Brookings: Topics - Global Education

Crafting an Education Goal in the Post-2015 Development Framework: Having Our Cake and Eating It Too

Luis Crouch, Jenny Perlman Robinson and Lauren Greubel — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:54:00 -0400

In the ongoing debate over learning outcomes and measurement in the lead up to the post-2015 framework, the education community risks falling victim to the old English proverb, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” We want global education goals but local adaptation, if not local origination. We want goals that are practical and can be measured realistically while also sufficiently ambitious and forward-looking. However, we may indeed be able to “have our cake and eat it too” if we use very precise language and realize the need to put into place goal-seeking rather than goal-setting processes. This is the spirit behind an upcoming report from the Methods and Measures Working Group of the Learning Metrics Task Force scheduled for release in June 2013.

Crafting a Goal That is Both Global and Local

One key distinction needed is between goals versus metrics. Goals motivate while metrics measure. What is often overlooked is that goals can be lofty, long-term and universally applicable yet still be locally adaptable. An example of such a goal is: All children should be able to read at proficiency, by the end of the primary cycle in their country, according to their national curriculum. The metrics for this goal could be robust assessments of reading administered at the end of primary through a national assessment. Countries could then report on the percentage of children achieving proficiency based on their national curricula or, to use Keith Lewin’s concept of “yield,” they could report on the percentage of children completing primary school and achieving a certain level of proficiency.

Risks do exist, however, in defining a goal relative to national curricula. These same national curricula have been failing children in many countries for the last decade. Measuring a goal based on national targets may risk stagnating progress in learning outcomes and disincentize governments to make real improvements to education quality.

But this problem can also be addressed. In addition to a goal that measures outcomes relative to national curricula, countries can also measure their students’ achievement based on an international metric, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), or a regional one such as the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). Utilizing a robust metric and publishing the outcomes are good ways for national governments to make explicit their commitment to education quality and garner support from the global education and development community.

Practicality versus Long-term Ambition

In distinguishing between goals and metrics, there is also a tension between practicality versus long-term ambition that needs to be addressed. While we may want to have a goal to ensure that all children possess civic values and are prepared to be global citizens, we are confronted with a very practical reality that there are currently no widely agreed-upon metrics for these goals.

However, to propose that we not measure anything because we lack such measures is like throwing the baby out with the bath water (apologies for all the idioms). In fact, there are areas of learning where measurement is quite far along at the global level, such as reading and math. Therefore, there is a need for international bodies, like the International Bureau of Education, as well as civil society organizations, academia and other groups to have the resources to implement rigorous data collection for measurement and developing metrics.

In other cases, there are other competencies that are equally important but the metrics are not as well developed. However, not including these competencies would be setting our sights short, much like we limited ourselves a decade ago by only including access, and not learning, in the MDGs. In fact, research is currently underway to define and measure so-called “global competencies”, such as civic values, critical thinking and problem solving by the Learning Metrics Task Force and others. Choosing not to include these critical non-cognitive skills in an education goal that will span the next decade or two – when the metrics for measuring them may be available within the next few years – does a real detriment to the ultimate well-being of millions of children and young people worldwide.

Progress Needs to Be Measured

We also need to distinguish between metrics and setting benchmarks on those metrics. Goals should remain ambitious and long-term, and may use a both national metric and an internationally comparable metric. But countries may also wish to set intermediate benchmarks of progress on metrics as a way to set and chart progress. For example, if only 10 percent of a country’s children are currently proficient in reading, having a lofty, long-term goal of getting 100 percent of children to be proficient is daunting. An ambitious goal can depress more than motivate if taken seriously or, given its distant timeline, could simply not be taken seriously at all. Having intermediate benchmarks, with shorter timeframes and more realistic targets can motivate by setting attainable milestones and provide guide posts to reach the ultimate goal.

Finally, a distinction needs to be made between top-line reporting and sub-line tracking of indicators. For example, if the top-line reporting is on the percent of children who achieve proficiency in literacy and numeracy after nine years of education according to national curricula, there can still be multiple sub-line indicators that are essential to monitor. Participation in a common international or national assessment is one. Even if a country’s performance on an assessment is not its main metric, its outcomes on an assessment can still help explain and anchor the ultimate goal. It is also important to monitor measures that are pedagogical precursors: are children learning the basics of reading early on, so they can go on to become lifelong learners? Similarly, input indicators, such as teacher training and financing, are also important since they relate to and influence the ultimate goal.

What is Still Needed

What is clear from these debates is more work, and more coordinated work, is needed. Setting a simple top-down “requirement” that uses only one global curricular objective and only one metric is relatively easy but risks repeating mistakes from the past. Creating distinctions between goals, metrics, and benchmarks, and encouraging a subtle interplay between the global and the local, is harder but can ultimately lead to greater impact. This is something the Learning Metrics Task Force is grappling with in their global deliberations. A recommendation from the task force’s latest meeting is the need for an international multi-stakeholder advisory group that promotes collaboration among the different measurement processes and leverages financial and technical resources on measurement within the education sector. Such a body could help countries develop their own measurement systems, report learning outcomes, and stimulate work on measurement in areas where it currently does not exist. In other words, it could facilitate a goal-seeking rather than goal-setting process.

Authors

Luis Crouch
Jenny Perlman Robinson
Lauren Greubel

Image Source: © Stringer Afghanistan / Reuters

The Impact of School Feeding Programs in Senegal

Jessica Elaine Smith and Brandon Routman — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:36:00 -0400

Access to universal primary school education has been a key policy priority for many nations trying to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, learning outcomes of students in sub-Saharan African, particularly those in rural areas, remain disappointing. Of the continent’s approximately 128 million school aged children, only half will attend school and learn basic skills (see the Africa Learning Barometer). Researchers from the Consortium for Social Economic Research are examining efforts in Senegal to improve the quality of education. On March 28th, the organization’s director, Diagne Abdoulaye, gave a seminar to the Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative on a recent study on the impact of school feeding programs on the cognitive acquisitions in rural primary schools in Senegal.

Hunger, malnutrition, and chronic fatigue are huge hurdles to learning in sub-Saharan Africa. One proposed intervention is the implementation of school feeding programs, or cantines as they are called in Senegal. Abdoulaye’s research seeks to determine whether cantines in Senegal have a significant impact on learning outcomes in the areas of reasoning, memory, comprehension and knowledge. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of governance (in this case the presence of a parent teacher association) on student achievement.

The research sample spanned 120 schools that had no prior cantine programs in four Senegalese provinces that featured a high incidence of poverty. In half of these schools (the treatment group) feeding programs were administered and the other half (the control) received no feeding programs. Over the course of one academic year, students were given cognitive tests in two subjects, French and math.

The results showed that the feeding program contributed to the cognitive development of the students and produced positive outcomes that were more pronounced in math than in French. The school feeding program did not have a significant impact on grade repetition or the dropout rate. Also noteworthy was the finding that the program contributed to an increase in the nutritional well-being of both students and children who co-habitat with the students, such as siblings, but who do not attend school themselves. Abdoulaye also found heterogeneous impacts of the treatment on different groups of students. For instance, the treatment had a greater impact on boys compared to girls, and was especially beneficial to students who had delayed entry into school and were over 10 years old.

Abdoulaye concluded his presentation by noting that the cantine program in Senegal was effective in raising learning and nutritional outcomes among students. However, the cost of school feedings was a concern expressed by schools during the study. Abdoulaye suggests that if the school feeding programs were administered in conjunction with other health-based programs such as de-worming, the results might have been even more notable. In light of Abdoulaye’s study, programs such as cantines could be considered as a critical intervention that helps holistically address the learning needs of the poorest, most marginalized children.

Dr. Diagne Abdoulaye is the director of the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s partner think tank the Consortium for Social Economic Research or CRES. He visited Brookings for the meetings surrounding the visits of President Macky Sall and the presidents from Cape Verde, Malawi and Sierra Leone. For more information about his study, please contact Dr. Diagne at adiagne@cres-sn.org.

Authors

Jessica Elaine Smith
Brandon Routman

Image Source: © Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

Why Global Education Financing Must Be Part of Europe's Financial Transaction Tax Revenues for Development

Sarah O’Hagan and Rebecca Winthrop — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:17:00 -0400

As the financial transaction tax (FTT) becomes part of the European political landscape and moves its way through EU member-state legislatures, the use of a percentage of tax revenues for development – and specifically for basic global education needs— remains highly uncertain.

The 11 eurozone countries that got the green light from EU finance ministers in January to move forward with a coordinated tax on financial transactions could deliver as much as €35 billion for their national budgets. But the clear consensus shared by these 11 nations— which collectively represent two-thirds of the EU’s economy— on the timeliness and necessity of implementing such a tax now is not equally matched by a consensus on allocating part of the revenues to international development, let alone education. This is an unfortunate state of things given that the idea of using part of the revenues to support global development was a big reason for the huge social movement in support of the tax.

The backdrop to this uncertainty is the austerity agenda being pursued by many governments, in which foreign aid budgets are under pressure. As a consequence, foreign aid to global education risks falling faster than overall aid levels.

To date, only one of the vanguard countries in the FTT movement, France, passed its own FTT in mid 2012 and committed to allocate part of the revenues to development and climate finance. At the time, many called for 50 percent of FTT revenues to be dedicated to overseas development assistance and climate finance, but that figure soon dwindled to 10 percent, and ultimately 4 percent, for health and environmental projects. The ray of hope is that France has expressed its willingness for the EU FTT to also be partly allocated to development and climate finance, and is currently gathering support.

Civil society groups in France and in Europe generally are more effectively mobilized within the health and environment sectors, and are comparatively weaker on the education front. Yet given that global education is a sine qua non for successful economic development, it’s vitally important that global education activists in France and elsewhere not only mobilize within their countries to earmark revenues for development-- including basic education— but also collaborate across the larger European landscape to set a precedent for the use of financial transactions taxes around the world. An EU financial transaction tax for development could indeed put more kids in school and improve their learning outcomes in developing countries.

The European Union, via its member states and the European Commission, is among the largest donors to global education in the world. But the recent OECD Development Assistance Committee data release revealed a decrease in official development assistance for the second year in the row with significant cuts in countries like Spain and the Netherlands. And an agreement among EU heads of state at the February 8 European Council for the 2014-2020 EU budget is not going to fill this gap. In fact, the budget froze the portion earmarked for development at 2007-2013 levels, leaving the EU far from its commitments to reach 0.7 percent ODA/GNI by 2015.

Another worrying fact is that global education may not be a priority sector for the EU in many countries moving forward according to early word from several developing countries partners.

For low-income countries that simply cannot grow and improve their basic education systems without external financing, a decrease in aid flows without a compensating or greater infusion from innovative financing such as the financial transactions taxes, spells disaster. That is why, in addition to pushing donors to respect their commitment in developing countries to aid, the education community should do all it can to ensure that newly enacted financial transaction taxes allocate part of their revenues to global education.

If these examples are indicative of the way financing for global education has worked to date, they amply underscore the patchwork approach that even pieced together will still leave students in developing countries falling behind.

Authors

Sarah O’Hagan
Rebecca Winthrop

Image Source: © Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters

Education Rising: Reflections on the Learning for All Ministerial Meetings

Liesbet Steer — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:08:00 -0400

Last week was a big one for global education. For the first time in history, education ministers and finance ministers featured together on the agenda of the annual World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings. The World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown co-hosted the Learning for All Ministerial, a series of high-level meetings to discuss specific challenges and concrete steps to accelerate progress toward ensuring that all children go to school and learn. Finance and education ministers from eight countries— Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen— that are collectively home to nearly half of the out-of-school population met together with international development partners, and civil society and private sector leaders.

A series of country papers that were prepared in consultation with a range of stakeholders and coordinated by the Center for Universal Education at Brookings tracked the progress (and in some cases regress) toward reaching the education goals. These papers also proposed specific actions that must be taken in order to meet MDG targets by 2015. In many countries, impressive progress has been made in providing access to education and reducing gender differences in education opportunities. This has occurred even in some of the poorest countries such as Ethiopia, where more than 10 million children have enrolled in primary school over the past decade, more than doubling the enrollment rate. There is cause for celebration and optimism about what can be achieved in the future.

But great challenges still lie ahead. Even in countries with strong performances, progress in school enrollment and gender equity has been highly uneven. Significant and often overlapping disparities exist between regions, fragile and non-fragile areas, rural and urban areas, and socioeconomic groups. Poor children in urban slums in Bangladesh, the North-Kivu and Kasai-Occidental of the DRC, the nomadic regions of Afar and Somali in Ethiopia, or the North Eastern states of Nigeria are much less likely to go to school than children in other areas. Girls account for two out of three out-of-school children in South Sudan.

Hugely encouraging numbers in terms of access also hide a crisis in learning. International as well as national studies of learning across countries show unacceptably low and even declining levels of learning as coverage expands. As a result, this often leads to high dropout rates. In most of the countries present at the meeting, less than two-thirds of children enrolled manage to complete primary school. In Haiti, only half of the children starting in grade 1 complete primary school. The MDGs, with their focus on education access, do not put sufficient attention on education quality and learning outcomes. This must be remedied in the post-2015 development framework.

Overcoming these challenges will require addressing bottlenecks well beyond the sector. Many children are not going to school because of persistent economic and socio-cultural barriers. With an average of two or more children per household, tuition costs in Haiti can consume up to 50 percent of a household’s income. Child labor and early marriage are also limiting education opportunities for a large number of children. Proposals to address these demand-side barriers include scaling up cash transfer programs in Nigeria, removing school fees in the DRC, providing school subsidies in Haiti, and providing girls’ stipends in South Sudan and Yemen. Achieving universal basic education will also require addressing broader issues such as early childhood development (including health and nutrition), the transition to secondary education, and the development of relevant life and job skills.

Critical to progress is the commitment of government and leaders at national and local levels. Many countries have institutionalized the right to free and compulsory primary education and have translated their commitment into sector plans and investment. In countries where state provision fails, non-state actors have stepped in to fill the gaps. Provision of basic services by civil society groups in Bangladesh is vital to educational achievement in the country. A proposal for flexible education provision in Bangladesh’s urban slums, using NGOs, builds on this strength. But discussions also highlighted the need for state capacity to set minimum standards and a regulatory framework for all providers, including the private sector. The Haitian school system is dominated by the non-public sector, which is largely unregulated and mainly financed by school fees that constitute a major expenditure for poor households.

Urgent improvements in what the World Bank president calls the “science of delivery” are needed. All country cases included proposals to strengthen infrastructure, teacher qualifications, and in some cases (e.g. Ethiopia) performance based school grants to improve access and quality. There is a broad recognition that all possible channels of delivery should be considered, including civil society and the private sector, particularly in fragile contexts such as in South Sudan. Also, decentralization can in many circumstances increase local responsiveness to local issues and opportunities. But political will is needed. The ministers of education and finance in Nigeria stressed the need to motivate their state governors to invest in education and proposed organizing a convention with all governors and the president to highlight the education crisis. Critically, accountability needs to be strengthened. This includes ensuring that teachers get paid, depoliticizing teacher hiring and transfers, and measuring education outcomes. It also includes local accountability through parent associations, and publishing amounts of funding and resources made available to local levels. Finally, participants also stressed the need to evaluate and scale up “revolutionary and innovative methods” of delivery, taking advantage of new mobile technologies.

More money is required, particularly as greater effort is focused on reaching marginalized, hard-to-reach groups, and improvements in education quality. Domestic resource allocations to education have increased dramatically in some countries. For example, up to 25 percent of Ethiopia’s budget is spent on education. But, in most other countries, education spending remains much too low at around 10 percent of total spending or even lower, such as in South Sudan at 7 percent, which is well below international standards. Education sector reform will need to go hand in hand with wider finance and tax reform to generate the resources needed. International support also needs to be sustained, expanded and better coordinated. For example in South Sudan, education assistance is delivered by 20 donors overseeing 46 projects of about $2 million.

The meetings last week resulted in a number of concrete commitments, which will be monitored by the Global Partnership for Education. A set of new meetings with other off-track countries (such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Timor Leste and Myanmar) is also planned for the UN General Assembly in September. A number of other education events coinciding with the Ministerial also led to a coalition to prevent child exploitation and an agreement to build a platform for business engagement in education.

The ministerial meeting ended with the premier of “Girls Rising”, an inspiring new documentary about the power of girls’ education. The film reminded all of us that education is a fundamental human right and a blessing that unlocks almost all other development goals.

Authors

Liesbet Steer

Image Source: © STR New / Reuters

The Sprint to the 2015 Development Goals: Reaching the Marginalized with Quality Education and Learning

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 17, 2013
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

On April 17, the Center for Universal Education hosted members of the global education community for a public discussion on the two main challenges preventing the realization of universal education. As the clock winds down on the deadline to achieve the Education for All targets and Millennium Development Goals, there are still 61 million children out of primary school and another 71 million not enrolled in secondary school. There are 250 million children that have not mastered basic reading skills, and 200 million don’t have the relevant skills to support meaningful livelihoods. Evidence shows that education is one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Clearly, more must be done to ensure that all children are in school and learning, especially marginalized groups that are furthest behind.

The first panel examined issues related to financing education. CUE Director Rebecca Winthrop emphasized that although there is a $26 million financing gap for global education, donor support has stagnated and some countries like the Unites States, Canada, France, Japan, the Netherlands and Belgium have cut their foreign aid to education. Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), pointed out that education ministers from developing countries are creating compelling education sector plans and working hard to improve their education systems. She stressed how important it is for governments and development partners to invest and support the efforts to help fund the $1.3 billion in pending GPE grants. She noted that innovative solutions could include financial transaction tax systems, local financing mechanisms, private sector partnerships and the use of technology. Nigel Chapman, CEO of Plan International, highlighted the importance of adding a gender lens to the issues of education. In an austere budgetary climate in many advanced economies where official development assistance is evaporating, it is essential that education is not forgotten because it requires complex and long term vision. Elizabeth King, director of Education for the World Bank’s Human Development Network, described the demand for education by countries, governments and communities. She highlighted how education is regularly cited as a top priority for people, even those living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. King argued that this should send a strong message to the international community that education can play a role in building good citizenship within societies and can be a lever for growth and development. Therefore, it is important for resources to be used effectively and efficiently.

The second panel explored the need for more equitable and better quality education. CUE Senior Fellow Kevin Watkins presented data on the large numbers of out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, and the causes of non-enrollment and school dropout, such as early marriage, child labor, conflict and poor educational quality. He pointed out that one of the biggest failings of the international donor community is the lack of provision within national education strategies to reach the most marginalized. Watkins emphasized that the reason why progress has stalled is largely because the same interventions and strategies are being used for marginalized groups when new and different approaches are needed. Baela Raza Jamil, director of programs at the Center of Education and Consciousness, described her work with the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in Pakistan and how she has been able to mobilize country-wide attention to issues around deficiencies in quality education in Pakistan.

She discussed the large-scale household and school assessment tools that have been created to measure differences within districts and across provinces. Jamil also talked about a new program, “Learning for Access”, that targets youth literacy and numeracy. Sumaya Saluja of the YP Foundation discussed the critical role that youth can play in tackling challenges in the education system. She described her work to measure school quality and her efforts to change traditional mindsets about girls’ education in India. Albert Motivan, head of Education Indictors and Data Analysis at UNESCO Institute for Statistics, presented evidence to illuminate the macro-level challenges facing global education, including UNICEF’s Out of School Initiative, which shows patterns of enrollment and progression across different segments of the global population. He also discussed the newly released report by the Learning Metrics Task Force, which outlines the different areas of learning that need to be measured, including readiness to learn, literacy and numeracy, competencies around analytic thinking, problem solving and ICT literacy.

Video

Audio

The Sprint to the 2015 Development Goals: Reaching the Marginalized with Quality Education and Learning

Transcript

Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

Civil Society Support from the Global South for an Equitable Learning Agenda

Allison Anderson and Kristen Molyneaux — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:53:00 -0400

Following the final meeting of the U.N. secretary general’s High-Level Panel (HLP) of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in Bali, Indonesia from March 25-27, panel members are now engaged in drafting a report that will recommend the vision and shape of a post-2015 development agenda that responds to the global challenges of the 21st century.

Last week, in an effort to inform the writing of this report, HLP members received a consensus brief, Equitable Learning for All elaborating on a vision and goal for education within the post-2015 development process. This brief was developed in response to members of the HLP’s request for consensus from the education community around a specific theme and vision for the post-2015 agenda. It was developed from an analysis of the many voices that have provided input for the post-2015 education consultation process, and it has been endorsed by 93 civil society organizations (CSOs) and other partners around the world, the vast majority of which are from the global south.

Given the role that quality education and learning play in empowering people to make informed decisions that impact their families’ well-being and equip them with the skills to live healthy and productive lives, the brief recommends that the post-2015 development agenda include education as a cross-cutting issue that affects all development goals. In addition, it calls for an explicit education goal focused on ‘equitable learning for all,’ encompassing equity, learning and the need for a learning continuum from early childhood through to adolescence. The brief states that the post-2015 development framework must focus on reducing the learning gap between the poorest and richest children, and girls and boys, through targets that promote equity, emphasizing the need for particular attention to rising inequality within countries. Finally the brief identifies six measures for tracking learning for all at the global level drawn from the work of the Learning Metrics Task Force, itself a global effort engaging over 800 people across 70 countries, the majority of which are from the global south.

Voices from the Global South

Civil society organizations play key roles in working with communities to ensure that global and national-level policies reach those for whom they are intended. As such, CSOs are strong advocates for social change at the community level, with their success rooted in their ability to organize, build consensus and mobilize community stakeholders who are willing to work for the change they desire.

Therefore, local and national CSOs from Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as regional and global CSOs such as the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), the Global Fund for Women, Pratham and ASER Centre were eager to give input into and eventually sign onto this brief as a show of solidarity around a common global goal. Organizations requested their names be added while articulating the importance that they saw in having a unified global voice for action; for example:

Tanzania Home Economics Association stated: “because we believe [in] one voice to positive change and [that] Education is the only possible way to escape poverty…[we] would like to be officially signed on to the brief.”

“[We] ask you to have Chikanta's name added to the brief as a sign of consensus around the importance of equity, learning, and the need for a learning continuum.... Indeed we would like to take part.” - Chikanta Community Schools Development Zambia.

“African democracy and good governance will not prosper without investing in education. We strongly support united international action for access to quality education for all and let the post 2015 MDGs speak!” – Pemba Island Relief Organization (PIRO) in Tanzania.

CSOs are already working to improve learning within their communities. Building consensus with and among them will only lead to faster change at the grass-roots level. Indeed, it is through the consensus building amongst and between CSOs, and the many stakeholders invested in educational improvement, that an equitable learning for all agenda can gain momentum and have a real chance to succeed beyond the pages of a post-2015 framework. Hopefully members of the HLP will heed this call.

Authors

Allison Anderson
Kristen Molyneaux

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

Welcome to Education + Development

Rebecca Winthrop — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:42:00 -0400

Welcome to Education + Development, a new blog by the Center for Universal Education. Our blog will cover issues on global education, learning and international development, with a particular focus on the post-2015 development agenda process. Over the next two years, we will regularly blog on the process toward creating the new development agenda that will replace the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire in 2015. In addition, we will track the progress toward achieving MDG 2 – to provide high quality education for all boys and girls.

Our blog will also examine issues at the heart of the global education and development debate, provide updates on the Learning Metrics Task Force, and analyze the latest research, policy initiatives and developments impacting global education, including:

• Addressing inequality and improving equity in education financing
• Reaching marginalized communities
• Providing access as well as quality learning opportunities for all children
• Promoting youth skills and livelihoods
• Weighing education provision through the strategic use of public and private funding
• Engaging corporate philanthropy in global education

Our hope is that the Education + Development blog will serve as forum for Brookings scholars and guest contributors to have a dynamic dialogue on the critical issues impacting education in developing countries and also serve as an online space to collectively share information and new ideas.

We have included several previous blog posts on the progress thus far in the post-2015 discussions, which serve as a foundation for continued debate and engagement from all members of our community.

We look forward to sharing new blog posts with you and welcome your thoughts and input.

Warm regards,

Rebecca Winthrop
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Universal Education
@rebeccawinthrop

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop

Image Source: © Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

Quiet Progress for Education in Pakistan

Rebecca Winthrop, Elena Matsui and Baela Raza Jamil — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:00:00 -0400

The issue of education in Pakistan rocketed to front page news after the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old girl who was targeted by Taliban assassins last October. Unfortunately, violence and attacks against education persist. At the end of March, Shahnaz Nazli, a 41-year-old teacher, was killed on her way to work at a girls’ school near the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal district. Five teachers were killed in January near the town of Swabi in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Acts of violence like these undermine an already weak education system where an estimated 30 to 40 percent of school-aged children are out of school. These enormous challenges are compounded by political uncertainties given the upcoming elections and denouement of the war in Afghanistan.

However, in the shadow of these difficult circumstances, progress is quietly being made in thousands of schools located in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province. A recent report, The Good News From Pakistan, shows positive results emerging from a program that instituted a number of reforms to the education sector in over 60,000 government schools. Based on global evidence of what works in school system reform, the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap targets access, equity and quality, and uses an innovative monitoring tool that can be used to support and encourage policy dialogue. Over the past two years there have been increases in student enrollment, teacher presence and the availability of functioning facilities in the regions where the program has been implemented.

Student learning levels in Punjab have also improved. An independent, citizen-led household-based study, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), assessed over 60,000 children from all 36 districts in Punjab and profiled almost 2,000 public and private schools in the region. It reveals significant gains in learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy. Grade 4 English language learning levels have improved 12 percent since 2011; Arithmetic levels in Grades 4 and 5 have increased 10 percent. Perhaps even more remarkable, the study indicates that gaps between public and private education are closing. Whereas private schools have historically performed better in terms of teacher attendance rates and learning outcomes, now public and private school attendance rates for children (86 percent) and teachers (87 percent) are on par. Public school facilities are also improving. There are more functioning toilets and available drinking water in government schools, which has further reduced discrepancies in relation to private schools.

Something is definitely working. A critical component of the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap includes strengthening district administration by involving, incentivizing and holding officials accountable for progress or failure, as well as acknowledging them publicly. In addition, a culture of evidence-based tracking and accountability is growing throughout the Punjab districts. In particular, monthly monitoring and ranking based on a number of key indicators around governance and quality has helped to bolster the attendance rates in public schools.

The engagement of policymakers as well as citizens is essential to the success of any large scale public sector education reform. While the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap is involving high-level officials and community leaders, Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Pakistan is doing its part to include citizens in the dialogue. Every year, 9,000 volunteers from across Pakistan work to collect ASER data that is then shared with the government, civil society organizations, media, bilateral and multilateral agencies and other stakeholders working in the education sector. This process supports the Right to Education (RTE) campaign that has collected almost 2 million signatures from in-school and out-of-school children in an effort to pressure the Pakistani government to implement free and compulsory education for all children aged five to sixteen. United Nations special envoy for Global Education and former prime minster, Gordon Brown, presented 1 million signatures from the RTE campaign to the president of Pakistan on Malala Day, November 10^th, 2012, which lead to the ratification of the first RTE bill in Pakistan. Following the death of Shahnaz Nazli, Malala started a new petition in honor of the slain teacher, which continues to put pressure on the Pakistani government to end the killings and violence that deny children their right to an education–especially for girls.

These advances are important for the people of Pakistan and the 5.1 million children out of school throughout the country. But these efforts also offer lessons for the international community. The Punjab Education Reform Roadmap as well as the work of ASER Pakistan and courageous individuals like Malala and Shahnaz Nazli show that even in the face of daunting challenges and an uncertain future, ambitious goal setting, collaboration and the effective use of evidence can deliver impressive results in a relatively short amount of time. Governments and partners working to improve education systems everywhere should take note.

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop
Elena Matsui
Baela Raza Jamil

Image Source: © Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

Syria's Children are in Desperate Need of Educational Aid

Maysa Jalbout — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0400

The UAE is increasingly viewed as an important player in the field of humanitarian aid, particularly in situations of crisis. Since 1971, the UAE has given more than Dh225 billion in foreign aid to more than 90 countries. This trend continued at last week's Dubai International Humanitarian Aid and Development Conference, where the UAE received praise for its pledge of Dh1.1 billion to assist Syrian refugees.

Syria's refugees are in desperate need of safe shelters, medical assistance, food and water. The UAE's money, which it will distribute outside of the UN framework, will go a long way in providing these basic services.

But the UAE could also play a leadership role in ensuring that Syrian children have access to something often overlooked during times of conflict: education.

In their recent report Childhood Under Fire, the UK-based agency Save The Children detailed the effect of the two-year crisis on Syrian children. Young people have been uprooted from their homes, and witnessed death and destruction. Many are separated from their families. Syrian children have experienced tragedies that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Without the much-needed physical protection and psychosocial counselling offered to refugee children in schools, Syria's displaced young people will not be able to cope. As reported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there have been cases of children taking their own lives in refugee camps, overwhelmed by the stress. Others, especially those who are not protected by a parent, are in danger of being subjected to harm, exploitation and abduction.

Read the full article on The National »

Authors

Maysa Jalbout

Publication: The National

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

Dakar Consensus: Equitable, Quality Learning for All

Allison Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:37:00 -0400

More than 120 education stakeholders from civil society, youth, private sector, foundations, academics, governments and the United Nations met last week in Dakar, Senegal to review global education progress achieved since 2000, discuss the remaining challenges, and develop recommendations around an education goal for the post-2015 development framework.

Gordon Brown succinctly captured the spirit of the conference discussion in a blog based on a video message he delivered to the Dakar conference, writing that “universal learning is a goal of goals, or a super goal,” because without education we cannot unlock the other development goals, such as employment opportunity, gender equality, environmental care and good health. He concludes that “this is not just about education. It is about achieving the promise of globalization: that there is opportunity for all. Education should be reversing, not reinforcing, inequalities. Let us make sure that with stepping stone targets for education that focus not just on enrolment but on learning too, we can make the next 15 years even more successful for education than the last.”

In their deliberations, the delegates reviewed a wide range of existing proposals and inputs, including recommendations from the U.N.-led global thematic consultation on education, on how to address these challenges. Despite differences on a range of issues, a clear consensus on four priorities emerged during the discussion. The organizers summarized the deliberations as a call for: “equitable, quality life-long learning for all.” The four areas of consensus include:

Equity: A post-2015 education goal must include a clear focus on reaching the marginalized, and in particular populations affected by conflict and disaster were frequently mentioned, as were people living in poverty, ethnic minorities, rural girls and those living with disabilities.
Quality Learning: The goal must also include a strong emphasis on improving the quality of learning outcomes and experiences, something which the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have failed to do.
Expanding Access to More than Just Primary Education: The goal must include a continuum of learning opportunities from early childhood on.
Cross-Cutting Nature of Education: The post-2015 development agenda must include education as a cross-cutting issue that supports other development goals. One way for this to be operationalized is to produce targets that integrate education is into other development sectors such as health and the environment. The idea of conceiving of education as helping building resilience across a range of other issues was introduced in this light.

A similar consensus around these themes of equity, learning and the need for a learning continuum from early childhood through adolescence was cited in the summary report of the global thematic consultation on education: Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda. This report, which is still in draft form, presents the main themes from the education consultations that have taken place since late 2012, including the global online forums focused on equitable access to education, quality of learning, global citizenship, jobs and skills, and governance and financing of education. The report highlights two priority themes, or imperatives, for the post-2015 development goals on which there is consensus within the global education community: equitable access and equitable quality education, and specifically learning, within a rights-based approach that focuses on tackling inequalities.

Priority One: Equitable Access

As the report from the global thematic consultation on education notes, equitable access to all levels of education remains a key gap in the education agenda. The education Millennium Development Goal focuses on universal primary enrollment; however, there is abundant evidence that education begins at birth and continues in post-primary opportunities, whether through secondary schooling or nonformal technical and vocational education. Thus, the global education report asserts the need for a “foundational commitment” in the post-2015 framework to a goal focused on equitable access across the learning continuum. Within the report, the learning continuum is conceived of as universal coverage for early childhood care and education, from birth to school entry (0 to 8 years), through to basic education, or nine years of schooling that includes lower secondary education.

Priority Two: Equitable Quality Education, Specifically Learning

The global education report states that good quality equitable education and learning emerge “at the heart of the post-2015 education agenda” and that there is an emerging consensus on an education goal with learning as a proxy measure of quality. The report notes that this could be couched in broad terms such as ensuring that all children are prepared for school entry and “leave school with measurable learning standards and the skills, knowledge and values to become responsive, active and productive members of society and the world.”

This is in line with the recent vision laid out by the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF)— a global effort engaging over 800 people, the majority from the global south, across 70 countries— in its report, Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn. The report presents a broad, holistic framework for learning beyond literacy and numeracy. While being able to read and write are critical for enabling all girls and boys to access a broader education, these core skills are far from sufficient. In addition to reading and numeracy, children need to learn relevant transferable skills such critical thinking, problem solving, civic values, mental health and well-being, and 21st century skills such as communication and technological literacy, to prepare them for the workforce and to be active, productive members of their communities.

The global education report and discussion in Dakar also highlighted the importance of having equity as a cross-cutting aspect underpinning these two priority areas of equitable access and equitable learning, with a strong focus on marginalized and vulnerable groups. In particular, gender equality and the needs of children and youth affected by emergencies have been singled out.

The Next Challenge: Targets and Metrics

As noted in the global report and discussed at the Dakar conference, now that there is broad agreement on the themes of an education goal, the challenge will become setting targets and metrics. Across all discussions, there is a debate about balancing global and country-level goals and metrics. It is clear that global goals must reflect national priorities and that more attention must be paid to neglected contexts such as conflict and post-conflict contexts, as well as to those countries with the least promising education metrics. However, one of the lessons from the Millennium Development Goals is that clear internationally comparable measures of progress have acted as a significant spur to global progress. Striking this balance between such goals and allowing for national or regional-level discretion is one critical question, not just for education in the post-2015 framework, but for all policy areas.

The Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) met last month to discuss these challenges and identified a small number of measures for tracking at the global level that should feed into the discussion of targets and metrics moving forward. The task force emphasized the need to operationalize these while simultaneously helping to build measurement capacity at the national level. The six areas for measurement that are important to enable children and youth to constructively participate in a globalized world are:

Access to and completion of learning opportunities through enrollment and completion indicators.
Early childhood experiences that result in readiness for primary school through a school readiness indicator.
The ability to read and understand a variety of texts through a learning to read indicator and reading to learn indicator at the primary and secondary level.
The ability to use numbers and apply this knowledge to real-life situations through numeracy indicators at the primary and secondary level.
An adaptable, flexible skill set to meet the demands of the 21st century through an indicator still to be developed (e.g. collaborative problem solving).
Exposure to a breadth of learning opportunities across all seven domains (physical well-being, social and emotional, culture and the arts, literacy and communication, learning approaches and cognition, numeracy and mathematics, science and technology) through an indicator still to be developed.

Information for these areas of measurement would be collected using internationally comparable assessments in some cases, such as reading comprehension and mathematics, and using alternative assessments for others. Data collected against these domains of measurement should describe average achievement levels in addition to progress over time and equity across groups (girls/boys, urban/rural and wealth levels, at a minimum). The work of the LMTF on this front will continue to inform the discussion on targets and metrics within the education community and an open consultation process will begin in mid-April.

The Dakar meeting discussions and outcomes will result in a synthesis report that combines all of the consultation outcomes to date, which will eventually inform the deliberations of the secretary-general’s High Level Panel (HLP) this spring and the secretary-general’s report to the U.N. General Assembly this fall. An explicit education goal focused on equitable access to learning opportunities should resonate well with the HLP as it addresses issues that are integral to ensuring sustainable development, equity and inclusive growth in the post-2015 development agenda. It is also a goal that is relevant to high, medium and low-income countries alike. The focus on equity, learning and a learning continuum from early childhood through to adolescence will also bind together the education discussion within the process to develop sustainable development goals with the post-2015 development framework. For the education community, this prioritization of equitable, quality life-long learning within the post-2015 development agenda will help bring a more coherent approach to the post-2015 development framework and the Education for All goals by addressing the most notable gaps and weaknesses between them.

Authors

Image Source: © Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

Education and President Obama’s Trip to the Middle East

Maysa Jalbout and Rebecca Winthrop — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:33:00 -0400

In President Obama's visit to the Middle East this week, one aspect that should not be overlooked on his agenda is education in Syria. Education is often not seen as an immediate priority during a conflict, yet is as critical now to Syrian youth and children as it is for the longer-term stabilization and eventual rebuilding of their country. The state of education in Syria is not only a reflection of the current turmoil but, as we have learned from neighboring countries in-post conflict times, especially Iraq, it is also a strong indication of its future.

UNICEF's recent report on the state of education in Syria is alarming. At least 2,400 schools have been destroyed and an additional 1,500 are being used as shelters for displaced persons. In some cities, children have already missed out on almost two years of schooling. Across the country, parents, understandably, are reluctant to send their children to school as school buildings have been targeted by armed forces. Many children fled Syria with their families disrupting their education and forcing them to adjust to new, and often time harsh, conditions. The two years of conflict in Syria has had a severe impact on its education system. If not prioritized now, the consequences could be devastating in the long-term for Syria, as has similarly occurred in Iraq.

Education in pre-war Iraq was arguably one of the best in the region with 100% gross enrollment rates, almost complete gender parity, low drop-out rates, and government spending of approximately $620 per student. Compare that with Iraq during and after the war: gross enrollment dropped, the gender gap increased significantly, the drop out reached 20% and government spending per student dropped to $47. Education continues to be the target of violence and destruction even today. UNESCO reports that going to school in Iraq remains a dangerous activity. In the span of five years (2003-2008), over 31,500 attacks on educational institutions were reported. The impact of the conflict in Iraq on its education system has been devastating and will continue to be felt for generations to come.

For Syria, as in Iraq and in most countries affected by conflict, if education is not prioritized urgently and systematically, we can also expect the same devastating legacy. It will result in less children and youth going to school, fewer years of schooling, lower literacy rates and even worse outcomes for those who were marginalized before the conflict, including girls and women. This Syrian mother's quote in Save the Children's recent report, Childhood Under Fire, depicts the new grim reality:

“My daughter, she is 16 and she loved school. She was the first in her class, and she wanted to become an architect. But this war...we were too worried for her. We could not protect her, so we had to marry her. I know that men are hurting women, old women, single women – everyone. We needed her to have a protector…What about marriage? ‘Your cousin is a good man, take him, he is good.’ So she said ‘As you wish’. But she did not want to get married, she wanted to study. But there were no more schools. So... she was married. This is happening a lot within Syria, many women I know are marrying their daughters – even younger than 16 – to protect them.”

If Syria’s post-conflict education system is left to follow in the same path as Iraq’s, it will not only exacerbate state fragility, but also obstruct development and hurt those who are most vulnerable. This 16-year-old Syrian girl's story could become the story of an entire generation of young women who lose the chance to be educated, to be empowered and to have the tools they need to participate in the rebuilding of their country.

The United States government could lead the way in supporting an education relief plan and a longer-term multi-stakeholder rehabilitation plan of the sector as a whole. It should begin by funding UNICEF's $20 million ask for education programs in Syria for which it has only received $3 million so far. Proven strategies for ensuring continuity of education amid crisis, such as setting up child friendly spaces for learning in homes and other safe spaces, are important not only for children’s learning outcomes but their psychosocial well-being. Funding shortfalls are preventing the provision of urgently needed prefabricated classrooms, repairs and rehabilitation of learning spaces, and the provision of learning materials. For Syrians who fled to neighboring countries, targeted support should be given to U.N. agencies and particularly to Jordan, where over 29,000 Syrian children have been given access to schools despite Jordan’s own schools being already overcrowded and burdened by previous flows of refugees.

To stop at the urgent needs of Syria's education system however, would be short sighted. Supporting Syria's education needs over the long term is a must. As President Obama and his administration consider the future of Syria, they must ensure that the legacy of Syria’s conflict is not another broken education system and its devastating consequences for Syria, the Middle East and the world.

Authors

Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters

The Learning Metrics Task Force Proposes Six Areas of Measurement for Global Tracking Post-2015

Rebecca Winthrop, Mari Soliván and Kate Anderson Simons — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:26:00 -0500

From Kenya to India to the United States, world leaders are realizing the global learning crisis that threatens to rob millions of children of the fundamental human right to education, and the knowledge and skills required for well-being and prosperity in the 21st century. Well before Education for All (EFA) was endorsed in 1990, educators recognized that providing access to schooling without also ensuring student learning is an empty promise. With a new set of global development goals on the post-2015 horizon, what can the education community do now to catalyze a shift in global focus and investment from universal access to ensuring access plus improving learning opportunities and outcomes worldwide?

Beginning with the End in Mind

To help answer this question, the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF) has undertaken an 18-month-long process of research, global consultation and consensus-building on learning measurement with education stakeholders around the world. Taking a cue from effectiveness guru Stephen Covey, the LMTF process is designed to force the education community to “begin with the end in mind.” Accordingly, Phase I of the project sought to identify the learning end-goal by answering the question, what do all children and youth need to learn in order to succeed in the 21st century?

Considering recommendations from a working group of experts chaired by Seamus Hegarty— visiting professor at the University of Warwick and former chair of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)—the task force decided in its first in-person meeting in September 2012 that indeed there were important competencies that all children and youth should master no matter where they live in the world. The first report from the task force, Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn, presents a broad, holistic framework of seven learning domains, with various competencies in each, as the aspiration for all children and youth across the globe. The seven domains are:

• Physical well-being
• Social and emotional
• Culture and the arts
• Literacy and communication
• Learning approaches and cognition
• Numeracy and mathematics
• Science and technology

After establishing what children should learn, Phase II of the project works back to the preceding step: how will we know whether learning is occurring under each of the seven domains? More specifically, how can we measure and track progress in learning at the global and national levels? The Measures and Methods Working Group of 57 experts in education and assessment, chaired by César Guadalupe, Associate Researcher at Universidad del Pacífico in Perú, is currently working to provide technical guidance to help the task force address this question.

A Meeting in Dubai

On February 20-21, the working group presented its recommendations on this topic to the task force at an in-person meeting hosted by Dubai Cares. Representatives of the education community convened from all over the globe to focus their collective expertise on the issue of learning measurement. Among the 44 attendees were representatives of low, middle and high-income countries; stakeholders from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and Oceania; key U.N. and multilateral agencies; regional bodies; teacher organizations; civil society; and bilateral donor agencies. Not in attendance but still heard were the voices of the more than 500 individuals from 49 countries who submitted comments on a previous draft through public consultation.

With so many diverse constituencies and perspectives at the table, task force members engaged in vigorous debate over the two days. Here we highlight a few of the most contentious topics, and then outline the decisions that emerged from the meeting.

Key Debates

Scope of Measurement and Unintended Consequences

In formulating its recommendations, the task force faced the challenge of striking a delicate balance: how to communicate the importance of all seven learning domains presented in the Phase I framework, while also identifying just a small set of measures for tracking at the global level.

Some members worried that pulling out just a few domains for global measurement might signal to policymakers and education systems that the other domains are less important. This might in turn have the unintended consequence of limiting diversity in national curricula or driving donor funding toward narrow learning goals. Others argued that the task force must limit its recommendations to no more than a handful of clearly articulated goals, or risk having noneducationalists do the job and potentially leave learning out of the post-2015 agenda altogether.

In the end, the task force agreed that it was necessary to identify a small number of measures for tracking at the global level and selected six specific areas of measurement. To guard against unintended consequences, the task force proposed a new global measure that would track the breadth of learning opportunities young people received; namely, are children and youth being given the opportunity to learn across all seven learning domains? The task force also emphasized the need to operationalize the global areas of measurement while simultaneously helping to build measurement capacity at the national level.

International Comparability and Statistical Rigor

Assessments such as PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA are regarded as the gold standard for internationally comparable learning assessment. However, a country can spend up to $250,000 to participate, plus the costs to administer the tests, which can be substantially more. On the other hand, some national assessments have high levels of statistical rigor and provide information that is often more relevant to the individual country context.

The following questions regarding international comparability were hotly debated, both within the working group and at the task force meeting:

Should global learning goals be measured in an internationally comparable way, that is, using the same measures everywhere? Or is it also valuable to use a common tool globally that would allow some basic information to be compared globally but would mainly enable countries to track their own progress over time?

Do all countries have the interest or the resources to participate in the international assessments currently available? Drawing a parallel to the pharmaceutical industry, should the education community make available “generic” (as opposed to branded) test items as a global public good?

How do large-scale international assessments impact policy and practice to improve learning outcomes? Is the information generated from assessment more useful to high-income countries? How can international assessments provide information beyond “static league tables”?

Task force members finally agreed that international comparability was important in some areas, such as reading comprehension and mathematics, but measuring learning using a common tool to compare progress over time, or equity in learning outcomes, could also be useful in tracking progress toward global goals.

Measuring Learning in School and Out of School

Some task force members argued it is pragmatic to focus measurement efforts in schools not only because it is economical, but also because the primary aim of large-scale assessments is to influence education policy and school systems. And after all, isn’t the goal to get all children into school? But other members were concerned that a continued focus on measuring learning within schools, where the majority of current assessment efforts are focused already, would lead to further exclusion of out-of-school children and youth. With an estimated 61 million primary-age-children out of school, clearly the access agenda is unfinished. They also noted that household-based surveys can provide information on all children and youth, including those who are not enrolled in school, enrolled in private schools or absent on testing days. Still others pointed out that given current trends and the proliferation of learning technologies, learning might take place in a wider range of contexts in the future. How can the task force’s recommendations allow for these innovations?

The task force decided that access indicators (on enrollment and completion) should be paired closely with learning indicators to maintain a focus on getting children into school while also improving learning outcomes. Furthermore, the task force promotes a broad definition of schooling that allows for a range of intentional learning contexts (e.g., job-embedded learning, nonformal programs, distance learning), beyond the walls of the traditional school building.

Accounting for a Diversity of Contexts and Learning Levels

The task force recognized that while some (mostly high and upper-middle-income) countries participate in rigorous national and internationally comparable assessments, others have a very limited “culture of evaluation” and therefore limited information on how well their education systems are functioning. Another challenge is how to account for existing learning levels in countries where a large proportion of learners would score below the lowest internationally benchmarked levels. Expanding internationally comparable tests to these contexts would not give policymakers, educators or the general public information about what the problem is or how to fix it.

There was general consensus among task force members that building on internationally comparable assessments was advisable in some contexts, but may not be a good fit for countries where vast numbers of children are unable to read in the language of the test. In these environments, additional tools would be necessary to capture all learning levels.

Task Force Decisions

After hours of debate and deliberation on these topics, both in small break-out sessions and as a whole group, the task force came to consensus on the following set of decisions.

The task force has identified six areas of measurement that represent important learning opportunities for children and youth to enable them to be effective members of a globalized society.

1.) Access to and Completion of Learning Opportunities

Rationale: Children and youth must access, and most importantly complete their education. This domain addresses the unfinished access agenda for out-of-school children and youth and emphasizes the importance of tracking completion, which currently is not done systematically. It also allows for a broad definition of schooling, including any intentional learning programs, whether formal, nonformal or virtual. Evidence shows that the skills and knowledge needed for global citizenship are rarely learned outside of intentional learning activities.

2.) Exposure to a Breadth of Learning Opportunities Across all Seven Domains

Rationale: Children and youth should have a breadth of learning opportunities that, at a minimum, covers the seven learning domains. It is expected that an even broader set of competencies is necessary at the national and local levels; however, the task force recommends that the breadth of learning that education systems offer, at least across these seven domains, be tracked globally.

3.) Early Childhood Experiences that Result in Readiness for Primary School

Rationale: The early childhood years are critical to later learning and development. Entry to primary school is a key milestone in a child's learning trajectory, and measuring school readiness can help drive improvements in preprimary education, health, family services, etc. Because of the varying rates at which young children develop, a holistic measure across multiple domains is the best way to capture learning at this stage. School readiness is broadly defined and typically includes aspects of learning related to at least five of the seven domains: physical well-being, social and emotional, literacy and communication, learning approaches and cognition, and numeracy and mathematics.

4.) The Ability to Read and Understand a Variety of Texts

Rationale: Children and youth must be able to communicate in their mother tongue and in the primary language of instruction. Foundational reading skills necessary for learning to read are critical for functioning in modern society, in addition to the ability to comprehend and analyze complex texts through a variety of media. This domain encompasses both primary and lower secondary levels.

5.) The Ability to Use Numbers and Apply this Knowledge to Real-Life Situations

Rationale: Children must be able to count and understand mathematical concepts both to make informed economic choices and to pursue advanced learning in such disciplines as science, engineering, economics, research, technology, etc. This domain also encompasses both the primary and lower secondary levels.

6.) An Adaptable, Flexible Skill Set to Meet the Demands of the 21^st Century

Rationale: Beyond literacy and numeracy, children and youth need a variety of skills across the seven learning domains to succeed in the 21st century. Administered in lower secondary, this domain of measurement might cover multiple competencies such as environmental awareness, collaborative problem solving, information communications technology digital literacy, and social responsibility.

The task force also recognizes that a system of global measurement will only be effective in improving learning outcomes if there is a simultaneous focus on improving capacity within countries to conduct and use learning assessments. The Measures and Methods Working Group proposed the establishment of a neutral international body, which may be an expansion of an existing agency, to operationalize these recommendations. In Dubai, the task force agreed to explore the feasibility of such an advisory group to track progress against the global areas of measurement and help build national capacity for measuring learning. In Phase III of the LMTF project, the Implementation Working Group will investigate this idea further and conduct an analysis of how to best translate these recommendations into practice.

Next Steps and Phase III

The next steps in the process include the April release of the task force’s final recommendations from the meeting in Dubai. A more detailed technical report on the Phase II process and results will follow.

The third and final working group on implementation will convene from March through August 2013. Led by Dzingai Mutumbuka—chair of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and former minister of education of Zimbabwe—the Implementation Working Group will consider, among other things:

The feasibility of setting up a neutral international advisory group on global learning measurement.

How governments can convene stakeholders to improve learning measurement across the seven learning domains.

What resources and financing would be needed to implement task force recommendations.

How to operationalize the two proposed areas of measurement for which there are currently no global measures (i.e., breadth of learning opportunities and 21st century knowledge and skills).

In July 2013, the task force will meet for a third time in person to hear the working group’s proposal.

Finally, a word on project scope. As originally conceived, the job of the Learning Metrics Task Force is to build consensus around global aspiration for learning and the measurement of learning outcomes. The task force recognizes that this is only one small piece of the larger quality puzzle, albeit an important one. Assessments alone will not improve the quality of instruction or learning environments; rather, they provide a better understanding of outcomes to enable policymakers and educators to develop strategies for improving learning, while taking into account many other factors. In response to multiple requests for the task force to make recommendations regarding inputs, such as curriculum, instruction, etc., discussions are now underway to explore whether there should be an LMTF Phase IV to expand the project scope beyond learning metrics.

To receive regular updates on the task force’s progress, send your name and email address to LearningMetrics@brookings.edu. Or visit brookings.edu/learningmetrics for more information.

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop
Mari Soliván
Kate Anderson Simons

Image Source: © Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

International Women’s Day in India and Around the World: Progress and Strategies for Action

Urvashi Sahni and Xanthe Ackerman — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:00:00 -0500

International Women’s Day, March 8, is here again, and it is time to take stock of women’s lives in the world today. Great progress has been made in education and for women more broadly. Still, so much work remains to ensure that women are empowered, educated, safe, healthy and free to be fully participating members of equal societies. In India, the recent groundswell of support for women and girls speaks to the potential to overturn harmful gender norms. We need approaches, such as self-organizing and campaigning for women’s rights, gender-sensitive education, and including men in the fight for equality, that go beyond business as usual. At the global level, it is critical that the next set of development goals hold actors to better account for progress for women and girls.

In many countries, the situation for women is improving at the highest levels of leadership and among the poor, even if slowly. There are now 17 female heads of state around the world—almost twice as many as in 1990. According to UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report, the number of countries where girls face severe gender disparity—defined as having less than nine girls in primary school for every ten boys—has dropped from 33 countries in 1999 to 17 in 2010. Gender parity at the secondary level has improved and, when girls make it to the secondary level in most countries, their retention and progression is the same or better than boys. More women are receiving antenatal care and skilled assistance during delivery—one of the most critical times in the prevention of maternal mortality.

While the international community welcomes and celebrates these gains for women and girls, much more needs to be done to ensure women and girl’s equality, and to meet the goals set out by the first set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Women are still largely unsafe, unwanted and unequal in the developing world. There are 4 million missing women and girls each year in developing countries. They are killed in the womb, soon after birth or during their child-bearing years. Most countries will miss the Education For All goal of a 50 percent improvement in adult literacy—a challenge that disproportionately affects women, who make up about two-thirds of the 775 million adults who cannot read. In addition to addressing lagging progress in female mortality reduction and access to education and economic opportunity, the World Development Report 2012 calls for renewed efforts to increase women’s voice and agency in the home and society, and to limit the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. Gender-based violence also continues to plague women around the world. According to CARE’s Women and Empowerment report, at least 1 in 3 females has been physically or sexually abused, often repeatedly and by a relative or acquaintance. Violence rivals cancer as a top cause of morbidity and mortality for women of child-bearing age.

In India, the case for renewed commitment to women and girls is clear. The government has made significant efforts to improve conditions for women and girls, including creating a large-scale girls’ education program that provides schools and support for girls in rural areas and has already helped to narrow the gender gap. Still, much remains to be done by the government and all other stakeholders. The child mortality rate in India is the highest in the world and some estimate that 1 million girls are killed in the womb there each year. In terms of education, gender overlaps with other causes of marginalization, including poverty, location (rural vs. urban) and social factors, such caste and tribe to worsen access and outcomes. For instance, according to the World Inequality Database on Education, in 2005, 31 percent of women age 17-22 years had less than four years of school, compared to 16 percent of men. Among the poor in the poorer regions of India, the numbers were as high as 91 percent of women compared to 55 percent of men.

Of all the challenges that women and girls face, to some, having no voice is among the most intolerable. Heroines the world over who struggle to be free and to make their voices heard, even when confronting lethal consequences. Malala was shot because she voiced the right to education for women in Pakistan, and Nirbhaya in India was brutally raped and murdered because she expressed her right to travel freely. For any known story, there are millions of lesser known cases such as Khusboo. This young woman in Uttar Pradesh, India received an education—a gender-based education that made empowerment the central goal—and found the courage to voice her right to complete high school. She resisted her father’s attempt to marry her off at 16 and for that she was beaten mercilessly and cast out of his house. To share her story and her voice, she recently made an award-winning autobiographical video that showed the abuse she faced and the triumph of holding up the diploma she earned.

On International Women’s Day, let us celebrate women’s triumphs, but let us also consider what more can be done to confront the reality that so many women face. The following are strategies that show promise in India and can be replicated and scaled.

Strategy #1: Self-Organize and Challenge the Status Quo

Advocacy campaigns that demand gender equality, examine gender norms and address the inconsistency of patriarchal structures in democratic societies can be highly effective. On February 14, 2013, Valentine’s Day, millions of women and many men rose up against gender-based violence across the globe. In India, thousands of people of all ages and gender took to the streets with banners, slogans, songs, street plays and dances, celebrating women and supporting their right to control their lives, their right to a safe world, their right to a voice. The India’s Daughters Campaign represents a civil society effort along these lines and has used mobile technology to engage and organize youth in the most rural areas, including the students at 28 girls’ schools.

Campaigning as a part of the ongoing public outcry following the rape and death of Nirbhaya has resulted in the constitution of a high-level committee to review laws related to sexual crimes. The committee produced The Justice Verma Report in record-breaking time. The report makes several recommendations to the government including judicial, political, police and military reforms. The committee also recommended that the Parliament promulgate a special bill of rights for women to ensure a life of safety and dignity, including in marriage. For the first time there is mention of “sexual autonomy” for women, and there is some recognition of marital rape as a crime. Severe punishments for rape and for all sexual offences are recommended, including stalking and sexual harassment in the work place. The committee writes that all marriages should be registered, which will make it possible to identify and prevent child marriages, which are widely prevalent in India. In addition, it recommends that police be subject to punitive action for not registering cases of rape and other sexual crimes. Jody Williams, civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work on the Campaign to Ban Landmines, states “impunity” as the single biggest reason that violence against women continues to exist in such large numbers. Accordingly, the Justice Verma Report tries to make the law more responsive.

People in India are demanding that the issue of women’s safety be taken seriously by the government, and the state has, in this instance, responded. Their actions pave the way for further progress. For instance, a recent budget declaration allocates $200 million for the “safety of women,” and civil society organizations now are organizing to understand how the Ministry of Women and Children will spend this money. The fact that the elections are only a year away could be a factor in government’s responsiveness to civil society demands. Even so, women are being taken seriously as a political constituency to be recognized and considered.

The movement that led to the Justice Verma Report has been hugely successful, but there is more work to be done. Advocacy efforts should focus not only on these issues and judicial responses, but also the administrative environment and ability for crimes to be redressed quickly. The Indian government passed an ordinance recognizing 90 percent of the recommendations, but left out two important ones. Marital rape has still been denied legal recognition, leaving women unsafe in the domestic space, and the armed forces have been left out of the punitive net. Both are grave omissions, and women’s organizations are contesting them strongly.

Strategy #2: Include Gender Education in the Curriculum

Since critical dialogues can lead to real change in society with positive outcomes for women and men, we must note that the education system can support these dialogues by introducing gender education in the curriculum to sensitize and empower both girls and boys. What is most significant in the recent events in India is that we have seen that girls and women (at least in urban areas) are finding their “voice” and raising it. Critical dialogues and discussions around gender are taking place all over, in the media, universities, government, policymaking halls of power, schools, cafes, homes, and on the streets. Gender has become, at least for now, an important issue. This transformation can and should happen in every school for every girl and boy. Even now, policymakers and civil society are considering the convening of a national-level working group in India to examine how education can promote positive gender norms.

Indeed, gender norms should receive special official focus in education systems, curricula and teacher training. Students must know the laws and recognize that women are entitled to an equal voice in the home and in society. Education helps girls and women develop their voice and the capacity to aspire to equality, based on the recognition of themselves as equal persons. We must include gender education in our core curriculum along with or as part of human rights education. This inclusion will help reduce one more gender gap—that of limiting the reproduction of inequality across generations—by enabling both boys and girls to examine gendered construction of identities and social norms, the underlying structures that perpetuate inequality, and to unlearn negative and harmful ideas about gender.

In order for gender education to be included in national curricula, it is necessary for ministries of education to approve and initiate a process whereby academics, gender experts, practitioners and educationists can work collaboratively to develop a graded curriculum for gender education, along with related teacher training courses. Schools provide an opportunity for intellectual discussions about gender roles, responsibilities and resulting power relations, which could help students gain a clearer perspective about what “equality” means in democratic societies. Making gender education a curricular subject will make the issue “official” and legitimate and create a generation of more egalitarian gender norms. A concerted effort is required by the international education and development community to influence policy at the country level in this direction.

Strategy #3: Include Men in the Conversation

If there is anything to rejoice and feel hopeful about for women on International Women’s Day, it is the support from men for the movement to better ensure women’s safety and opportunity, especially in India. Men’s participation is something that all of us, men and women everywhere, should tenaciously hold on to in the fight for gender equality. We need male champions in every sphere: national politics, business, civil society, in homes and in schools. We all stand to gain from a society where everyone has a voice. As we’ve learned, boys are open and willing to think about the issue seriously: The protests in India were led equally by young men and women.

The inclusion of boys and men in the struggle for gender equality is critical, and women and girls need them as allies. Women’s education, health and safety are not “women’s problems” to be dealt with for and by women alone. Boys must be engaged in serious discussions about the social construction of masculinity and feminity in their contexts with the resulting implications for gender equality.

Strategy #4: Ensure the Next Set of Global Goals Focus on Gender Equality

At the global level, we must all work to ensure that gender continues to play a prominent role in the next set of global development goals. Whether gender is a cross-cutting issue that runs through all goals, or whether there are one or more goals that deal specifically with gender, the commitment to measuring progress for women and girls and funding policies and programs that improve conditions for women is critical and must be increased. Goals, metrics and policies should recognize that progress for girls and women over all often masks the lack of progress for large swaths of the female population. Even when average conditions for women and girls are improving, the situation for those affected by multiple forms of disadvantage, such as extreme poverty, remote location, conflict, disability, domestic abuse, negative gender norms, often remain unchanged.

While on International Women’s Day we celebrate the goals accomplished by women and girls, and men and boys—we also take stock of all that is yet to be finished.

Authors

Urvashi Sahni
Xanthe Ackerman

Toward Consensus on a Goal for Education within the Post-2015 Development Agenda: A Tale of Two Regional Consultations

Allison Anderson, Urvashi Sahni and Mathias Weyessa — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:32:00 -0500

Last week, in two separate regional consultations (in Africa and in Asia) on education in the post-2015 agenda, a wide range of representatives focused on the importance of an equitable learning agenda that defined learning as going beyond literacy and numeracy. This groundswell of support for the inclusion of a robust measure of learning was also reflected at the global Learning Metrics Task Force Meeting in Dubai.

African Regional Consultation

On February 28, 2013, 35 delegates representing civil society organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutes and think tanks consulted with the African Union on the post-Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) education agenda and recommended priority areas for the post-2015 framework. The meeting, held in Addis Ababa, was organized by the African Union in collaboration with Save the Children, UNICEF and the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA). In his opening address, Ned Olney, Save the Children’s Ethiopia country director, spoke on the current state of education in Ethiopia to emphasize that inequity and learning gaps remain key challenges to children’s education across the globe and must be addressed in the post-2015 development framework.

The delegates at the Addis Ababa meeting developed guiding principles, priorities and strategies to inform the global and continental post-2015 framework based on a variety of position papers and views put forward by the Africa Network Campaign on Education For All, UNICEF, UNESCO, the Global Campaign for Education, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, the Commonwealth Education Working Group and the Outcome Document of the Regional Consultations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. In the guiding principles developed at the meeting, equity is highlighted as a major priority, including the need to focus on marginalized populations such as girls, ethnic minorities, communities in hard to reach areas, and children with disabilities. The principles also call for equitable distribution of provisions and schools targeting these marginalized groups. Another principle highlighted was ownership of and broad-based participation in policy processes at all levels, involving communities and civil society organizations.

The meeting identified three priority areas for education the post-2015 framework:

Quality education, which translates into learning outcomes at all levels (early childhood development, technical and vocational training, and primary, secondary and tertiary education).
Equitable and inclusive access to education at basic, secondary and tertiary levels.
Literacy and skills development.

Among the strategies identified to meet these priorities were a focus on life skills training, the promotion of skills for youth employability, and strategies for measuring learning outcomes for 21st century skills (commonly defined as including critical-thinking skills, collaborative working skills, and skills for utilizing information and communications technology). Dr. Bernice Njenga, the head of the Education Division of the African Union, will bring the recommendations from the meeting in Ethiopia to the Africa Wide Consultation on the Post-2015 Development Agenda in Tunis (March 11–12), which will inform the development of the African position on the post-2015 development agenda, which will then be presented to the African Union Summit in May for adoption by member states.

Asian Regional Consultation

At the same time as delegates were meeting in Addis Ababa, 4,193 miles away in Bangkok, Thailand, over 120 stakeholders from the Asia-Pacific region were meeting at the Regional Thematic Consultation on Education in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, co-organized by UNICEF’s regional offices for East Asia and the Pacific and for South Asia and UNESCO Bangkok. Delegates included representatives from governments, international, regional, national and local NGOs, universities and academia, teachers’ unions, and organizations for youth and for persons with disabilities .

Throughout the consultation, there was a definite shift in the discourse from access to education to learning, which goes beyond literacy and numeracy to include cognitive and non-cognitive skills, psychosocial skills and critical thinking. There was also a clear focus on equity and the need to ensure equitable learning across gender, ethnicity, caste, socio-economic class, disabilities, geographic region and age. Delegates highlighted the importance of skills like resilience and the ability to adapt to and manage crises and disasters, given that the world is rapidly changing, politically, socially and climatically. Young people in particular emphasized that education should be relevant to their context and linked to employment. There was a welcomed focus on governance, moving beyond discussions of financing and budgets to the need for education systems that are more accountable to communities and less corrupt. While delegates agreed that that education is the responsibility of the government, the delegates also deemed partnerships with civil society, the donor community (including the corporate sector) and local communities increasingly important for realizing the goal of quality education for all.

The outcome document of the Bangkok meeting articulates recommendations for a) equitable and inclusive access to and participation in learning, b) quality of learning, c) global citizenship, skills and competencies for life and work, d) governance, financing and partnership/cooperation, and e) possible scenarios and options for how to best articulate and position education in a post-2015 development agenda. Within the recommendations for how to articulate an education goal, the outcome document asserts, “quality learning for all should be an overarching, universally relevant goal, with possibility of flexible adaptation in terms of target setting at national and local levels. In order to ensure that education goals contribute to narrowing disparities within a country, it is crucial to set targets for—and systematically monitor—disparity reduction.” The draft outcome document also states that the goal for education in the post-2015 development agenda could embrace the following key aspects: “To guarantee equitable opportunities for all to participate in transformative quality learning at all levels aiming to provide the knowledge, skills, competencies and values vital to achieve inclusive and sustainable development.”

What Comes Next

These two regional consultions have revealed a collective vision regarding education priorities for a post-2015 development agenda: equitable learning that goes beyond literacy and numeracy to foster broader cognitive and personal development and ensure full participation in modern economies and societies. This vision is in line with the vision that has emerged from the global Learning Metrics Task Force and position papers released by Save the Children, the Basic Education Coalition and The Global Campaign for Education U.S. Chapter, among others.

The outcomes of these two consultations will contribute to the debate at the Global Leadership Meeting on Education on the post-2015 agenda in Dakar, Senegal, on March 18-19. At that meeting, high-level participants will develop recommendations around an education goal, including how progress will be measured. The outcome document will eventually influence the High-Level Panel’s report and the debate on the post-2015 development agenda at U.N. General Assembly meeting. When it meets in Dakar, the education community should speak with voice on a goal that prioritizes the issues that have emerged across the consultation processes: to amend the current MDG emphasis on access to education to include a focus on equitable learning.

The remaining debate about how to balance global- and country-level targets and metrics and to do so in a way that measures learning beyond literacy and numeracy is being tackled by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Educations’ global Learning Metrics Task Force. When the report from that bodies’ February 20-21 meeting in Dubai is released this month it will help to bring global voices and evidence to the remaining questions of targets and metrics.

Authors

The Declaration of the Millennium Development Goals

John McArthur — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

More than a decade after the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ample confusion persists regarding their genesis. In particular, many people misunderstand the relationship between the contents of the September 2000 UN Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets that were extracted from that Declaration. As recently as 2012, I have heard senior global policy figures state a belief that, “The Millennium Declaration did not establish any quantitative targets. Those were set afterwards.” This is not correct. All of the MDGs’ original formal Targets were established in the Millennium Declaration.

The roots of the misunderstanding probably lie in the U.S. government’s stance from mid-2001, when the MDGs were first used as a policy term, through September 2005, when President Bush first used the words “Millennium Development Goals” in public. During the interim period, U.S. officials would commonly state that, “The United States supports the goals of the Millennium Declaration but not the Millennium Development Goals,” or that “The United States supports Goals 1 through 7 but not Goal 8.” When looking at the actual contents of the Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets, neither statement is logical.

The following describes the issues through the form of an FAQ structure.

1. Which Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration?
All of the original MDG Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration. Following the September 2000 Millennium Summit, the UN General Assembly mandated Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prepare a long-term roadmap towards the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. Annan in turn commissioned Assistant Secretary-General Michael Doyle to coordinate a process to extract the development-related outcomes of the Millennium Declaration and thereby crystallize the priorities for follow-up.

In working through the prose of world leaders’ commitments embedded in the body of the Millennium Declaration, Doyle and his team (which included people like Jan Vandemoortele of UNDP and others from UNICEF, the OECD, World Bank, IMF, UNFPA and later WHO) identified a subset of 18 politically agreed commitments, which they categorized under eight overarching “Goals.” These 18 commitments were labeled as “Targets.” Ten out of the 18 Targets were quantitative in nature and nine out of ten set a deadline for 2015, the exception being the slum dweller Target for 2020. Table 1 lists the original 18 MDG Targets next to the relevant passage(s) from the Millennium Declaration. [The 18 Targets were later expanded to be 21, based on 2005 intergovernmental agreements, as described under point #6 below.] Appendix 1 includes the complete Development section of the Millennium Declaration.

Download the full paper »

Downloads

Download the paper

Authors

John McArthur

The New Push for Education Reform in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Xanthe Ackerman, Lauren Greubel and Rebecca Winthrop — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:38:00 -0500

Over the last two years the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has doubled the proportion of the national budget going to education from 6.5 percent to 13.8 percent. Such a large increase is uncommon. More than doubling the percent of the national budget appropriated to education is indicative of a greater shift in national priorities to move education up the ladder of importance. Still, for this commitment to translate into positive outcomes for the millions of children who are in school but currently not learning, and the 7 million primary school-age children who are out of school, the DRC and its partners must address challenges made more complex by on-going conditions of insecurity.

In 2012 the ministry of education finalized a new strategy that outlines its national objectives for the next three years. Knowing that the depth of the problem is too great to address without support, the government has made a concerted effort to reach out to international partners, including through two trips to Washington D.C. and New York in the last three months - one by Minister of Education Mwangu in December 2012 and a second by Prime Minister Mapon this past February. The Brookings Center for Universal Education, together with the Africa Growth Initiative, co-hosted the prime minister and his delegation and engaged in a discussion about economic stabilization and education policy and partnerships.

Despite the step change in recent budget allocations to education, the country has a long way to go in reaching universal primary enrollment and improving the quality of education available to all the children in its country. On the 2011 Human Development Index, the annual rankings of national achievement in health, education and income in 187 countries, the DRC was ranked last. Ravaged by over 15 years of conflict that ended in 2008, the country faces the threat of on-going violence and instability in the eastern region that prevents broader economic and social development. Although 11 heads of state signed a peace accord on February 24th at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, the government and the M23 rebels remain locked in tense negotiations. Rebel tactics in the DRC have been particularly brutal, including widespread rape of girls and women.

Reaching the lost generation

During past years of conflict in the DRC social services were slowed or even stopped. By the government’s report, in 1990 the national allocation to education was 1 percent of the national budget and in 1999 only 32 percent of children were in primary school. Since then, 2.7 million children have died as a result of the conflict. Other children did not go to school because they were working, fighting, or were displaced from their homes due to instability. The prime minister dubs this generation, who are now young adults, the “lost generation” because of the opportunities that passed them over. Data from a 2010 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey conducted nationally reflects the impact of war on these young adults. It found that nationally only 51 percent of young women age 15-24 years are literate, a figure that falls to only 28 percent for women from the poorest quintile. These youth make up the country’s unskilled labor force and a large percentage of the unemployed – almost 70 percent of youth have no job. The government and its partners are now tasked with providing employment opportunities for this generation. One way they are doing so is by creating jobs in the agricultural and social service sectors.

Not only does the country need to create jobs, but also ensure there are skilled people to fill them. The DRC is a country with the third largest population in sub-Saharan Africa. It is endowed with some of Africa’s most fertile soil, unparalleled hydroelectric potential and many of the world’s most precious metals. Its labor market demands workers with strong foundational skills including literacy and numeracy, and noncognitive attributes such as critical thinking and interpersonal communication. But also skills that are relevant to – and meet the needs of – a growing economy, such as information and communication technology fluency, computer literacy and industry specific technical skills. The government is partnering with private universities, the business sector and NGOs to create targeted vocational programs such as specialized training programs in mechanics and plumbing.

The DRC faces twin challenges of remedying the lack of skills and employment opportunities for the “lost generation” with improving its education system to best meet the needs of today’s children. To achieve this the government announced that primary education would be free up through third grade in 2010 and have been adding one grade level each school year since. Still, reaching the most marginalized with quality education remains a formidable challenge, including that the implementation of the free primary education policy has been criticized by some members of civil society.

Ensuring equity

Recent data from UNICEF shows that the DRC’s national net enrollment rate is 75 percent for primary school. Reaching the last 25 percent of out-of-school primary aged children – approximately 7 million children by some estimates – is essential for the DRC’s long-term growth and prosperity. But the last 25 percent is will be the hardest to reach. They are the children from the poorest families, the most rural and conflict-affected areas, and those disadvantaged by their gender or disability.

Reaching the conflict-affected with education services is a particular challenge. The use of child soldiers is pervasive in the DRC and recruitment prevents some children from staying in school. As of 2011, an estimated 7,000 child soldiers remained in both armed groups and government forces (despite large scale releases of child soldiers from the national army in preceding years and reforms making recruitment of children under 18 illegal). As of December 2010 there were 2.7 million internally displaced persons in the country and an additional 491,481 refugees in other countries from the DRC, a large percent of which are children whose access to education has been disrupted. International actors have an important role in supporting demobilized child soldiers and in delivering services to IDPs, including food, health support, shelter and education services; but the government has the ultimate responsibility to ensure their right to education.

In addition to living in conflict-affected areas, other factors such as gender, poverty and location create disadvantage. Data from UNESCO’s Education For All Global Monitoring Report’s new World Inequality Database on Education shows just how stark the disparities can be. For example, only 6 percent of urban 17-22 year olds face extreme education poverty (less than two years of schooling) compared to 23 percent of their rural counterparts. Two percent of the richest quintile face extreme education poverty in contrast to 26 percent of the poorest quintile. However, the greatest disparities exist between regions: In Kinshasa only 2 percent of the population experience extreme education poverty, compared to 32 percent in North Kivu – the site of much current and ongoing conflict. The impact of poverty on education is evident among the more than 40 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 14 who have been child laborers, especially in mines.

Girls are especially vulnerable and the disadvantage they face is reinforced in conflict-affected areas. The Gender Parity Index for primary school is 0.93, but falls to 0.83 in Katanga in the conflict-affected east of the country. Only 7 percent of males face extreme education poverty, compared to 23 percent of females. Rape is frequently used as a tool of war, many times against children. In 2007, UNICEF reported 18,000 survivors of rape in eastern the DRC alone, half of whom were children. During surges in rebel activity, as recently as the fall of 2012, reports show that sexual assault of women and girls sharply increases.

Improving education quality

Improving equity in access to education is one step the government of the DRC can take to strengthen economic growth; another is improving the quality of education for children once in school. Learning outcomes in the DRC are low. In a RTI International 2012 Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) baseline assessment of Grades 4 and 6 students showed that 29 percent of boys and 44 percent of females could not read one word. Furthermore, the assessment found that two out of three Grade 4 and 6 boys, and more than three out of four girls in the same grades, were unable to answer a single reading comprehension question correctly.

Poor learning outcomes are due in part to an undersupported teaching force. In primary school, the national average is one teacher for 37 pupils, but in marginalized or rural areas, there can be over 100 pupils per class. Similarly there is a lack of education materials, with one textbook for every two students at the primary level. Estimates suggest that there are between 350,000 and 450,000 teachers, with just over half of these teaching at primary level. The average age of teachers is 50 years old and while almost 74 percent of primary teachers are trained, only 33 percent of teachers at secondary level are trained. Salary expenditure consists of four-fifths of the education budget, yet teacher salary levels remain among the lowest in the world and have declined in real terms by up to 40 percent.

The DRC has made improving the quality and relevance of education the second priority of its education strategy. To promote quality education, an 2012 RTI report said the government committed to increasing free textbook distribution, creating a national policy on teacher training, establishing a national action plan to add value to the teaching profession, training teachers and instituting curriculum reform.

Funding gap

In 2012 the government developed an Interim Education Plan with three objectives: increasing access, equity and retention, improving the quality and relevance of education and strengthening governance. In addition to the increase in budget allocation to education over the last decade, the government reports widespread economic reforms that have resulted in a stabilized exchange rate, lower inflation rate, and an increase in public revenue collection so that it now accounts for 28 percent of the GDP, compared to 5 percent in the 1990s.

In December 2012 the DRC was awarded $100 million by the Global Partnership for Education to help increase access to primary education, improve the quality of education through better learning materials and strengthened teacher training, and improve management in the education sector. While the government’s budget for education from 2012 to 2015 is $1.2 billion, in a presentation by H.E. Mr. Maker Mwangu Famba to the Brookings Institution, he explained there is still a $270 million financing gap. In addition to the additional funds, the country seeks technical support to aid in the absorption of funds and efficient delivery of services.

On April 18th and 19th, the minister of education and the minister of finance will return to Washington D.C. to attend the Learning for All Ministerial meetings at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Invited by World Bank President Jim Kim, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and U.N. Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown, the delegation will meet with members of the international community to discuss how to provide quality education for all and to continue to accelerate progress toward the reaching Millennium Development Goal of universal access to education in the DRC.

Authors

Xanthe Ackerman
Lauren Greubel
Rebecca Winthrop

Image Source: Sharon Farmer

Improving Education Governance and Financing: A Bigger Role for the Private Sector

Allison Anderson and Amanda Gardiner — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:47:00 -0500

What are the key obstacles in financing education? Who should be held accountable for ensuring that children receive a good quality education? These questions are at the heart of the debate going on in the post-2015 development agenda’s Global Consultation on Education, which is wrapping up this week. With a massive financing gap of $16 billion per year needed to achieve education for all by 2015, it is clear that more funding is needed. But increased financing is only one part of the equation: more effective and equitable aid is the other. Ensuring more effective aid isn’t a question of a public or private financing, but of working smarter and more collaboratively to bring the lessons of what works and what doesn't in both the public and private systems to the poorest of the poor, to places where neither government nor market approaches on their own are solving the education crisis.

Private Sector Involvement in the Post-2015 Education Agenda
The private sector should be part of the solution to development and education challenges, and is increasingly operating as such. Previously, the private sector too often sat outside of development policy processes. Now the U.N. secretary general’s Education First initiative and High Level Panel on the post-2015 development agenda are helping to change these out-dated dynamics.

The Global Education First Initiative, U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon’s five-year education initiative aimed at giving a “big push” to the global movement for education by 2015 and beyond, is forging a broad coalition for change across donors, governments, the private sector and civil society. The secretary general has deliberately included business leaders in his High Level Panel to advance the development framework beyond 2015, including Betty Maina, the chief executive of Kenya’s Association of Manufacturers, and Paul Polman, the chief executive officer of Unilever, a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. In addition, the High Level Panel has sought private sector input throughout its process. Never before has the door been so wide open to businesses wanting to help shape the development debate, and never before have so many companies gotten engaged.

The business case for corporate engagement is compelling: a well-educated and skilled workforce is crucial to corporate competitiveness and to national growth, particularly in our knowledge-based, globalized 21st-century economy. Private sector involvement within the education sector has until now largely taken place under the banner of corporate social responsibility, with activities among companies often fragmented. In order to create change, Sarah Brown is chairing the Global Business Coalition for Education, which provides a coordinating mechanism for corporate efforts to deliver on the promise of quality education for all of the world’s children. The initiative brings together corporate leaders around a set of education priorities and enables them to identify opportunities for collaboration, advocate collectively, and, where possible, pool resources for greater scale and impact. While more still needs to be done, including getting more companies involved, the seeds have been sown.

More Effective and Equitable Financing
More financing is crucial, but as we have learned from the health sector, the education sector must ensure that the focus on mobilizing funding does not come at the expense of a productive discussion about how to ensure funding is spent efficiently and that delivery mechanisms are cost effective.

One enormous challenge for financing education is equity: public spending often reinforces disadvantage, with the most prosperous regions and best performing schools cornering the lion’s share of the education budget. As recently highlighted by Kevin Watkins, we must move away from the current “equal finance for each pupil” model and toward “an equal chance for every child” approach. Both public and private spending must play a greater role in mitigating disadvantage.

Corporate stakeholders can help to overcome obstacles in education through support for innovative programs and data-driven policies, for instance through participation in global initiatives such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Forty-six countries to date have been approved for GPE program implementation grants with a combined value of $2.76 billion dollars. Additionally the number of countries and the value of approvals are expected to significantly increase in 2013. GPE has a seat on its board for the private sector/private foundation constituency; both Pearson and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation represent the private sector through this mechanism. In this capacity, these private sector actors are encouraging alignment across many actors and education initiatives, and are working to identify opportunities for private sector stakeholders to become more engaged in shaping and supporting national education plans in support of GPE priorities. Companies like Microsoft and Intel, and foundations including the Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundation and Firelight Foundation, are some of the other private sector actors involved.

Private companies are developing innovative financing strategies, including investments that are targeted to promote equitable learning in developing countries. For instance, investment in private companies that are committed to original approaches and learning outcomes for economically disadvantaged children brings new capital into the education sector. The Pearson Affordable Learning Fund, launched in 2012 with $15 million of initial capital, provides an example of private sector investment to promote greater opportunity along these lines.

Supporting Innovative Models
Private sector engagement in education is as much about innovation in delivery models as it is about mobilizing resources. A core strength of the private sector is its ability to finance innovation, testing the viability of new approaches and models, and taking them to scale without long bureaucratic delays. Indeed, the private sector can take risks that governments and other actors cannot afford to make and be more nimble in choosing and making investments. In this spirit of innovation, U.N. Special Envoy Gordon Brown, the Global Business Coalition for Education and Laurene Powell Jobs hosted a summit on the role of technology in education on January 31st at the Twitter offices in Silicon Valley. The summit focused on three themes: how technology can be a substitute for bad or nonexisting education, how technology can be used to enable the system to do things more effectively, and how technology can be used to better meet learning needs through customized learning. Outcomes of the meeting included two public-private partnerships that seek to harness private sector innovation for the good of public education: 1.) UNICEF’s Office for Innovation is organizing innovation labs with tech companies in several country offices in advance of a follow-up meeting in 2014; and 2.) the idea of a new Global Literacy X Prize for the group that brings 200 illiterate kids to literacy in the fastest, most scalable way possible.

Data-Driven and Outcomes-Focused
Good data is crucial to business success and to improving the state of education around the world. The private sector can play a role in commissioning and gathering vital education data needed to shape programs and policies. Pearson’s partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit is one example of this. The two launched the Learning Curve in 2012, a large open resource of educational data. The data in the Learning Curve, drawn from sources including the OECD, UNESCO and national statistics from 50 countries, shows a clear lack of correlation between public spending on education and the outcomes that countries achieve for their students. Data from partnerships such as these can show us that as important as increasing financing for education is, creating incentives, measuring learning outcomes and prioritizing open transparent accountability (for governments, districts, schools and even individual teachers) may be equally important.

Another effort currently underway to improve data and measurement of learning outcomes is the Learning Metrics Task Force, which represents a collaborative effort to build consensus around a set of learning goals that can be measured and achieved globally, and which can inform the post-2015 process. This work is in response to the realization that the focus on access to education in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was at a cost to the quality of education and that there is too little accountability for learning outcomes once children go to school. The Task Force is co-chaired by a private sector representative, Sir Michael Barber of Pearson, a U.N. representative, Geeta Rao Gupta of UNICEF and a civil society representative, Rukmini Banerjee of Pratham.

The current post-2015 development agenda debate provides an opportunity for education stakeholders to rectify this oversight and inject learning into the agenda. A development goal with specific targets around learning would help to hold governments accountable for not only attendance numbers, but also for the performance of their schools and students over time. It could result in more effective education plans and systems that better enable teachers, students and parents to overcome the challenges and harness the opportunities of the 21st century. Indeed, the Learning Metrics Task Force’s meeting taking place this week in Dubai will aim to formulate meaningful and useable metrics that will not overburden governments already struggling to implement their national education plans with extremely limited resources.

The debate on financing within the post-2015 agenda provides the education community with an opportunity to identify good practices for equitable financing of innovative programs and policies that can help to tear down the existing inequalities in education and throughout societies. These preceding examples are just the tip of the iceberg as to how the private sector can be a powerful partner in achieving a learning agenda and how its investments can serve as a model for similar initiatives in other parts of the world.

Authors

Allison Anderson
Amanda Gardiner

How Do You Support Teachers? Pay Them

Rebecca Winthrop — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 12:23:00 -0500

In many fragile and conflict-affected states, teachers are largely responsible for rebuilding and sustaining education systems, even when the government is unable or unwilling to do so. Teachers can be found working in some of the hardest conditions around the world and are often on the front lines of violence.

Education, and, with it teachers, have increasingly become targets of attack.

Between 2006 and 2009:

439 teachers, education employees and students were killed in Afghanistan;
117 teachers and students were assassinated in Colombia and 435 education staff also received death threats;
and the list goes on.

However, this form of violence is not the only thing that makes teaching especially difficult in these contexts. Teachers, like their students, have often been affected in other ways by the crisis themselves, including having their livelihoods disrupted by being displaced from their homes and losing loved ones. In addition, often the teachers working in this context are paid infrequently, if at all. A survey of teachers in post-war Liberia showed that, routinely, teachers had to work three jobs (two after they were finished teaching) just to feed their families.

Read the full blog post on Education for All Blog »

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop

Publication: Education for All Blog

Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn

Rebecca Winthrop and Maribel E. Soliván — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:03:00 -0500

Over the last few weeks, Allison Anderson has written about the recent UN High-Level Panel meeting in Monrovia and other pieces in the “multilayered puzzle that is the post-2015 process.” The Learning Metrics Task Force, convened last summer by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics and the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, seeks to provide another important piece of the post-MDG puzzle.

Comprised of national and regional governments, U.N. Education for All-convening agencies, regional political bodies, civil society and donor agencies, the task force is working on a fast-paced schedule leading to September 2013 to build global consensus on measuring learning and make concrete recommendations to inform the post-2015 agenda. The first report from the task force, “Toward Universal Learning: What Every Child Should Learn,” presents the results of the first step in that process.

Before the task force could consider which measures of learning to recommend for inclusion in global development goals, it first had to answer some foundational questions:

Are there essential competencies that all children and youth need to master to be successful in school and life, regardless of where they live?
Should the task force limit its recommendations to what is measurable now, or should it also consider opportunities for expanding current capacity for measurement?

To answer these questions, the task force sought guidance from a technical working group of 37 experts in early childhood, primary and postprimary education, as well as feedback gathered through global consultation from more than 500 stakeholders in 57 countries. Here’s what they learned.

Seven Domains of Learning
The task force identified the following seven domains of learning as important for all children and youth:

Physical well-being
Social and emotional
Culture and the arts
Literacy and communication
Learning approaches and cognition
Numeracy and mathematics
Science and technology

All seven domains are applicable from early childhood through postprimary, although at different stages some domains are more relevant than others.

The task force also learned that there is broad interest globally in exploring ways to measure learning beyond literacy and numeracy, where the current capacity for assessment is concentrated. Accordingly, the following framework was developed as the basis for the next set of task force recommendations. Figure 1 represents the task force’s vision for what every child across the globe should learn and be able to do, whether at the classroom, system or global level, by the time they reach postprimary age.

Finally, the task force charged the second technical working group on measures and methods with investigating a “hybrid model” for measuring learning, which would look at two tracks: improving the measurement of learning at a global level and at a national or subnational level.

Next Steps
Later this week the task force will meet in Dubai for the second in-person convening. Over two days, the group will hear options for this hybrid model and make final decisions on what it should look like. In the third and final phase of the project, the task force will consider how these measurements might be implemented to build national, regional and global capacity for assessment, and ultimately to improve learning for children and youth around the world. We look forward to sharing these decisions as they develop.

For more information about the Learning Metrics Task Force, visit www.brookings.edu/learningmetrics or email learningmetrics@brookings.edu to receive updates.

Authors

Rebecca Winthrop
Maribel E. Soliván