoring, were introduced with limited reference to the political contexts within which they needed to operate, something which recent reviews of social accountability have found to be critical (Devarajan, Khemani, and Walton 2011 ; Hickey and King 2016 ). These ‘widgets’—pared-down tools for project intervention that failed to engage with the deeper and wider politics of school provision—had little prospect of strengthening accountability for public service delivery (Joshi and Houtzager 2012 ). Citizen power involves a transformation of political relationships, not merely the ‘teeth’ or consumer power to make choices at the frontline, but the ‘voice’ to mandate public action, and to demand accountability (Fox 2015 ). In the terms of the WDR 2004, the short route to accountability needs the ‘voice’ of political claims- and policymaking for it to be effective, while at the local level, education service delivery only has ‘teeth’—the ability to punish failures—when citizens and service-users have the capacities to demand, and receive, improved performance on the frontline (see also Westhorp et al. 2014 ).

These bottom-up pressures also need to be backed up by top-down pressure from within the political and bureaucratic system (Booth 2012 ), often through combined forms of diagonal accountability that join up oversight mechanisms in pursuit of more responsive and effective performance (Goetz and Jenkins 2005; Joshi and Houtzager 2012 ). The nature of the ‘craft’ in the interpersonal activity of teaching and learning means that effective school systems need to be organized like starfish—independently functional and responsive to differences in environment, yet connected to the whole—rather than, as most are, like spiders, directly controlled from the centre (Pritchett 2013 ). Yet central control remains an important political objective in many school systems, whether under democratic or authoritarian rule, and whether state capacity can be judged strong or weak.

These lessons have renewed attention to the politics of the ‘long route’ to accountability in education provision. In the first World Development Report on education (World Bank 2017 ) the roots of the learning crisis are framed as both technical and political. In one important example, national learning assessments are seen as vital to create ‘measures for learning [to] guide action’ as well as ‘measures of learning [to] spur action’, by increasing public participation and awareness of school performance; providing parents with evidence needed to make better choices; and raising voice via ‘the long route of accountability, where learning metrics may help citizens use the political process to hold politicians accountable for learning’ (World Bank 2017 , 94). Yet, while ‘political impetus’ has been critical to the adoption and implementation of learning reforms, powerful political incentives, including ‘unhealthy’ relationships between teacher unions and political and bureaucratic interests, can also ensure the goals and practices of the system remain misaligned with those of children’s learning (World Bank 2017 ).

Understanding the Political Economy of Education Quality Reforms

It may be true that ‘education systems are what they are, and indeed, the schools are what they are—everywhere in the world, regardless of the nation—because politics makes them that way’ (Moe and Wiborg 2017 ). Yet political science has paid little attention to education, for reasons that include lack of data and the specific disciplinary challenge (for political science) of accessing household dynamics and decision-making processes at multiple levels (Gift and Wibbels 2014 ; Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011 ; Ansell 2010 ). There has been some interest in the comparative politics of education, including in developing countries (for instance, Baum and Lake 2003 ; Brown and Hunter 2004 ), but it remains a new thematic area for the discipline, and one in which theorizing is in its infancy. The next section briefly discusses existing political science theories of education provision in light of the distinct challenges and concerns of developing countries, before moving on to the literature on the politics of education quality in developing country settings. This includes a discussion of the need to maintain a distinction between the politics of education in advanced, industrialized societies with long-established systems of mass education, and the politics of education in societies whose population includes many first-generation learners, where mass education is still a novelty and where transnational influences may be stronger.

Gift and Wibbels ( 2014 ) argue that the basis for a political science theory of education is as a function of the interaction between demand and supply: how much education a society receives is a function of: (a) the demand for skills emanating from the labour market and the economy; and (b) how, and the extent to which, those skills are supplied through the education system. Parents are assumed to ‘naturally prefer’ schools that are good for their children, and, to a greater or lesser extent, to mandate politicians to deliver them. How successfully they organize to assert their demands will determine what states provide. Ansell ( 2010 ) similarly notes that a political theory of education must rest on insights (a) that education is essentially redistributive and, depending on how resources are spent, can be progressive or otherwise; and (b) that ‘public education policy is heavily affected by the nature of the global market for educated labor’ (Ansell 2010 , 3).

Not all the assumptions made by Gift and Wibbels ( 2014 ) hold in contexts where mass formal schooling is still new. Gift and Wibbels view the outcome as a matter of magnitude, with the dependent variable being public spending on education. But if the heart of the problem is that schools and teachers are unaccountable to the parents and pupils they are supposed to serve, this implies a change in the relative political power of these groups, and not—or not only—more resources. In fact, more resources may exacerbate the problem, entrenching public sector interests in the existing system, making teacher unions stronger, expanding poorly managed services to an even wider population. Parents may know neither what to expect nor what to demand (for instance, Martínez 2012 ; Dunne et al. 2007 ; Mani and Mukand 2007 ). The capacity of citizens to demand and achieve improved levels of service provision is in general closely shaped by issues of poverty, exclusion, and inequality (Hickey and King 2016 ).

In developing countries with limited state capacity, the strongest demand for an educated population may come from the state itself. Many developing countries lack the human resources to staff the state; as we have already seen, many low-income countries cannot recruit enough educated teachers. Education provision may thus be insulated against state weaknesses and/or the problems of personalized as opposed to programmatic policy regimes, but with limited implications for quality: ‘in an environment of weak state capacity, democracy may prompt governments to increase education access, but not education inputs’ (Harding and Stasavage 2014 , 230). The likely absence of programmatic education agendas in developing countries may also be related to the general absence of programmatic class-based parties; the political history of education in developed countries indicates that parties and coalitions on the left and centre are more likely to promote wider access to education, and are associated with higher public spending on education (Busemeyer 2014 ).

Demand for educated labour from employers may be weak in low-income developing countries with large ‘reserve army’ populations, or because low-capital enterprises generally need little skilled labour. It seems clear that the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approach to understanding differences in education policy on the basis of ‘a functional complementarity between skill formation and welfare state policies’ (Busemeyer 2014 , 35) offers limited insights into situations where the relationship between labour, capital, and the state is informal, paternalistic, and unorganized. Corrales argues that it is possible that ‘more exposure to capitalism prompts governments and constituents to protect education expenditures’, but that how domestic politics interacts with opportunities and constraints in the global economy shapes the politics of investment in education (Corrales 2006 , 240). Doner and Schneider (2016, 635) note that informality, inequality, and a reliance on foreign direct investment can fragment business and labour, and ‘undercut the potential demand for upgrading institutions’.

Of the available scholarship that does focus on the political economy of education in developing countries, 3 it is possible to differentiate between those studies which focus on how national-level politics shapes educational policies in broad terms (e.g. Stasavage 2005 ; Kosack 2009 ; Kosack 2012 ) and those that look more specifically at how politics (e.g. Grindle 2004 ) and governance arrangements (Pritchett 2013 ) play out within education systems. Within each of these literatures, there is a further distinction between a focus on formal institutional arrangements (e.g. Ansell 2008 and Stasavage 2005 on democracy; Pritchett 2013 on education sector governance; World Bank 2003 on formal accountability structures) and those that focus on informal power and politics (e.g. Kosack 2012 on political coalitions; Grindle 2004 on policy coalitions; also, Wales et al. 2016 ).

Analysis of the relationship between democracy and education tends to find that democracy exerts a positive influence on governments’ financial commitments to education (Stasavage 2005 ; Ansell 2008 ). But this may not advance understanding of reforms aimed at learning, as opposed to access. Nelson ( 2007 ) argues that competitive elections may create pressures to increase but not to improve or reallocate provision, because the political incentives to do so are so weak and non-urgent. Kosack ( 2012 ) also goes beyond regime-type explanations in search of a less formal and institutional analysis, arguing that none of the three most common political–economic explanations (relating to regime type, education cultures, and governmental commitment to economic performance) predict the realities of education policies. In his analysis of Taiwan, Ghana, and Brazil, Kosack concludes that answers to two questions can explain patterns of education investment: whose support does a government need to stay in power? What sort of education do those citizens want? Kosack identifies situations in which political entrepreneurs help disorganized groups to organize around common interests on education, as through the formation of coalitions between populist leaders and rural constituencies (Kosack 2012 ; also Corrales 1999 ). By extension of the same logic regarding the role of coalitions in shaping policy preferences, it may well be that developing countries lack the kinds of organized groups that might constitute a coalition in favour of a better trained citizenry and labour force (e.g. middle-class parents, organized capitalists).

This focus on informal forms of politics seems to characterize the most insightful comparative work to date on education politics. Merilee Grindle’s (2004) seminal work on education sector reform in Latin America notes that whereas access reforms were ‘“easy” from a political economy perspective’ (Grindle 2004 , 6), reforms aimed at improving quality in the 1990s:

involved the potential for lost jobs, and lost control over budgets, people, and decisions. They exposed students, teachers, and supervisors to new pressures and expectations. Teachers’ unions charged that they destroyed long existing rights and career tracks. (Grindle 2004 , 6)

The wider literature supports the presumption that teachers are typically the best organized and most vocal group empowered to influence education policy and reforms, and that influence is not always benign (Moe and Wiborg 2017 ; Bruns and Schneider 2016 ; Kingdon et al. 2014 ; Rosser and Fahmi 2018 ; Béteille et al. 2016 ). Nevertheless, Grindle’s cases of education quality reforms in Latin America show that reforms could succeed, depending on how they were introduced, designed, approved, and implemented. Reform-oriented coalitions within the education sector were particularly important in her cases. Corrales ( 1999 ) similarly suggests that policy entrepreneurs tend to emerge in response to high-level government commitment to reforms. But a recent review of the politics of education quality in developing countries found that the visibility and ‘political returns’ of educational investments, information asymmetries, particularly around performance assessment, and patterns of demand and accountability, including capacities for collective action, tended to limit commitment to quality reforms (Nicolai et al. 2014 , 5).

In terms of studies on the significance of formal governance arrangements within the education sector, there has been a focus on both the national- and local-level systems, and within each of these on the appropriate balance between top-down and bottom-up forms of accountability mechanisms. Pritchett ( 2013 ) argues that school systems are often highly centralized, which can work well to deliver expanded provision quickly, but which may exclude local parents and teachers from influence, and so deliver schooling without learning. A similar point is made by Tikly and Barrett ( 2013 , 20), who conclude that ‘weighting accountability towards top-down control … can constrain the space for teacher autonomy, reducing responsive inclusion and curricula relevance at the classroom level’.

However, formal governance arrangements rarely play out according to design in developing countries (Andrews 2013 ). Kingdon et al. (2014, 2) note that the supposed benefits of decentralization ‘do not accrue in practice because in poor rural areas the local elite closes up the spaces for wider community representation and participation in school affairs’. They suggest the effects of decentralization are ‘especially problematic when accountability systems are weak, and there is little parental information or awareness of how to hold schools responsible’ (Kingdon et al. 2014 , 28). A good deal of work has been undertaken at the level of schools themselves, particularly in terms of the type of oversight and accountability measures associated with improved levels of performance. Westhorp et al.’s (2014) systematic review of the circumstances under which decentralization, school-based management, accountability initiatives, and community schools influence education outcomes, particularly for the poor, found that a wide range of approaches had achieved some degree of success. These include the introduction of rewards in conjunction with sanctions; performance monitoring by the community members, including traditional authorities and politicians; and the introduction of direct accountability relationships, including the power to hire and fire between school management committees and staff. However, school-level interventions are rarely enough on their own: to work, they depend on a supportive political context, an adequately-resourced education sector with a strong national system for assessment, and high-capacity local actors, including school management committees, head teachers, and local community actors.

Some research into the politics of education in developing countries has focused more on the ideas (rather than only the incentives) that shape elite behaviour. A good deal of work on elite perceptions and commitment has identified education as being an area that attracts a high level of consensus from ruling elites, as compared with other aspects of social policy (e.g. Hossain 2005 ; Hossain and Moore 2002 ). Contemporary developing countries are part of a world system in which mass education is, or is becoming, the norm, so that integration into that world system depends on the provision of mass education, and provision of mass education legitimates state authority (Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer 1985 ; Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal 1992 ; see also Corrales 2006 ; Tikly 2001 ). Policy and political elites may ‘demand’ education as part of a developmentalist agenda of nation building or economic development, or as an instrument for achieving other social policy goals (e.g. fertility control: Colclough 2012 ; Ansell 2010 ).

Finally, international actors have played a significant role in driving up the levels of investment in education in developing countries, and in ensuring that a significant effort is made to target this provision at poorer groups. This is in part through the transnational advocacy coalition that comprised the Global Campaign for Education (Gaventa and Mayo 2009 ), as well as the strong pressures that international aid agencies have often exerted over education policy within countries that rely on overseas development finance. The Millennium Development Goals helped to provide further impetus here. However, the influence of aid agencies within the global South is declining, and there is little evidence to date that donors or international agencies have succeeded in promoting reforms targeted at improving the quality of education, despite efforts in this direction (Wales et al. 2016 ), including through the Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall, then, there have been some important studies of the politics of educational quality in developing countries, even if these are few in nature. Of these, the ones that most closely address our concern with the politics of promoting difficult reforms aimed at tackling the learning crisis have tended to emphasize the role of informal as well as formal institutional processes, ideas as well as incentives, and actors operating at multiple scales, from the global through to the local, and often in the form of coalitions. Given that none have presented a conceptual framework that can help capture these multiple factors, we try to address this failing in the next chapter, where we set out an approach that helped guide the studies reported on here and which we hope can be of some use in guiding further work in the field.

Conclusion: Understanding Education Quality Reform Demands a Political Approach

The global learning crisis manifests itself in low learning attainments in each of the six countries studied here. Their experiences are reflected across the struggles faced by low- and middle-income countries to grow their education systems in an increasingly competitive global economy dependent on skills. This book helps to make sense of the global learning crisis by exploring the proposition that politics matters, centrally, in explaining why some countries are doing better at raising the quality of education than others. But how might politics matter? Political analysis of education is limited, both empirically and theoretically, and both in developed and in developing countries. While there are good reasons to believe that the difference in the uptake of quality reforms and their implementation relates to differences of a political nature, there is little conceptual work with which to build a theoretical framework for analysing how that works, or evidence to test it. This book contributes both evidence of how politics influences reforms in developing countries, and to the construction of theory about how this comes about. It does this by setting out and testing hypotheses about how the political settlement and its relationship to the domain of education have shaped the uptake, success, or failure of recent efforts to bring about education quality reform.

Education quality reforms tend to be less politically tractable than programmes of expansion. The nature and distribution of power over the vital resource involved in education quality—teaching—are necessarily at the centre of this analysis. Quality reforms are difficult to design and difficult to deliver: less is known about ‘what works’ and achievement is hard to measure. Weak state capacity has not prevented children from attending school, but it is very likely to shape what happens once they get there. Yet strong state capacity in relation to education may not necessarily or only mean centralized power; effective education systems must be responsive and adaptive to local needs, granting enough autonomy for schools to be accountable to the local communities they seek to educate. The governance and institutional reforms needed to build effective schools are intensely political and involve struggles over power, whether in terms of the authority to define the content and direction of nation building, the power to deploy the vast national teaching force, or the resources to spend on school buildings and teachers’ pay.

The following chapters look at how politics is shaping the level of capacity and commitment of elites to improving the quality of public education and its governance in developing countries. These chapters explore variations in the extent to which countries have adopted and implemented reforms aimed at improving learning outcomes, and in how those reforms have played out in terms of improved learning. Next, Chapter 2 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the politics of education in developing countries within which such analysis can be conducted.

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http://un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/ (accessed 12 June 2017).

All figures here are from UNESCO’s 2015 Global Monitoring Report , which took stock of all progress towards the EFA goals over the period (UNESCO 2015 ).

We are grateful to Sophie King for producing an excellent annotated bibliography on the politics of education in developing countries, on which this section is based.

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The Bottom Line The Deterioration of K-12 Education in America

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent announcement for overhauling the K-12 education system in New York rightly recognizes the teacher shortage, which has become a crisis . But it does not change the underlying incentives for attracting talented people into teaching or retaining the teachers who do a good job educating their students.

From urban to suburban to rural, schools are desperate for personnel to staff classrooms. Classrooms are often forced to combine to ensure an adult is present to supervise students. And administrators are regularly substituting as teachers, lunchroom monitors, and cafeteria workers. These shortages wear existing school personnel out and reduce the student experience.

When the human supply runs too short, schools are canceling for multiple days or even weeks at a time, often with little notice — forcing a significant hardship on working parents and causing students to fall further behind in their learning. These teacher shortfalls are especially detrimental to the development of children in light of what they’ve already been experiencing since 2020 due to Covid responses.

The K-12 public education system started the 2021-2022 school year with one and half million fewer students than the previous year, and many more have withdrawn mid-year. Even with the resulting reduced demand for teachers, the supply has not kept pace. Data from Emsi Burning Glass, revealing that job postings for teachers have grown by 79 percent over the past year, illustrates the magnitude of the teacher shortage.

The challenges are not new. Rather, the past two years have accelerated what has long been a structural challenge within the K-12 education system for years — its inability to attract sufficient numbers of quality teachers.

Barriers to Entry

For starters, the current system holds teacher certification as a sacred cow and fails to recognize subject matter expertise gained through advanced degrees, professional experience, or a combination of the two. Instead, a teaching certificate from any of the hundreds of programs around the country serves as the gatekeeper. Little concern is given to the vastly differing quality or admissions requirements of the teacher preparation programs.

Nor is it considered that the instructors in the certification programs (typically university professors) are themselves often not certified.

Certification requirements stifle the supply of teachers by raising unnecessary barriers to entry and unnecessarily hinder the geographical movement of teachers. Since certifications vary state-to-state, many teachers feel constrained to stay put, even if they could find a better opportunity or quality of life in another state. Researchers have found that voluntary certification would provide at least as many benefits without the costs.

While  Governor Hochul’s announcement recognizes the long wait times in the certification process and endeavors to address it by hiring additional staff to facilitate teacher certification, the problem is that the entire certification process is broken. What we need is not more staff, but a different process for attracting, vetting, and retaining talent.

Rewarding Incumbents, Not Performers

Unfortunately, both the recruiting and the retaining of excellent teachers are hindered by a system that rewards tenure instead of performance.

The longstanding recognition in labor economics is that the alternative to longevity pay — pay for performance — creates stronger performance incentives for current workers. It also attracts higher-caliber candidates because talented workers want a system that recognizes and rewards their performance. The result of performance pay is systematic improvements in teacher quality and productivity .

The recruiting and the retaining of excellent teachers are hindered by a system that rewards tenure instead of performance. Keri D. Ingraham & Christos A. Makridis

Simply raising salaries uniformly, as Governor Hochul has recommended, risks discouraging effort even more than it already is in the system. In fact, the main problem in U.S. teacher pay is not low pay uniformly , but rather the lack of customization and failure to link pay with performance. A further issue is the nine-month work year . Though it may be attractive for some (e.g., working moms with younger children), it shortchanges those desiring compensation for a twelve-month professional employment career.

Bureaucracy, Bureaucracy, Bureaucracy

Another major problem negatively impacting the teacher workforce is the system’s overbearing bureaucracy, which dampens creativity and innovation, and snuffs out creative problem-solving. All too often, the hands of teachers (and administrators) are tied by endless top-down, one-size-fits-all policies and procedures, preventing them from providing personalized learning plans for each individual student. Governor Hochul’s recommendation to bring additional billions into the education system sounds good in theory, but does little to create incentives for performance. Customization is increasingly needed, especially given the varying learning styles of children and the necessity to prepare students for the increasingly complex workforce.

Teachers’ unions add to the bloated bureaucracy. Despite the extreme measures of teachers’ unions to promote employee working conditions and compensation, research reveals that right-to-work laws positively affect workers, including their well-being.

Job performance and job satisfaction are often higher among non-unionized teachers, such as those working in charter and private schools. For example, data consistently confirms that charter school and private school students outperform traditional public school students. With the teacher the number one factor beyond parents influencing student learning, the powerful impact of the human capital in the classroom is revealed. And these charter and private school teachers willingly work for less pay with a mere fraction of the benefits traditional public school teachers receive, signaling strong job satisfaction.

Needed Structural Changes

Continuing down the current path, which is failing our students and shuttering our schools, is unacceptable. We need to stop throwing good money after bad and rethink K-12 education from a systems perspective. Of fundamental importance is getting incentives right. With the teacher shortage crisis at hand, there is a timely opportunity to adjust the system. We must attract the right teachers and reward them based on quality of work in order to deliver premium educational services to students.

The best way to do that is by linking pay with performance. While critics of pay for performance often argue that it harms students, empirical analysis has provided enormous evidence to the contrary . Even though performance pay has not been implemented on a large scale (primarily due to teachers’ unions’ politicization of the issue), there are examples of positive results. One example is the Dallas Independent School District , where the approach has led to substantial student learning gains.

And no longer can we limit the educator pipeline to only graduates of education schools. The pool of teacher candidates has dwindled, and schools are forced to hire less proficient teachers (or sometimes the only applicant for a teaching vacancy), which ultimately hurts the student.

Finally, we need to muster the political courage to challenge the unbridled power of the teachers’ unions. Their resistance to performance-based pay for teachers and the preventing even the lowest-performing teachers from getting fired keeps the U.S. K-12 education system in a state of mediocrity.

The system must be redesigned to address these flawed approaches and practices related to the acquisition and compensation of educators. That means ending the teacher shortage and creating a system that allows and incentivizes our top subject matter experts and those with the ability to demonstrate remarkable teaching skills the opportunity to not only enter but have the necessary flexibility to transform our K-12 classrooms.

• canceled school
• Dallas Independent School District
• education bureaucracy
• educational bureaucracy
• educator pipeline
• Governor Kathy Hochul
• human capital
• K-12 education
• non-unionized teachers
• performance based pay
• public schools
• recruiting teachers
• retaining teachers
• rethink K-12 education
• teacher certification
• teacher pay
• teacher shortage
• teacher unions
• teachers' unions
• vetting teachers

The declining productivity of education

Subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, jonathan rothwell jonathan rothwell nonresident senior fellow - brookings metro @jtrothwell.

December 23, 2016

US economic development has stalled. We’ve recently learned that only about half of people born around 1980 earn more today than their parents did at a similar age. The nation’s deteriorating education sector is one important factor, culpable for both weak economic growth and rising income inequality. Intergenerational gains in learning have slowed, alongside gains in income, as I’ve argued in a recent report for Gallup and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness.

Like any other sphere of economic activity, the productivity of the education sector depends on the relationship between how much it generates in value—learning, in this case—relative to its costs. Unfortunately, productivity is way down.

Education costs have soared…

College tuition, net of subsidies, is 11.1 times higher in 2015 than in 1980, dramatically higher than the 2.5 increase in overall personal consumption over the period.  For private education, from pre-K through secondary, prices are 8.5 times higher now than in 1980. For public schools, the rise is lower—4.7 from 1980 to 2013 —but still far above general inflation.

…but learning has stagnated

For the nation’s 17-year-olds, there have been no gains in literacy since the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in 1971. Performance is somewhat better on math, but there has still been no progress since 1990. The long-term stagnation cannot be attributed to racial or ethnic differences in the U.S. population. Literacy scores for white students peaked in 1975; in math, scores peaked in the early 1990s.

Education productivity growth for U.S. education has been particularly weak

International literacy and numeracy data from the OECD’s assessment of adult skills confirms this troubling picture. The numeracy and literacy skills of those born since 1980 are no more developed than for those born between 1968 and 1977. For the average OECD country, by contrast, people born between 1978 and 1987 score significantly better than all previous generations.

Comparing the oldest—those born from 1947 to 1957—to youngest cohorts—those born from 1988 to 1996, the U.S. gains are especially weak. The United States ranks dead last among 26 countries tested on math gains, and second to last on literacy gains across these generations. The countries which have made the largest math gains include South Korea, Slovenia, France, Poland, Finland, and the Netherlands.

This weak performance is even more disturbing given that the U.S. spends more on education, on a per student basis, than almost any other country. So what’s going wrong?

The sources of educational failure

For higher education, a major factor driving up costs has been a growth in the number of highly-paid non-teaching professionals. In 1988, for every 100 full-time equivalent students, there were on average 23 college employees. By 2012, that number had increased to 31 employees, with a shift toward the highest paying non-teaching occupations. Managers and professionals now outnumber faculty, who comprise just a third of the higher education workforce.

To a large extent, rising costs have been absorbed by increased student borrowing, subsidized by the federal government, and supplemented through grant aid. Unfortunately, as my report shows, federal loans have increasingly gone to the worst-performing colleges, from the perspective of default rates, which is consistent with Brookings research showing the rising prevalence of for-profit colleges as aid recipients.

In primary and secondary public education, where price increases have been less dramatic, there has been a decline in bureaucratic efficiency. The number of students for every district-level administrator fell from 519 in 1980 to 365 in 2012. Principals and assistant principals managed 382 students in 1980 but only 294 in 2012.

An even bigger problem perhaps is that teaching itself has become increasingly unattractive. Salaries for teachers start low, relative to the education they require, and never get particularly competitive. School systems also impose frustrating daily constraints upon teachers, often in the form of mandatory administrative exams, required by school districts, states, and federal bureaucracies. This burden , combined with weak pay, has deterred many top students from entering teaching, and driven many others out.

The high price of inefficient education

Declining education productivity disproportionately harms the poor. The rising costs of education cannot be fully offset by redistributive mechanisms. And unlike their affluent peers, low-income parents lack the resources to overcome weak quality by home-schooling their children or hiring private tutors.

Over the last 30 to 40 years, the United States has invested heavily in education, with little to show for it. The result is a society with more inequality and less economic growth; a high price.

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The Education Crisis: Being in School Is Not the Same as Learning

First grade students in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province are learning the alphabet through child-friendly flash cards. Their learning materials help educators teach through interactive and engaging activities and are provided free of charge through a student’s first learning backpack. © World Bank 

THE NAME OF THE DOG IS PUPPY. This seems like a simple sentence. But did you know that in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, three out of four third grade students do not understand it? The world is facing a learning crisis . Worldwide, hundreds of millions of children reach young adulthood without even the most basic skills like calculating the correct change from a transaction, reading a doctor’s instructions, or understanding a bus schedule—let alone building a fulfilling career or educating their children. Education is at the center of building human capital. The latest World Bank research shows that the productivity of 56 percent of the world’s children will be less than half of what it could be if they enjoyed complete education and full health. For individuals, education raises self-esteem and furthers opportunities for employment and earnings. And for a country, it helps strengthen institutions within societies, drives long-term economic growth, reduces poverty, and spurs innovation.

One of the most interesting, large scale educational technology efforts is being led by EkStep , a philanthropic effort in India. EkStep created an open digital infrastructure which provides access to learning opportunities for 200 million children, as well as professional development opportunities for 12 million teachers and 4.5 million school leaders. Both teachers and children are accessing content which ranges from teaching materials, explanatory videos, interactive content, stories, practice worksheets, and formative assessments. By monitoring which content is used most frequently—and most beneficially—informed decisions can be made around future content.

In the Dominican Republic, a World Bank supported pilot study shows how adaptive technologies can generate great interest among 21st century students and present a path to supporting the learning and teaching of future generations. Yudeisy, a sixth grader participating in the study, says that what she likes doing the most during the day is watching videos and tutorials on her computer and cell phone. Taking childhood curiosity as a starting point, the study aimed to channel it towards math learning in a way that interests Yudeisy and her classmates.

Yudeisy, along with her classmates in a public elementary school in Santo Domingo, is part of a four-month pilot to reinforce mathematics using software that adapts to the math level of each student. © World Bank

Adaptive technology was used to evaluate students’ initial learning level to then walk them through math exercises in a dynamic, personalized way, based on artificial intelligence and what the student is ready to learn. After three months, students with the lowest initial performance achieved substantial improvements. This shows the potential of technology to increase learning outcomes, especially among students lagging behind their peers. In a field that is developing at dizzying speeds, innovative solutions to educational challenges are springing up everywhere. Our challenge is to make technology a driver of equity and inclusion and not a source of greater inequality of opportunity. We are working with partners worldwide to support the effective and appropriate use of educational technologies to strengthen learning.

When schools and educations systems are managed well, learning happens

Successful education reforms require good policy design, strong political commitment, and effective implementation capacity . Of course, this is extremely challenging. Many countries struggle to make efficient use of resources and very often increased education spending does not translate into more learning and improved human capital. Overcoming such challenges involves working at all levels of the system.

At the central level, ministries of education need to attract the best experts to design and implement evidence-based and country-specific programs. District or regional offices need the capacity and the tools to monitor learning and support schools. At the school level, principals need to be trained and prepared to manage and lead schools, from planning the use of resources to supervising and nurturing their teachers. However difficult, change is possible. Supported by the World Bank, public schools across Punjab in Pakistan have been part of major reforms over the past few years to address these challenges. Through improved school-level accountability by monitoring and limiting teacher and student absenteeism, and the introduction of a merit-based teacher recruitment system, where only the most talented and motivated teachers were selected, they were able to increase enrollment and retention of students and significantly improve the quality of education. "The government schools have become very good now, even better than private ones," said Mr. Ahmed, a local villager.

The World Bank, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK’s Department for International Development, is developing the Global Education Policy Dashboard . This new initiative will provide governments with a system for monitoring how their education systems are functioning, from learning data to policy plans, so they are better able to make timely and evidence-based decisions.

Education reform: The long game is worth it

In fact, it will take a generation to realize the full benefits of high-quality teachers, the effective use of technology, improved management of education systems, and engaged and prepared learners. However, global experience shows us that countries that have rapidly accelerated development and prosperity all share the common characteristic of taking education seriously and investing appropriately. As we mark the first-ever International Day of Education on January 24, we must do all we can to equip our youth with the skills to keep learning, adapt to changing realities, and thrive in an increasingly competitive global economy and a rapidly changing world of work.

The schools of the future are being built today. These are schools where all teachers have the right competencies and motivation, where technology empowers them to deliver quality learning, and where all students learn fundamental skills, including socio-emotional, and digital skills. These schools are safe and affordable to everyone and are places where children and young people learn with joy, rigor, and purpose. Governments, teachers, parents, and the international community must do their homework to realize the promise of education for all students, in every village, in every city, and in every country. 

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Quality in Education—Concept, Origin, and Approaches

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Being instrumental in bringing about the economic development of a country, education and is one of the basic services offered by government and stakeholders to society. However, as mere quantitative expansion would not generate the desired results unless a particular standard of quality is maintained, it is essential that policies shift their focus from increasing enrolments to quality improvement in all spheres—beginning from making school facilities available to students, developing their learning skills which is not just limited to curriculum knowledge, and initiating efficient teaching practices. The concept of quality in the field of education is not new; therefore, it is even important to understand how the quality debate has evolved over the years and how it has come to be linked with the provision of education. This chapter describes the theoretical aspect of quality concept, its historical origin in the field of education, various related models and approaches. It is being argued that the concept of quality in education is multifaceted; it does not possess any specific definition; different scholars have interpreted the concept differently. The differences lie not only in the way this concept is defined, but is also reflected in the manner in which quality is measured. Although, worldwide, research initiatives has been undertaken to identify the quality indicators, measuring the educational outcomes, in the Indian context, little evidence is available, particularly in case of secondary education.

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Jain, C., Prasad, N. (2018). Quality in Education—Concept, Origin, and Approaches. In: Quality of Secondary Education in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4929-3_2

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Deteriorating Quality of Education in Schools Are Teachers Responsible?

The role of government school teachers in India is being questioned because of the deteriorating learning levels of children. There is constant criticism of teachers’ performance on the grounds that despite paying high salaries to teachers, children are not performing well in examinations because the majority of teachers are not competent enough. An analysis of six Indian states offers the opportunity to address this debate from the lens of public provisioning for teachers in the school education system. The performance of teachers needs to be judged on the basis of factors like their training, working conditions, and, above all, resource allocation by the government.

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Quality and excellence in teacher education is one of the major initiatives of the government of India. To achieve the better outcomes at all levels of education, government of India has been focusing on quality and excellence in teacher education. Because the quality of the outcomes of education is depends upon the quality of its teachers. Different studies are conducted in this perspectives and most of the studies reveled that there is a positive correlation exist between the quality of the outcomes of education and quality of its teachers. But now a day in India the quality of teacher education was decreased day by day due to some problems. If these problems are resolved in the field of teacher education, then maybe we can reach our determined goal. Through this research, the researchers trying to discuss the problems of teacher education and discuss its possible solution.

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The socio economic landscape of the country is rapidly changing. The Ministry of Human Resource Development is conscious about changing scenario and has been taking the steps to mitigate the adverse impact of growing 'exclusive-ism ' within the society, which would not be in the best interest of the future generation. This study has explored government financing of education in India and across the states of the country. Economic reform has certainly affected public expenditure on social sector in general and that on education sector in particular. The study concluded that state real per capita income, is found to significantly enhance educational expenditure at the aggregate level. Moreover, contrary to general perceptions, education expenditure at all levels has been significantly lower after liberalization in comparison with the pre-economic reform era. The paper examines the level, trends, growth and intra-sectoral allocation of Public expenditure on education. Finding indicates that quantum of expenditure on education has increased significantly since 2001, But still the actual amount of money spend on education sector is less than the required amount. The paper explores the trends of public expenditure on primary, secondary, higher education and technical education. Analysis shows that percentage share of State government has decline and the share of central government has increased.

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Teacher education is a continuous process and its pre-service and in-service components are complimentary to each other. Education is instrumental in the preparation of teachers who can in their practice ensure transformative learning, where teacher and learner, learner and learner are co-constructors of knowledge. The aim of the present paper is to improve the teacher education quality in India by focusing on the problems & related concerns. The present structure of teacher education is supported by a network of national, provincial and district level resource institutions working together to enhance the quality and effectiveness of teacher preparation programs at the pre-service level and also through in-service programs for serving teachers throughout the country. Importantly, the teacher education and training institutions must take up the charge of educating policy makers and the general public about what it actually takes to teach effectively both in terms of knowledge and skills that are needed and in terms of the school contexts that must be created to allow teachers to develop and use what they know on behalf of their students. Now teacher has to perform various roles like encouraging, supporting and facilitating in teaching-learning situations which enables learners to discover their talents, to realize their physical and intellectual potentialities to the fullest, to develop character and desirable social and human values to function as responsible citizens. Teacher and his education are very significant aspects of any nation. The education gives a new shape to the individual and the nation as well. It is a well known saying that teacher is the nation builder. The quality of teacher education programme needs to be up graded. Teacher education has not come up to the requisite standards. Teachers are not able to think critically and solve the issue related to teaching methods, content, organisation etc. teacher education programme needs a comprehensive reform and restructuring curriculum of teacher-education programme needs to be revised according to changing needs of society. In the research paper I will discuses the problems of teacher education and provide the some Suggestions of teacher education.

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In the present world teachers are not only the agents of cultural transformation or managers of discipline and order but also the source of information, searcher of new areas and explorer of the unknown world. A country will not be able to survive in the competitive world, if its education system is not capable of contributing for its development. Indian education system is widely criticized in multi-dimensions for its failure to create required employability in its students according to the industry requirements and its inability to contribute to inclusive growth in the nation as a whole. This paper attempts to highlight the issues and provide some solutions to resolve them. The study uses secondary data from various available sources. The researcher presumes that the issues in the present education system that are daunting the growth of this country can be tackled effectively if constructive and committed actions are taken by the Government to resolve them.

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The relationship between education and health: reducing disparities through a contextual approach

Anna zajacova.

Western University

Elizabeth M. Lawrence

University of North Carolina

Adults with higher educational attainment live healthier and longer lives compared to their less educated peers. The disparities are large and widening. We posit that understanding the educational and macro-level contexts in which this association occurs is key to reducing health disparities and improving population health. In this paper, we briefly review and critically assess the current state of research on the relationship between education and health in the United States. We then outline three directions for further research: We extend the conceptualization of education beyond attainment and demonstrate the centrality of the schooling process to health; We highlight the dual role of education a driver of opportunity but also a reproducer of inequality; We explain the central role of specific historical socio-political contexts in which the education-health association is embedded. This research agenda can inform policies and effective interventions to reduce health disparities and improve health of all Americans.

URGENT NEED FOR NEW DIRECTIONS IN EDUCATION-HEALTH RESEARCH

Americans have worse health than people in other high-income countries, and have been falling further behind in recent decades ( 137 ). This is partially due to the large health inequalities and poor health of adults with low education ( 84 ). Understanding the health benefits of education is thus integral to reducing health disparities and improving the well-being of 21 st century populations. Despite tremendous prior research, critical questions about the education-health relationship remain unanswered, in part because education and health are intertwined over the lifespans within and across generations and are inextricably embedded in the broader social context.

We posit that to effectively inform future educational and heath policy, we need to capture education ‘in action’ as it generates and constrains opportunity during the early lifespans of today’s cohorts. First, we need to expand our operationalization of education beyond attainment to consider the long-term educational process that precedes the attainment and its effect on health. Second, we need to re-conceptualize education as not only a vehicle for social success, valuable resources, and good health, but also as an institution that reproduces inequality across generations. And third, we argue that investigators need to bring historical, social and policy contexts into the heart of analyses: how does the education-health association vary across place and time, and how do political forces influence that variation?

During the past several generations, education has become the principal pathway to financial security, stable employment, and social success ( 8 ). At the same time, American youth have experienced increasingly unequal educational opportunities that depend on the schools they attend, the neighborhoods they live in, the color of their skin, and the financial resources of their family. The decline in manufacturing and rise of globalization have eroded the middle class, while the increasing returns to higher education magnified the economic gaps among working adults and families ( 107 ). In addition to these dramatic structural changes, policies that protected the welfare of vulnerable groups have been gradually eroded or dismantled ( 129 ). Together, these changes triggered a precipitous growth of economic and social inequalities in the American society ( 17 ; 106 ).

Unsurprisingly, health disparities grew hand in hand with the socio-economic inequalities. Although the average health of the US population improved over the past decades ( 67 ; 85 ), the gains largely went to the most educated groups. Inequalities in health ( 53 ; 77 ; 99 ) and mortality ( 86 ; 115 ) increased steadily, to a point where we now see an unprecedented pattern: health and longevity are deteriorating among those with less education ( 92 ; 99 ; 121 ; 143 ). With the current focus of the media, policymakers, and the public on the worrisome health patterns among less-educated Americans ( 28 ; 29 ), as well as the growing recognition of the importance of education for health ( 84 ), research on the health returns to education is at a critical juncture. A comprehensive research program is needed to understand how education and health are related, in order to identify effective points of intervention to improve population health and reduce disparities.

The article is organized in two parts. First, we review the current state of research on the relationship between education and health. In broad strokes, we summarize the theoretical and empirical foundations of the education-health relationship and critically assess the literature on the mechanisms and causal influence of education on health. In the second part, we highlight gaps in extant research and propose new directions for innovative research that will fill these gaps. The enormous breadth of the literature on education and health necessarily limits the scope of the review in terms of place and time; we focus on the United States and on findings generated during the rapid expansion of the education-health research in the past 10–15 years. The terms “education” and “schooling” are used interchangeably. Unless we state otherwise, both refer to attained education, whether measured in completed years or credentials. For references, we include prior review articles where available, seminal papers, and recent studies as the best starting points for further reading.

THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN EDUCATION AND HEALTH

Conceptual toolbox for examining the association.

Researchers have generally drawn from three broad theoretical perspectives to hypothesize the relationship between education and health. Much of the education-health research over the past two decades has been grounded in the Fundamental Cause Theory ( 75 ). The FCT posits that social factors such as education are ‘fundamental’ causes of health and disease because they determine access to a multitude of material and non-material resources such as income, safe neighborhoods, or healthier lifestyles, all of which protect or enhance health. The multiplicity of pathways means that even as some mechanisms change or become less important, other mechanisms will continue to channel the fundamental dis/advantages into differential health ( 48 ). The Human Capital Theory (HCT), borrowed from econometrics, conceptualizes education as an investment that yields returns via increased productivity ( 12 ). Education improves individuals’ knowledge, skills, reasoning, effectiveness, and a broad range of other abilities, which can be utilized to produce health ( 93 ). The third approach, the Signaling or Credentialing perspective ( 34 ; 125 ) has been used to explain the observed large discontinuities in health at 12 or 16 years of schooling, typically associated with the receipt of a high school and college degrees, respectively. This perspective views earned credentials as a potent signal about one’s skills and abilities, and emphasizes the economic and social returns to such signals. Thus all three perspectives postulate a causal relationship between education and health and identify numerous mechanisms through which education influences health. The HCT specifies the mechanisms as embodied skills and abilities, FCT emphasizes the dynamism and flexibility of mechanisms, and credentialism identifies social responses to educational attainment. All three theoretical approaches, however, operationalize the complex process of schooling solely in terms of attainment and thus do not focus on differences in educational quality, type, or other institutional factors that might independently influence health. They also focus on individual-level factors: individual attainment, attainment effects, and mechanisms, and leave out the social context in which the education and health processes are embedded.

Observed associations between education and health

Empirically, hundreds of studies have documented “the gradient” whereby more schooling is linked with better health and longer life. A seminal 1973 book by Kitagawa and Hauser powerfully described large differences in mortality by education in the United States ( 71 ), a finding that has since been corroborated in numerous studies ( 31 ; 42 ; 46 ; 109 ; 124 ). In the following decades, nearly all health outcomes were also found strongly patterned by education. Less educated adults report worse general health ( 94 ; 141 ), more chronic conditions ( 68 ; 108 ), and more functional limitations and disability ( 118 ; 119 ; 130 ; 143 ). Objective measures of health, such as biological risk levels, are similarly correlated with educational attainment ( 35 ; 90 ; 140 ), showing that the gradient is not a function of differential reporting or knowledge.

The gradient is evident in men and women ( 139 ) and among all race/ethnic groups ( 36 ). However, meaningful group differences exist ( 60 ; 62 ; 91 ). In particular, education appears to have stronger health effects for women than men ( 111 ) and stronger effects for non-Hispanic whites than minority adults ( 134 ; 135 ) even if the differences are modest for some health outcomes ( 36 ). The observed variations may reflect systematic social differences in the educational process such as quality of schooling, content, or institutional type, as well as different returns to educational attainment in the labor market across population groups ( 26 ). At the same time, the groups share a common macro-level social context, which may underlie the gradient observed for all.

To illustrate the gradient, we analyzed 2002–2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from adults aged 25–64. Figure 1 shows the levels of three health outcomes across educational attainment levels in six major demographic groups predicted at age 45. Three observations are noteworthy. First, the gradient is evident for all outcomes and in all race/ethnic/gender groups. Self-rated health exemplifies the staggering magnitude of the inequalities: White men and women without a high school diploma have about 57% chance of reporting fair or poor health, compared to just 9% for college graduates. Second, there are major group differences as well, both in the predicted levels of health problems, as well as in the education effects. The latter are not necessarily visible in the figures but the education effects are stronger for women and weaker for non-white adults as prior studies showed (table with regression model results underlying the prior statement is available from the authors). Third, an intriguing exception pertains to adults with “some college,” whose health is similar to high school graduates’ in health outcomes other than general health, despite their investment in and exposure to postsecondary education. We discuss this anomaly below.

Predicted Probability of Health Problems

Source: 2002–2016 NHIS Survey, Adults Age 25–64

Pathways through which education impacts health

What explains the improved health and longevity of more educated adults? The most prominent mediating mechanisms can be grouped into four categories: economic, health-behavioral, social-psychological, and access to health care. Education leads to better, more stable jobs that pay higher income and allow families to accumulate wealth that can be used to improve health ( 93 ). The economic factors are an important link between schooling and health, estimated to account for about 30% of the correlation ( 36 ). Health behaviors are undoubtedly an important proximal determinant of health but they only explain a part of the effect of schooling on health: adults with less education are more likely to smoke, have an unhealthy diet, and lack exercise ( 37 ; 73 ; 105 ; 117 ). Social-psychological pathways include successful long-term marriages and other sources of social support to help cope with stressors and daily hassles ( 128 ; 131 ). Interestingly, access to health care, while important to individual and population health overall, has a modest role in explaining health inequalities by education ( 61 ; 112 ; 133 ), highlighting the need to look upstream beyond the health care system toward social factors that underlie social disparities in health. Beyond these four groups of mechanisms that have received the most attention by investigators, many others have been examined, such as stress, cognitive and noncognitive skills, or environmental exposures ( 11 ; 43 ). Several excellent reviews further discuss mechanisms ( 2 ; 36 ; 66 ; 70 ; 93 ).

Causal interpretation of the education-health association

A burgeoning number of studies used innovative approaches such as natural experiments and twin design to test whether and how education causally affects health. These analyses are essential because recommendations for educational policies, programs, and interventions seeking to improve population health hinge on the causal impact of schooling on health outcomes. Overall, this literature shows that attainment, measured mostly in completed years of schooling, has a causal impact on health across numerous (though not all) contexts and outcomes.

Natural experiments take advantage of external changes that affect attainment but are unrelated to health, such as compulsory education reforms that raise the minimum years of schooling within a given population. A seminal 2005 study focused on increases in compulsory education between 1915 and 1939 across US states and found that a year of schooling reduced mortality by 3.6% ( 78 ). A re-analysis of the data indicated that taking into account state-level mortality trends rendered the mortality effects null but it also identified a significant and large causal effect on general health ( 88 ). A recent study of a large sample of older Americans reported a similar pattern: a substantial causal effect of education for self-rated health but not for mortality ( 47 ). School reform studies outside the US have reported compelling ( 122 ) or modest but significant ( 32 ) effects of schooling on health, although some studies have found nonsignificant ( 4 ), or even negative effects ( 7 ) for a range of health outcomes.

Twin design studies compare the health of twins with different levels of education. This design minimizes the influence of family resources and genetic differences in skills and health, especially for monozygotic twins, and thus serves to isolate the effect of schooling. In the US, studies using this design generated robust evidence of a causal effect of education on self-rated health ( 79 ), although some research has identified only modest ( 49 ) or not significant ( 3 ; 55 ) effects for other physical and mental health outcomes. Studies drawing on the large twin samples outside of the US have similarly found strong causal effects for mortality ( 80 ) and health ( 14 ; 16 ; 51 ) but again some analyses yielded no causal effects on health ( 13 ; 83 ) or health behaviors ( 14 ). Beyond our brief overview, readers may wish consult additional comprehensive reviews of the causal studies ( 40 ; 45 ; 89 ).

The causal studies add valuable evidence that educational attainment impacts adult health and mortality, even considering some limitations to their internal validity ( 15 ; 88 ). To improve population health and reduce health disparities, however, they should be viewed as a starting point to further research. First, the findings do not show how to improve the quality of schooling or its quantity for in the aggregate population, or how to overcome systematic intergenerational and social differences in educational opportunities. Second, their findings do take into account contexts and conditions in which educational attainment might be particularly important for health. In fact, the variability in the findings may be attributable to the stark differences in contexts across the studies, which include countries characterized by different political systems, different population groups, and birth cohorts ranging from the late 19 th to late 20 th centuries that were exposed to education at very different stages of the educational expansion process ( 9 ).

TOWARD A SOCIALLY-EMBEDDED UNDERSTANDING OF THE EDUCATION-HEALTH RELATIONSHIP

To date, the extensive research we briefly reviewed above has identified substantial health benefits of educational attainment in most contexts in today’s high-income countries. Still, many important questions remain unanswered. We outline three critical directions to gain a deeper understanding of the education-health relationship with particular relevance for policy development. All three directions shift the education-health paradigm to consider how education and health are embedded in life course and social contexts.

First, nearly universally, the education-health literature conceptualizes and operationalizes education in terms of attainment, as years of schooling or completed credentials. However, attainment is only the endpoint, although undoubtedly important, of an extended and extensive process of formal schooling, where institutional quality, type, content, peers, teachers, and many other individual, institutional, and interpersonal factors shape lifecourse trajectories of schooling and health. Understanding the role of the schooling process in health outcome is relevant for policy because it can show whether interventions should be aimed at increasing attainment, or whether it is more important to increase quality, change content, or otherwise improve the educational process at earlier stages for maximum health returns. Second, most studies have implicitly or explicitly treated educational attainment as an exogenous starting point, a driver of opportunities in adulthood. However, education also functions to reproduce inequality across generations. The explicit recognition of the dual function of education is critical to developing education policies that would avoid unintended consequence of increasing inequalities. And third, the review above indicates substantial variation in the education-health association across different historical and social contexts. Education and health are inextricably embedded in these contexts and analyses should therefore include them as fundamental influences on the education-health association. Research on contextual variation has the potential to identify contextual characteristics and even specific policies that exacerbate or reduce educational disparities in health.

We illustrate the key conceptual components of future research into the education-health relationship in Figure 2 . Important intergenerational and individual socio-demographic factors shape educational opportunities and educational trajectories, which are directly related to and captured in measures of educational attainment. This longitudinal and life course process culminates in educational disparities in adult health and mortality. Importantly, the macro-level context underlies every step of this process, shaping each of the concepts and their relationships.

Enriching the conceptualization of educational attainment

In most studies of the education-health associations, educational attainment is modeled using years of schooling, typically specified as a continuous covariate, effectively constraining each additional year to have the same impact. A growing body of research has substituted earned credentials for years. Few studies, however, have considered how the impact of additional schooling is likely to differ across the educational attainment spectrum. For example, one additional year of education compared to zero years may be life-changing by imparting basic literacy and numeracy skills. The completion of 14 rather than 13 years (without the completion of associated degree) could be associated with better health through the accumulation of additional knowledge and skills as well, or perhaps could be without health returns, if it is associated with poor grades, stigma linked to dropping out of college, or accumulated debt ( 63 ; 76 ). Examining the functional form of the education-health association can shed light on how and why education is beneficial for health ( 70 ). For instance, studies found that mortality gradually declines with years of schooling at low levels of educational attainment, with large discontinuities at high school and college degree attainment ( 56 ; 98 ). Such findings can point to the importance of completing a degree, not just increasing the quantity (years) of education. Examining mortality, however, implicitly focused on cohorts who went to school 50–60 years ago, within very different educational and social contexts. For findings relevant to current education policies, we need to focus on examining more recent birth cohorts.

A particularly provocative and noteworthy aspect of the functional form is the attainment group often identified as “some college:” adults who attended college but did not graduate with a four-year degree. Postsecondary educational experiences are increasingly central to the lives of American adults ( 27 ) and college completion has become the minimum requirement for entry into middle class ( 65 ; 87 ). Among high school graduates, over 70% enroll in college ( 22 ) but the majority never earn a four-year degree ( 113 ). In fact,, the largest education-attainment group among non-elderly US adults comprises the 54 million adults (29% of total) with some college or associate’s degree ( 113 ). However, as in Figure 1 , this group often defies the standard gradient in health. Several recent studies have found that the health returns to their postsecondary investments are marginal at best ( 110 ; 123 ; 142 ; 144 ). This finding should spur new research to understand the outcomes of this large population group, and to glean insights into the health returns to the postsecondary schooling process. For instance, in the absence of earning a degree, is greater exposure to college education in terms of semesters or earned credits associated with better health or not? How do the returns to postsecondary schooling differ across the heterogeneous institutions ranging from selective 4-year to for-profit community colleges? How does accumulated college debt influence both dropout and later health? Can we identify circumstances under which some college education is beneficial for health? Understanding the health outcomes for this attainment group can shed light on the aspects of education that are most important for improving health.

A related point pertains to the reliability and validity of self-reported educational attainment. If a respondent reports 16 completed years of education, for example, are they carefully counting the number of years of enrollment, or is 16 shorthand for “completed college”? And, is 16 years the best indicator of college completion in the current context when the median time to earn a four-year degree exceeds 5 years ( 30 )? And, is longer time in college given a degree beneficial for health or does it signify delayed or disrupted educational pathways linked to weaker health benefits ( 132 )? How should we measure part-time enrollment? As studies begin to adjudicate between the health effects of years versus credentials ( 74 ) in the changing landscape of increasingly ‘nontraditional’ pathways through college ( 132 ), this measurement work will be necessary for unbiased and meaningful analyses. An in-depth understanding may necessitate primary data collection and qualitative studies. A feasible direction available with existing data such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) is to assess earned college credits and grades rather than years of education beyond high school.

As indicated in Figure 2 , beyond a more in-depth usage of the attainment information, we argue that more effective conceptualization of the education-health relationship as a developmental life course process will lead to important findings. For instance, two studies published in 2016 used the NLSY97 data to model how gradual increases in education predict within-individual changes in health ( 39 ; 81 ). Both research teams found that gradual accumulation of schooling quantity over time was not associated with gradual improvements in health. The investigators interpreted the null findings as an absence of causal effects of education on health, especially once they included important confounders (defined as cognitive and noncognitive skills and social background). Alternatively, perhaps the within-individual models did not register health because education is a long-term, developing trajectory that cannot be reduced to point-in-time changes in exposure. Criticisms about the technical aspects of theses studies notwithstanding ( 59 ), we believe that these studies and others like them, which wrestle with the question of how to capture education as a long-term process grounded in the broader social context, and how this process is linked to adult health, are desirable and necessary.

Education as (re)producer of inequality

The predominant theoretical framework for studying education and health focuses on how education increases skills, improves problem-solving, enhances employment prospects, and thus opens access to other resources. In sociology, however, education is viewed not (only) as increasing human capital but as a “sieve more than a ladder” ( 126 ), an institution that reproduces inequality across generations ( 54 ; 65 ; 103 ; 114 ). The mechanisms of the reproduction of inequality are multifarious, encompassing systematic differences in school resources, quality of instruction, academic opportunities, peer influences, or teacher expectations ( 54 ; 114 ; 132 ). The dual role of education, both engendering and constraining social opportunities, has been recognized from the discipline’s inception ( 52 ) and has remained the dominant perspective in sociology of education ( 18 ; 126 ). Health disparities research, which has largely dismissed the this perspective as “specious” ( 93 ), could benefit from pivoting toward this complex sociological paradigm.

As demonstrated in Figure 2 , parental SES and other background characteristics are key social determinants that set the stage for one’s educational experiences ( 20 ; 120 ). These characteristics, however, shape not just attainment, but the entire educational and social trajectories that drive and result in particular attainment ( 21 ; 69 ). Their effects range from the differential quality and experiences in daycare or preschool settings ( 6 ), K-12 education ( 24 ; 136 ), as well as postsecondary schooling ( 5 ; 127 ). As a result of systematically different experiences of schooling over the early life course stratified by parental SES, children of low educated parents are unlikely to complete higher education: over half of individuals with college degrees by age 24 came from families in the top quartile of family income compared to just 10% in the bottom quartile ( 23 ).

Unfortunately, prior research has generally operationalized the differences in educational opportunities as confounders of the education-health association or as “selection bias” to be statistically controlled, or best as a moderating influence ( 10 ; 19 ). Rather than remove the important life course effects from the equation, studies that seek to understand how educational and health differences unfold over the life course, and even across generations could yield greater insight ( 50 ; 70 ). A life course, multigenerational approach can provide important recommendations for interventions seeking to avoid the unintended consequence of increasing disparities. Insofar as socially advantaged individuals are generally better positioned to take advantage of interventions, research findings can be used to ensure that policies and programs result in decreasing, rather than unintentionally widening, educational and health disparities.

Education and health in social context

Finally, perhaps the most important and policy-relevant emerging direction to improving our understanding of the education-health relationship is to view both as inextricably embedded within the broad social context. As we highlight in Figure 2 , this context underlies every feature of the development of educational disparities in health. In contrast to the voluminous literature focusing on individual-level schooling and health, there has been a “startling lack of attention to the social/political/economic context” in which the relationships are grounded ( 33 ). By context, we mean the structure of a society that varies across time and place, encompassing all major institutions, policy environments, as well as gender, race/ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic stratification. Under what circumstances, conditions, and policies are the associations between education and health stronger or weaker?

Within the United States, the most relevant units of geo-political boundaries generating distinct policy contexts are states, although smaller geographic units are also pertinent ( 44 ; 100 ). Since the 1980s, the federal government has devolved an increasing range of key socioeconomic, political, and health-care decisions to states. This decentralization has resulted in increasing diversity across states in conditions for a healthy life ( 96 ; 101 ). A recent study demonstrates how different environments across US states yield vastly different health returns to education ( 100 ). State-level characteristics had little impact on adults with high education, whose disability levels were similarly low regardless of their state of residence. In contrast, disability levels of low-educated adults were not only high but also varied substantially across states: disability was particularly high in states that have invested less in the social welfare of its residents, such as Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Highly-educated adults, particularly white adults and men who can convert education into other resources most readily, use personal resources to protect their health like a ‘personal firewall’ ( 97 ). Their less-educated peers, meanwhile, are vulnerable without social safety nets. Demonstrating the potential for informing policy in this area, the findings directly identify state policies that influence the extent to which educational attainment matters for health and longevity. These include economic policies including state income tax structures and education expenditures per capita, as well as policies influencing social cohesion in a state, such as income inequality and unemployment rates. Beyond the US, investigators can leverage differences in political systems across countries to assess the impact of different welfare regimes on the education-health associations, as some European researchers began generating ( 41 ; 82 ).

Similar to variation across geo-political boundaries, research on variation across time can highlight policies and conditions that mitigate or inflate health disparities. How has the education-health association changed over time? In recent decades, the association has become increasingly strong, with widening disparities in health outcomes across education ( 53 ; 77 ; 86 ; 116 ; 143 ). These increases started in the 1980s ( 17 ) at the same time that social inequality began rising with the political embrace of pro-market neoliberal policies ( 33 ). Since then, the United States has been increasingly marked by plummeting economic wellbeing (except for the wealthiest Americans), growing economic segregation, emerging mass incarceration, downward social mobility, and despair in many working-class communities ( 17 ; 95 ; 129 ). Conversely, in the two decades prior (1960s and 70s), social disparities in health were decreasing ( 1 ; 72 ). During those decades, many pro-social policies such as Civil rights legislation, War on Poverty programs, and racial desegregation were improving social inequalities. Macro-level political forces, clearly, can influence not only social but also health inequalities ( 104 ). Two facts follow: growing disparities are not inevitable and changes in the education-health relationship may be strongly linked to social policies. While some of the growth in educational inequalities may be attributable to changes in educational composition of the population with increasingly negatively select groups of adults at the lowest levels of schooling, these compositional changes likely play only a minor role in the overall trends ( 38 ; 58 ). Linking education and health to the broader social context brings to the forefront the ways in which we, as individuals and a collective society, produce and maintain health disparities.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Reducing macro-level inequalities in health will require macro-level interventions. Technological progress and educational expansion over the past several decades have not decreased disparities; on the contrary, educational disparities in health and mortality have grown in the US. Moreover, the consistent, durable relationship between education and health and the multitude of mechanisms linking them suggests that programs targeting individual behaviors will have limited impact to counteract disparities. Thus, we argue that future findings from the new research directions proposed here can be used to intervene at the level of social contexts to alter educational trajectories from an early age, with the ultimate goal of reducing health disparities. We note two promising avenues for policy development.

One potential solution may focus on universal federal and state-level investment in the education and well-being of children early in the life course to disrupt the reproduction of social inequalities and change subsequent educational trajectories. Several experimental early-education programs such as the Perry Preschool Project and Carolina Abecedarian Project have demonstrated substantial, lasting, and wide-ranging benefits, including improved adult health ( 25 ; 57 ; 102 ). These programs provided intensive, exceptionally high-quality, and diverse services to children, and it is these characteristics that appear central to their success ( 138 ). Further research on the qualitative and social dimensions of education and their effects on health can inform future model educational programs and interventions across all ages.

Another important issue for both researchers and policymakers pertains to postsecondary enrollment and attrition, and their effects on health. Educational expansion in the college-for-all era has yielded high post-secondary enrollment, but also unacceptable dropout rates with multiple detrimental consequences, including high rates of student debt ( 64 ) and stigma ( 76 ), which may negatively affect health. Emerging studies found that college dropouts fail to benefit from their postsecondary investments. Next we need to understand under what circumstances college goers do reap health benefits, or how their postsecondary experience can be modified to improve their health.

For both of these avenues, effective implementation will need further research on the specific institutional characteristics and social contexts that shape the schooling effects. However, in designing interventions and policies, we need to be aware of the dual role of education as a drive and reproducer of inequality. Individuals from advantaged backgrounds may be better positioned to take advantage of new educational opportunities, and thus any interventions and programs need to ensure that marginalized populations have equal or greater access in order to avoid the unintended consequence of further intensifying disparities. Finally, researchers and policymakers should engage in a dialogue such that researchers effectively communicate their insights and recommendations to policymakers, and policymakers convey the needs and challenges of their practices to researchers.

Education and health are central to individual and population well-being. They are also inextricably embedded in the social context and structure. Future research needs to expand beyond the individual-focused analyses and hypothesize upstream ( 96 ), taking a contextual approach to understanding education and health. Such an approach will require interdisciplinary collaborations, innovations in conceptual models, and rich data sources. The three directions for further research on health returns to education we outlined above can help generate findings that will inform effective educational and health policies and interventions to reduce disparities. During this critical time when health differences are widening and less educated Americans are experiencing social and health declines, research and policy has the opportunity to make a difference and improve the health and well-being of our population.

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Anna Zajacova, Western University.

Elizabeth M. Lawrence, University of North Carolina.

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• Quality of education

Every child has the fundamental right to quality education – one that helps them acquire basic literacy and numeracy, enjoy learning without fear, and feel valued and included, irrespective of where they come from.

Access to education of poor quality is tantamount to no education at all. There is little point in providing the opportunity for a child to enrol in school if the quality of the education is so poor that the child will not become literate or numerate, or will fail to acquire critical life skills. Currently in South Asia, one in three children who reach Grade 4 are able to read basic texts. Millions of children, who have completed primary education, have not mastered the foundational skills of basic numeracy and literacy.

Quality education, which is essential to real learning and human development, is influenced by factors both inside and outside the classroom, from the availability of proper supplies to the nature of a child’s home environment. Improvements in the quality of teaching can reduce dropout rates and ensure better retention and transitions from early childhood learning into primary and secondary education.

South Asia faces significant challenges in providing quality education to all its children. It lacks adequate finances, qualified teachers, pedagogical knowledge, and opportunities for adolescent education and skill utilization. In many parts of the region, learning methods are largely teacher-centred and rote-based, and children are subjected to corporal punishment and discrimination. 

UNICEF works with governments in the region to develop national educational policies and standards based upon the principles of Child-Friendly Schools. We partner with governments for curricular development, teacher’s trainings and material support to improve the quality of learning in the region. We work to strengthen learning assessment systems to improve teaching and learning practices by identifying disparities in learning outcomes to target support where it is the most needed. 

In South Asia, UNICEF helps strengthen education systems by making more data available. We also support countries in using data to inform policies and more effectively put them into practice. We ensure improvements in the quality of education by collecting, analysing and disseminating information on what is working and what is not. We share good practices and lessons learnt on active learning pedagogy throughout the region. 

UNICEF works closely with governments and partners in the region to make schools accountable to ensure a quality education for all children. We encourage the continuous monitoring of learning outcomes at the national, sub-national and classroom level which can feed into teaching and learning practices. We help strengthen local planning and financial management and help develop school improvement plans. 

These resources represent just a small selection of materials produced by UNICEF and its partners in the region. The list is regularly updated to include the latest information.

• The Learning Generation Report: Investing in education for a changing world 
• 2015 India: Evaluation of Activity-Based Learning as a means of Child-Friendly Education
• 2015 Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka Child-Friendly Approach (CFA) Evaluatio

Last update: March 2018

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Addressing the Philippine education crisis

Human Side Of Economics

By Bernardo M. Villegas

It is obvious that the Philippine Government is struggling to comply with the constitutional mandate that the State is obliged to provide free quality education at the basic education level for all Filipino children and youth. The inadequacies of the State are either due to limited funds or poor governance or both.

As in other areas of attaining the common good, the efforts of the government to attain the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of quality education for all must be strongly complemented by initiatives of business and civil society. Among emerging markets, the Philippines is notable for the role of both the business sector and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in promoting the common good, oftentimes replacing the State in what it is mandated to do by the Constitution. What in other countries in which the State practices good governance, such as Singapore, Finland and Germany, are delivered by the government to the public, in the Philippines the private sector is oftentimes obliged to provide by default. An outstanding example in the field of education is the non-profit organization founded in 2006 by top CEOs, the Philippine Business for Education (PBEd). This NGO is the business community’s response to the need for greater education and economic alignment. Its advocacies include teacher quality and workforce development.

In a recent multisectoral assembly, the PBEd presented an Agenda for Education Reform that could lead, among others, to certain legislative measures. To get as wide a participation among the public in pushing for the implementation of the necessary action program, let me present here the main items in the PBEd Agenda:

1. Address malnutrition and stunting among zero- to five-year-old children and students through a strong implementation of the Philippine Plan of Action for Nutrition;

2. Increase the budget and resources for education: widen the pie and ensure accountability;

3. Establish an Autonomous Assessment Agency: consistently diagnose strengths and weaknesses, and target interventions;

4. Infuse the system with the best and brightest teachers through a National Teacher Education Scholarship Bill;

5. Bridge the gap and strengthen the implementation of the mother tongue-based multilingual education.

As regards the first item in the Agenda, it is a fact that even before they step foot in the classroom, hunger and malnutrition hinder our children from learning. One of three children under the age of five is undernourished and thus not ready to learn. Schools were supposed to help address this problem. Their continuous closure during the pandemic made it more difficult to remediate malnutrition among the children. As of the end of the third quarter of 2020, the Department of Education’s feeding program had an unobligated allotment of P6.8 billion. In this regard, the spontaneous response of private citizens to the community pantry movement started by a lone woman in Quezon City, which spread like wild fire all over the archipelago, is another example of citizens’ response to a national problem. Also to be noted are efforts of NGOs like the Philippine Food Bank Foundation to channel millions of pesos worth of soon-to-expire (SOTEX) manufactured food products and surplus food from restaurants and other eating establishments to orphanages and feeding clinics of schools and local government units (LGUs).

In this regard, LGUs all over the Philippines should take note of the very successful program of Quezon Province to implement the “First 1,000 Days of Life, Maternal and Child Healthcare Program” which consists of a package of healthcare and nutrition intervention in the first 1,000 days of life of the child (starting in the mother’s womb) and its pregnant mother. This was launched as far back as 2015 and has been strongly endorsed by such international organizations as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Program, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). At the level of the municipality, the example that can be followed is a similar 1,000 Days Program being implemented by the municipality of Quezon in Palawan. This is a project of the Food and Nutrition Research Center (FNRI) and the Department of Science and Technology (DoST). It cannot be over emphasized that the battle for quality education is already lost if millions of children are undernourished or malnourished in their first 1,000 days. The damage to the brain is irreversible.

As earlier mentioned, the Philippine Government is spending only 17% of its budget on education, while our more progressive neighbors are spending 20% or more. The PBEd recommends that when the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) to LGUs is finally implemented, following the Mandanas ruling, the LGUs should appropriate at least 20% of its annual allotment for education. There should be an increase in local accountability and the local school boards should be empowered and strengthened. There should be 100% utilization of the Special Education Fund (SEF) as well as full parental engagement. There should also be decentralization of authority, devolving more power to school division officials and principals. At the national level, serious efforts should be exerted to attain the 20% of the national budget target for education.

The additional resources should be especially directed towards solving the “last-mile” problem. According to the Department of Education, in 2020, there were 4,536 waterless schools in the country. There were 1,562 unenergized schools. Among the public-school pupils studying at home during the pandemic, 6.2 million had insufficient load in their digital devices, 6.9 million had unstable connections, and 6.8 million lacked gadgets. Given the realistic expectation that these last-mile challenges will take time to address, it is imperative that face-to-face classes be introduced as early as possible once the pandemic is put under reasonable control. Online learning and even blended learning will leave millions of school children behind unless physical presence in the classroom is soon allowed. Blended learning will work only for the children of the well-to-do (A, B, and some C households) who have access to the best digital devices and efficient internet connections.

The third recommendation is the establishment of an Autonomous Assessment Agency. The Philippine National Education Assessment Program will be implemented by an independent Philippine National Education Assessment Authority, modelled after Australia’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). What are assessed are reading, writing, numeracy and the so-called 21 st century skills. The grade levels assessed are Grades 4, 9, and 12. Sampling will be utilized with regular and consistent diagnostic testing. There will be student and school summary reports. This autonomous assessment agency will allow the Department of Education to focus on teaching and learning interventions.

The fourth item in the Agenda has to do with the quality of the teachers. We should attract the best and brightest to the teaching profession by implementing a teacher education scholarship program. The granting of scholarships will be merit-based. The successful candidates will be given a full scholarship to study in select high-quality Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs), whether public or private. To maximize learning, each student will be assigned a mentor who will closely follow her or his progress, not only in academic matters but also in the values and virtues that are especially relevant to the teaching profession. In the contract of scholarship, there will be incorporated a return of service obligation. Each scholar will have a guaranteed teaching position after graduation.

The fifth relates to an issue in which there is no consensus among the experts and policy makers. It has to do with the mother-tongue based (MTB) multilingual education (MLE) law. Under this MTB-MLE law, the mother tongue (there are 19 mother tongues in the Philippines for this purpose) is the medium of instruction during Grades 1 to 3, after which there is a transition to Filipino and English. International research has shown that students with well-developed skills in their first language have been shown to acquire additional languages more easily and fully and that, in turn, has a positive impact on academic achievement. Second language learners use what they know in their own language to help develop other languages. The positive transfer effect has been found especially significant in reading. Under this MTB-MLE law, it is expected that by the end of Grade 3, students will enjoy communicating in their first language on familiar topics for a variety of purposes and audiences using basic vocabulary and phrases, read texts in their mother tongue with understanding and create their own stories and texts in their mother tongue.

This is the theory. Unfortunately, the reality is that for a variety of reasons, most Filipino students — especially in the public schools — are not able to transition to English well enough to be competent in reading in their later years.

Considering that our 15-year-old students who participate in international achievement tests like that of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) take the tests in English, and their lack of fluency in English is a handicap. This fact could partly explain why they do very poorly in these tests. To address this problem, the PBEd recommends that the implementation of the MTB-MLE law be strengthened through: a.) Teacher training (pre- and in-service) in MTB-MLE; b.) Adequate and quality teaching and learning materials for students written in the mother tongue: and, c.) Sticking to 19 mother tongues and avoid undue multiplication. This approach rests on the assumption that mother-tongue based teaching and learning, if done well, positively correlates to better learning.

In a consultation meeting with legislators, however, there were dissenting opinions from this view. The harsh reality in the Philippines is that an effective implementation of the MTB-MLE law is made very difficult because of the paucity of resources that can address the problem of producing teaching and learning materials in 16 mother tongues. Only three fourths of students have access to textbooks per student. The rest have to share textbooks with others. Only half have access to libraries. This shortage of materials has been compounded with the need to make available all sorts of learning materials that have been made necessary by blended learning during the pandemic. The peculiar linguistic situation in the Philippines in which there are numerous mother tongues may make it necessary to review the MTB-MLE law and already introduce English as one of the media of instruction even during the pre-school years. This is one of the contentious issues that can only be resolved by constant multi-sectoral research and dialogues that are facilitated by civil society organizations like the PBEd. The establishment of an Autonomous Assessment Agency will also help in arriving at more practical solutions to this admittedly very difficult language problem.

Having resided in Europe for a couple years, I observed that some of the most successful multi-lingual programs in education were in regions like Catalunya in Spain and countries like Switzerland and Germany. While teaching in Barcelona, I observed that Catalan is the mother tongue used from the very start of basic education. The Catalans, however, are also sufficiently fluent in Castilian (Spanish). The multilingual society par excellence is Switzerland. The Germans come close as a multilingual people. One has to remember, however, that these societies have per capita incomes 10 or more times that of the Philippines. They can afford to spend huge amounts in providing teaching and learning materials to teachers and students in their MTB-MLE educational programs. We may have to make the hard choice of giving priority to English in our language policy because of its crucial role in making possible two sectors which account for 12% to 14% of our GDP, the OFW and the BPO-IT sectors.

As regards the cultivation of fluency in the national language, Filipino, we just have to rely on the widespread use of Filipino in the mass media and in the film and entertainment industry. An optimistic note in this continuing controversy is the finding of linguists that children who are exposed to the sounds of different languages from the cradle find it easier to learn several languages when they grow up. This may partly explain why our 10 million or more OFWs, most of them with modest academic attainments, are able to adjust to the linguistic requirements of their hosts, even in countries whose languages foreigners find difficult to learn, like Japan, China, and Finland (in fact, in one of my visits to Helsinki, I was impressed to listen to Filipina domestic helpers speaking the esoteric language of the Finns).

Those who have difficulties learning new languages are individuals who were exposed to only one sound in their childhood, like North Americans whose mother tongue is English.

To be continued.

Bernardo M. Villegas has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Asia and the Pacific, and a Visiting Professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.

bernardo.villegas @uap.asia

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A breakdown of reasons as to why poor quality education still exists

ONE OF the obvious and important reasons why students attend school is the wealth of knowledge, surprising amount of information and skills, and quality education provided within the school setting. School provides a safe haven for voluminous ideas, recognizes how these ideas learned, and often gives access to concepts and abilities that would not regularly find in homes. But is this really the school setting of today? Is the education system good? Are the teachers’ prime roles support it? Are the students really receiving quality education?

With many studies and numerous researches about our Philippine education, it is saddening and alarming to face it right now because particularly in public schools, the poor quality education is well-observed. But who should be blamed? Whose fault is it? Pointing fingers will never be useful for this demanding issue. It will surely prevent solutions. But breaking down some reasons could be a valuable step to resolving why the country’s education is deteriorating. These are seat-of-the pants understanding to why they should be given major attention: poor school facilities; poor expertise of teachers; poor student to teacher ratio; clerical jobs and miscellaneous works of teachers; and corruption in many ways.

Poor school facilities: The condition of the school facilities has an important impact on students’ performance and teacher effectiveness. Not because it is public school, students do not have the right to have well-maintained school facilities. Some of the visible problems are lacking of classrooms, lacking of tables and chairs, lacking of instructional rooms and laboratories, poor ventilation, poor comfort rooms and canteens, and the like. Students surely want something sufficient and even though they are only in a public school, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the right to study in a comfortable environment. The government should do something about this because that is the right thing to do.

Poor expertise of teachers: Teachers have the most powerful influence on quality education. What teachers do in the teaching-learning process is critical in student success. Students trust teachers so much that they see them as one of the most reliable sources of what they need to know. Hiring incompetent teachers and promoting unskilled teachers must be stopped. The standard and qualification must be strictly implemented.

Poor student to teacher ratio: It is unstoppable that the number of enrolling students continuously increases every year; and the student to teacher ratio remains unsolved. The Department of Education once reported and posted on The Philippine Star issue last March, 2018 that the average of student-teacher ratio in public schools has significantly improved from 1 teacher per 45 students in previous years to 1:36. Where did they conduct the research, because as of today, 1:53 is still the class size. Still, the DepEd should continue conducting intervention programs to achieve the real ideal class size.

Clerical jobs and miscellaneous works of teachers: By description, a teacher teaches especially in school. The job of a teacher is to teach – back to the basics, and make teaching the single most important agenda of teachers. Today many teachers spend a lot more time doing many things other than teaching. The list of tasks teachers have to do is endless. Unloading these tasks is not enough. There must be non-teaching positions in schools to do such so teachers can focus more on teaching.

Corruption in many ways: Education especially in public schools is corrupted, imbalance, lacking necessary checks, where certain people practice dishonesty, dictatorship, and act without due consideration for some other participants particularly the teachers and students. This argument is serious but these certain people should revisit their ethics, integrity, morality, and conscience.

Sound arrogant but perhaps, those things must be taken serious attention. Efforts must be made to ensure the quality of education students receive. Of course the actions will not take effect overnight or in just a snap of a finger. Everything has to be gradual. Everything is a process. And it should starts now.

(Unsolicited contributions here are unedited, unabridged, as is. Errors in grammar, syntax, etc, solely the writer’s. — Editor)

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Deteriorating Quality of Education in Schools

The role of government school teachers in India is being questioned because of the deteriorating learning levels of children. There is constant criticism of teachers’ performance on the grounds that despite paying high salaries to teachers, children are not performing well in examinations because the majority of teachers are not competent enough. An analysis of six Indian states offers the opportunity to address this debate from the lens of public provisioning for teachers in the school education system. The performance of teachers needs to be judged on the basis of factors like their training, working conditions, and, above all, resource allocation by the government. 

This article is part of a larger study “Analysis of School Education Budget in India” supported by Child Rights and You.  

In recent years, the Government of India has become increasingly interested in the relationship between the amount of resources devoted to education and student learning outcomes. Learning outcomes in government schools are compared to those of private schools to measure the quality of education. The most-cited source in this regard is the Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER), conducted by a non-governmental organisation called Pratham. It shows that for the last five years, the quality of learning has deteriorated in government schools, while private schools do better both in terms of reading and arithmetic skill (ASER Centre 2017).

This deterioration in learning outcomes has generated a debate about teachers salary and efficiency. One argument is that teacher salaries in government schoolswhich account for over 80% of the spending on educationis drawing a large amount of resources and causing fiscal burden on states (Dongre et al 2014). Some scholars have argued that teachers in private schools are performing better at improving the learning outcomes of children at much lower salaries (Jain and Dholakia 2010; Milligan and Dhume 2012; Pritchett and Aiyer 2014; Muralidharan et al 2016; Ree et al 2016; Kingdon 2017). Hence, there is a push to link teachers salaries to student outcomes in order to enforce accountability in the government school system (NITI Aayog 2017).

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