Essay 2

Local context matters

By appealing to global actors, I appear insensitive to the fact that education is an eminently local and political affair. My essay was addressed to my colleagues in international organizations, inviting them to step up. I believe they have a role to play to improve the performance of their own organizations and to improve collaboration between them. But I could have done a better job of connecting the dots between the global and the local actors. If I had to reframe my essay, I would start from the classroom, then zoom out to the country context, and then out to the global actors. I would pose the question as: What needs to happen at the classroom level to improve instruction of FLN; are local actors poised to take the necessary actions to enable this; and what role should the global actors play to support the right local action?

Let’s make this concrete and take the example of the World Bank’s commitment to halve LP by 2030. How does this commitment made at the World Bank’s president’s level translate into action? The Bank’s primary instrument is lending to countries. So, to halve LP, the World Bank needs to have a corresponding loan portfolio to its client countries. But those countries may not want to borrow to meet this particular objective; they might legitimately want to borrow for secondary, tertiary, or vocational education. Even if a country chooses to borrow money to achieve the LP goal, what is the mechanism by which the quality of these loans is ascertained? Do they track learning outcomes? Are there competing programs being implemented in that country? Is there a robust local governance structure that elicits regular review of collective progress against LP, and, if not, how is it being strengthened?

My view is that, having made an institutional commitment to halving LP, it is incumbent on the leadership of the World Bank to align internal incentives and operations to its declared objective. Otherwise, we are left with another grand but hollow promise, of the kind the sector has seen before.

Focus and coalitions

There are two sets of criticisms about the notion of focusing. First, there is no legitimacy to a top-down, imperial focus, and that the job of agencies is simply to support what countries want. Second, it is far from obvious that FLN is the right focus since other areas “are hard to get wrong.”

I agree with the first criticism. Thus, in my essay, I don’t suggest that a focus on FLN be forced onto countries, by using aid conditionality, for example. Nor do I suggest a wholesale redirecting of domestic or aid funding to FLN: it may not be needed at all. On the contrary, I suggest that agencies, like the World Bank, US Agency for International Development, and UNICEF, work with countries also convinced that they need to improve the quality of their basic education system within their fiscal constraints. I would have labelled this compact as a “coalition of the willing” had the expression not been irretrievably corrupted.

To this, I’ll add two points:

•  First, an honest country dialogue by aid agencies ought to include a conversation about the quality of basic education. It is not true that aid agencies are just on the receiving end of what countries and civil society want: the exchange of ideas goes both ways; it is not obvious that the demand for gender equity or tobacco control or action on climate change emerged from the bottom up. Global institutions play an important leadership role in developing norms, building consensus, and prompting action.

•  Second, to focus is not to suggest that countries work on FLN to the exclusion of everything else.2 Obviously, governments will need to continue to run their pre-primary, secondary, vocational, and tertiary programs. For me, to focus is to invite a convergence of effort: it is to take the task seriously, to make every effort to understand the root causes of poor performance deeply, to align collective action to addressing those problems, to review progress regularly, and to have an honest conversation (an “account-based” one) about what needs to change. It is the difference between giving us a chance to make meaningful progress against a fundamental SDG 4 objective, versus making no progress at all against any objective.

The other criticism is that governments could spare themselves the heartache of improving FLN by doing other “easier” things, like providing school meals, expanding secondary school seats, etc. Some things are indeed easier, but I doubt we could credibly tell the government of, say the UK, to please limit themselves domestically to providing school meals in response to their own students not meeting minimum proficiency levels in early grades, because it is a “cost-effective” measure. What applies to the UK surely also applies to Malawi in this case. And some things are easier only if we have low expectations. Only 44 percent of Ugandan students complete primary school, of which only 52 percent meet minimum proficiency levels for reading. We would also have to make heroic assumptions about recruiting and training specialized secondary school teachers, a problem an order of magnitude more difficult to solve than recruiting primary school teachers. In that context, I can only imagine that when we say we can easily universalize secondary schooling, we mean just frog-marching students through secondary schools even if they don’t learn much of anything: we would be promoting a depressingly custodial view of education. In my view, there is no escaping the challenge and the importance of improving learning levels in basic education,3 precious arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.